Opus Castle

Genre: First-Person Horror

Players: 1

.

Review:

Opus Castle is a First-Person Horror game released in 2021 on PC and ported to PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and Nintendo Switch in 2022, with a plot centered on a building with some sort of horrible past involving kidnappings and cultist activity, with a story that jumps between a past focused on an imprisoned young girl, and a modern… real estate agent, I think?… who heads to the location to inspect it.

This is an episodic game, though it isn’t being sold like one – it’s being presented as a free release with no “Chapter One” in the title, but in actuality this is a short 30-minute prelude to a full game players will need to spend $11 to actually acquire the full game across 6 chapters… and Chapter 2 is the most expensive of the lot, at $5, just in case you’re the sort of person who feels intrigued by the initial free chapter but might not be inclined to keep paying after you see more than that first half hour.

On the surface, Opus Castle is actually fairly impressive. While the 3D character models look terrible, the environments are nicely detailed, and the art direction here is suitably creepy, if a bit over-reliant on jump scares. The sound design has a lot to do with that, doing a good job building up that creepiness. There’s also voice acting here, which I’m guessing is in Portuguese, since it’s not in English and the developer is situated in Brazil. It seems mostly decent as far as I can tell.

Having said that, you can definitely see the seams under the surface if you look more closely. There’s tons of obvious pop-in, ridiculously long and frequent loading times, and moments where the framerates drop into the single-digits. It’s particularly notable when the light case by a lamp disappears when you walk a few feet away from it, completely changing the look of a room. Oh, also, this game is far too dark (as in, difficult to see), with no option to change the darkness level in the settings.

However, while this game’s technical issues are definitely a problem, the real issue is the poorly-designed gameplay. Opus Castle is a game that seem pretty clearly built around unseen “flags” that trigger events, common in scripted games and frequently used within the Horror genre – walk past this spot or pick up that item and suddenly an event is triggered, a monster is spawned, that sort of thing.

The problem is that Opus Castle’s flags and event triggers seem to be very poorly-crafted, to the point where they sometimes don’t work at all. In the game’s opening epilogue area, I had to walk back and forth repeatedly trying to figure out where I needed to go next after picking up a key, simply because the game had apparently failed to register that I had grabbed it. Later on when the game was tutorializing its in-game smartphone, I apparently froze the game by using one of the smartphone’s features to exit the smartphone, forcing me to restart.

Even when the game’s poor design didn’t cause it to become unplayable, its poor signposting meant I was often left wondering what I needed to do to trigger the next event the game was leading to. At one point I’m in a narrow staircase with a grandfather clock, wandering around at the game’s slow walking pace struggling to find anything I can interact with that will trigger one of the many doors to open or become accessible so I can move on. At one point I click on the clock for what must have been the fifth or sixth time, and this time it reveals a key I can use. No idea why it didn’t do that before.

In the next room with a table filled with food, after picking up an item and searching in vain for anything to interact with, I resign myself to clicking on the food to eat it, despite that no sane person would do that… but I’m in a videogame trying to find anything I can do to get the game to move on. Even after this, I’m still stuck in that room for a little while until some unknown thing I did triggered the next flag signaling a jump scare to end the experience.

And that sums up my experience with Opus Castle. A half hour of frustration and tedium as I try to figure out what the heck the game wants me to do so it will let me continue, occasionally needing to completely restart when the game freezes on me. And while I credit the game’s presentation for its creepiness (when it’s not having embarrassing performance issues), I cannot recommend people subject themselves to the terrible gameplay just for a half hour of jump scares. Even for “free”, this game isn’t worth it.

tl;dr – Opus Castle is a “free” First-Person Horror game that is actually just the first half-hour introductory chapter of an episodic game, with a plot surrounding kidnappings and some sort of demonic cult. The creepy atmosphere here is actually pretty good, and the graphics aren’t bad… until you start noticing all the horrible performance issues. Worse than this is poorly-constructed gameplay that doesn’t work most of the time, repeatedly became literally unplayable, and frequently left me tediously looking around for something to do. The result is an exercise in frustration I cannot recommend, even for free.

Grade: D+

^{You can support eShopperReviews on Patreon! Please click HERE to become a Sponsor!}

^{This month’s sponsors are Jamie and His Cats, Ben, Ilya Zverev, Andy Miller, Johannes, Jaka, Jared Wark, Gabriel Coronad-Medina, Francis Obst, Kristoffer Wulff, and Seth Christenfeld. Thank you for helping to keep the reviews coming!}