Behind Demo

Although it’s pretty easy to scare gamers in video games, it’s even easier to do so if you take advantage of virtual reality technology. It’s one thing for a monster to pop up on your monitor, but it’s a whole different thing to see the said monster come at you as if it was in the same room as you. Hence, the genre should be quite popular with developers in the near future.

Behind is a first-person survival game in which your sole purpose is to walk around a creepy mansion and try not to get too scared. The game is designed specifically for the Oculus Rift VR headset, and that’s pretty obvious from the first seconds of gameplay. On the other hand, there are many bugs and inconveniences as well, which makes it difficult to enjoy the game properly.

There’s not much of a story either, since all you have to do is walk around the abandoned mansion and try to get spooked. The lack of a purpose hurts the atmosphere a lot, since we all know how terrifying proper horror games can get, even without showing any sort of gore or ghosts. On the other hand, this is but an Alpha version, so things may change for the best in the future.

As you may suspect, the whole thing runs on scripted events, which means that jump scares happen once you enter a specific room, or when you turn around the corner. They become predictable after a while, which hurts replayability and ruins the atmosphere for good. On the other hand, you might still get spooked if you forget about a certain script.

The graphics are not bad either, but they are far from nice. The character design and the animations are quite awful, and the level design is both barren and uninspired. While most of these mistakes can be fixed in later versions, it would be nice to see more effort from the get-go, because that’s the whole point of horror games.

In the end, Behind is a good way to test your Oculus Rift gear, but it’s not a very good game. It has issues in almost every regard, and the only scary part about it is the huge number of bugs and bad design choices. Still, this can be fixed with more work and dedication, and it’s a lot more understandable when you consider the fact that there is only one developer behind the whole thing.