Games of the Abstract: Dark Escape 4D (2012)

 

Developer: Bandai Namco Entertainment

Publisher: Bandai Namco Entertainment

One to Two Players

Arcade

 

Having to find new gimmicks, Bandai Namco Entertainment when looking at the light gun genre they innovated within already, including their famous Time Crisis franchise, clearly had a member of the team who wanted to be the William Castle of arcade game cabinets. Castle, a filmmaker of horror films like House on Haunted Hill (1959) and The Tingler (1959) with Vincent Price, is just as famous as a showman and raconteur, who sold his films in their promotion and their cinema-exclusive gimmicks. This included having insurance for cinema patrons to sign if they died of fright mid-film, or infamously with The Tingler, cinema seats rigged to give random punters a random shock or two.

Dark Escape 4D would make Castle proud if his ghost had interest with arcade games, with many gimmicks just for one machine in Dark Escape 4D. Namco have had a lot of idiosyncratic arcade cabinets over the year in a variety of genres, including within non-light gun genres like Aqua Jet (1996), a jet skiing game, but they are a company as well as being clearly the Castles of arcade machines, also a company who found very simplistic and innovative ways to improve these genres, such as Time Crisis' innovation, so forth into the sequels, was the ability to duck behind cover which changed the game play style within just this. Dark Escape felt greedier, contrasting a set-up which is very basic and stripped down with the number of gimmicks it has, of your nameless and faceless character (or two) locked in a room with an unknown young blonde woman, who will be learnt to be Courtney Wall in the final cut scene. Dark Escape fascinates as a horror work, not just video games, in that its heart that shows the history of the medium, of a Japanese company making what is a William Castle film in what the game's real selling features are as a physical cabinet, against its influence from later decades on. Its influences are clearly ingesting the Saw franchise, whose first phase ended in 2010 with Saw 3D, with a baby masked doctor on video screens forcing the leads to play his game. Blatantly borrowing Capcom's Resident Evil for its biologically created monsters and zombies is also there. [Huge Spoilers] In terms of a plot there is not a lot beyond this, except that with this figure is revealed to have done this all for a bet with a military colleague, your position is entirely expendable for them too and with explanation to who they were. [Spoilers End]

The game is a 3D game, in that for one layer of its gimmick it has 3D glasses available in the fully enclosed cabinet, though these were absent from the one I played within, and were likely to have been easy to steal if someone felt a bastard to have done so. The game thankfully, to its credit, has a button in-between the machine-built plastic machine guns to switch from 3D to 2D and back. A lot of the game has objects pointing at you, especially the choose-your-route segments which, if you win, give you health, if you do not, has pointy objects jabbed at you connected to its biggest gimmick. As a "4D" game, the cabinet is a closed booth with a curtain, with a large plastic bench for two players which vibrates at moments, with wind blowing functions for gusts of air from the internal walls. The game warns that anyone with a heart condition or pregnant should not play, and that is needed as a health warning but clearly links to pure hucksterism, especially with the biggest gimmick here, one William Castle would have raised a thumb up at even if he hated video games, becomes the central original aspect to the experience.

That being that the machine gun controllers have a pulse monitor within them which reads your heart beat. This does link to a personal pet peeve, though I have softened to Dark Escape 4D greatly, that I hate jump scares, admitting they are too effective on me but are also cheap. Dark Escape's modus operandi are jump scares, a constant within just one level, all connected to the central gimmick of the pulse reading which is inspired and softens my response to the game even if I hate jump scares for their contrived effectiveness in horror in general. Even if I am suspicious of how the heart monitor works, it reads your pulse during tense moments, requiring both hands on the plastic gun to work but with the advantage that, with the machine gun a common weapon and thus with the peripheral having a recoil function, it is not practical to weld the bolted-on tool with one hand. Over a certain level, your own pulse will knock a Panic Level onto you as a player unless you have nerves of steel and can avoid this. It you go over a limit per level of these panic levels, you will be punished, though for me, the vibrating bench and burst of air I go each time was more pleasant than scary. It is a concept for an arcade game you could not really replicate well unless you were resourceful, and does stand out.

Dark Escape itself is a game with good aspects though I wish it had been more imaginative at times. I admire it and look at some of its creativity on display onscreen, but admit that its influences do rob some personality it could have carved for itself. There are some memorably grotesque enemies to its credit, such as the arachnophobia based level with humanoid torso spiders, or the one boss with crocodile monstrosities where, splitting their maws open, reveal a skull face within at the back of the split gullet. A lot of the game however is pretty conventional, neither helped that the influence from Saw and other horror from this era means, whilst creepy to go through, these are mostly bland levels sewers and laboratories you pass through. The levels, barring the first recommended to do, or the final one you have to unlock, are meant to be based on various fears, keeping to the gimmicks of frightening the player, so there is one based on a fear of arachnids, one on vermin, one on fear of the darkness, with lack of light a gameplay mechanic, and the one level which is memorable. That one, continuing the influence of horror medium in general on the game, is based on fear of pursuit but is really an excuse, set in a wooden beamed house, to recreate the trope of boarding up a house to stop classic zombies getting in. The game, whilst switch the weapon to things like as Magnum, is also usually a rapid fire machine gun, making the artistic choices, whilst needed for the pulse monitor, a double edged sword in a personality that has a lot of morbid charm but could have flourished if it had been more ridiculous.

The ending also continues a trope in light gun games of forcing a challenge to a game which is already challenging. Dark Escape is also a little cheap in monsters popping up close before you could shot them, but the big challenge for the good ending includes shooting security camera in the game before to make the final boss and its challenged easier. If you win, you get the good ending and escape, but if you lose and mess up one segment of the boss battle, the Bad Ending happens. [Another Huge Spoiler] That being Courtney Wall turns into a zombie, because you did not hit all the targets of the finale plant based boss, which infects her, and who proceeds to presumably eats you. [Spoiler] The good ending, in truth, is frankly not that great, and whilst it may seem misanthropic that the bad ending, which does not require a challenge, is a better ending, it actually is. It befits the horror tone without having to worry about additional requires, all because it actually has something happen than just abruptly ends through a door to nowhere.

Dark Escape has things I have softened to and admire. It also has aspects which are not as memorable or creative as it should be. It is the arcade cabinet, ridiculously expensive to have put together, entirely about reading your pulse whilst it scares you, the cabinet entirely about its central selling point as a light gun cabinet rather than as a light gun game. It is one which reading the end credits got English, Japanese and Chinese voice acting for the few characters, meaning that for a modern arcade game, this was Bandai Namco Entertainment pulling out the stops for a big hitter not only in the West, and their own country, but in Chinese markets with a premise, entirely about biomorphic monsters, which stretches into the supernatural but manages to be a scary game that finds loopholes around not having ghosts and spirits.

I have softened to the game entirely because it's cheap jump scares and lack of subtlety was fun, a game you would want to play with two players, preferable (if cruelly) one who is more susceptible to fright, or an aversion to pointy objects, or with both of you (more kindly) up for a jolt or two followed by laughter and giggles. One with the 3D glasses available but even with enough gimmicks for that to have been a hat-on-a-hat, when its ghoulish rollercoaster of jump scares and icky monster enemies is going to make someone's day even if the glasses had been stolen. Again, when I thought of William Castle, that was when I softened to Dark Escape 4D, realising the arcade machines especially of the nineties onwards, with their gimmicks, follow the same when Castle and others in cinema used to have their ballyhoo, over-the-top marketing and strange mechanical gimmicks that are sadly hard to preserve or replicate at home. Even for a game in 2012, with still modern looking graphics, this managed to time travel back to fifties into the sixties horror and sci-fi film gimmicks of 3D glasses and exploiting being scares, and make something idiosyncratic from this for a modern reinterpretation.