Platform: PC
The original 1982 anthology film Creepshow was an instant cult classic. It paired the directorial clout of horror maven George Romero with five tales of terror penned by Stephen King in his screenwriting debut, all brought to life by effects guru Tom Savini, with everything modelled on the classic EC Comics horror titles of the 1950s.
Conversely, Creepshow the video game isn’t worthy of cleaning up the popcorn from a particularly messy midnight madness screening of the original material. Ostensibly based more directly on Greg Nicotero’s recent TV show adaptation for horror streaming platform Shudder, developer PHL Collective – whose priors include slapdash brand tie-ins Barbie Horse Trails and SpongeBob Squarepants: The Patrick Star Game, which should be the first warning – tries to translate the unpredictable nature of each episode into a collection of 3D point-and-click narrative adventures, but ultimately serves up a messy, buggy, boring, short, ill-thought mess that feels unfinished and, worse, packs zero scares.
There are countless head-scratching development decisions to encounter during Creepshow’s meagre four hour play time, but let’s kick off with the near total absence of The Creep, the iconic ghoul who frames each episode of the show. The cackling figure is front and centre on the game’s start screens, and occasionally pops up for an audio cameo to mockingly narrate or introduce some of the on-screen events, but is otherwise absent.
Instead, the framing narrative focuses on a group of archetypal ‘80s teens – nerdy Danny, goth Mel, cheerleader Liz, and jock Jack, investigating a burned down mall where Danny’s father died years before. Separated from the group, Danny encounters reject ‘horror host’ The Reader, some sort of fortune telling zombie mariachi musician sat in an arcade cabinet, who promises to help him escape the ruined mall if he reads him some stories found in the form of Creepshow comic books.
That serves as threadbare set-up for the rest of the game which, like the show, comprises two unrelated narratives. Another bizarre decision – that format works for weekly episodic television, but makes the package here feel almost embarassingly devoid of content. The first story, “Metamorphic Love”, sees fast food worker and amateur entomologist Andrew caring for his soon-to-be-late wife Laura but, unable to deal with her passing, descending into insectoid delusions. The second, “The Toll Keeper”, follows Father Torosian, a disgraced priest sent to a remote church as penance for some past transgression, but instead of tending to its restoration starts following otherworldly voices promising him vitality and glory — all in exchange for a few measly souls, of course.
A good point-and-click thrives on its puzzles, yet Creepshow offers a paltry and pathetic few in each of its tales…
There’s spooky potential in both, but it remains almost completely unrealised. Metamorphic Love seems to want to be a horror tinged take on Franz Kafka, but its moments of body horror as Linda’s corpse is slowly corrupted, mutated, and ultimately puppeted by a giant cockroach are undermined by dated visuals. PHL seems to be trying to blend Creepshow’s comic book influences with TellTale Games’ well-honed aesthetic, but even TellTale’s earliest, roughest outing looks better than this. The Toll Keeper fares a little better, having a sense of rural, isolated unease that evokes a mix of The Wicker Man and Apostle, but still lacks and real frights. And while Creepshow, in any format, never quite masters the satisfyingly twisted moral comeuppances that Tales From the Crypt often excels at, both the ‘comic’ stories and the framing narrative surrounding Danny and The Reader ultimately just sort of… stop. You’ll put your pad down thinking “was that it?”.
Across it all, there’s barely any actual game here, either. Objectives tell you exactly what to do in what order, and any attempt to deviate or explore the tiny settings of each story offers no reward. A good point-and-click thrives on its puzzles, yet Creepshow offers a paltry and pathetic few in each of its tales – an insect-themed panel sliding one is the most challenging that Andrew faces, although Torosion does have a slightly trickier task of piecing together bible verse clues to open a lockbox. There are hints of other puzzles scattered through, but none can seem to be completed or fully implemented within the game and remain inessential to completing it.
Worst of all though is how broken the game is, functionally, as a piece of software. Tested across two computers it routinely crashed, ultimately to the point of needing to be reinstalled after every play session. When it did deign to run, the game presented numerous glitches including interactive objects not being interactive, collectibles reappearing after picking them up, supporting characters walking “off camera” during cutscenes but then floating around as immaterial models if you followed them, and cutscenes not triggering until the player character walked through a trigger point multiple times.
About the best that can be said for Creepshow is that it has decent voice acting and some good moments of dark humour – with one actual laugh out loud moment in Metamorphic Love – but that’s nowhere near enough to salvage this mess. The only scary thing? That someone, somewhere thought this was in an appropriate state to release.
