It always pains me to see games like You Will Die Here Tonight. Games that aim to do true classic survival horror with some new ideas but fail miserably. Though, at least in the case of You Will Die Here Tonight the end result is still quite serviceable and with some updates and fixes might become slightly better. Though it won’t fix any of the issues that are making this project deeply flawed on a fundamental level. And my experience with the game went from mild curiosity to genuine, though sometimes annoyed, engagement. Only to plummet into frustration as I stopped playing it right during the final sequence of the game and refuse to attempt it again, as it’s horrendously designed.
So what is You Will Die Here Tonight? It’s a quite well designed classic survival horror game with an isometric perspective that in many ways reminds of Resident Evil Gaiden. Sadly, that includes some of the bad things about RE Gaiden, but for the most part the title figures out how to take that extremely flawed and often frustrating game and its ideas and turn it into something that is actually working. Due to the isometric perspective, as you might expect, no combat is happening in that main view of the game. So when you get attacked or aim a weapon in the direction of an enemy (with a clear line of sight), the game switches to a first person view. In it, you’re locked into place in a jRPG-like battle arena space as the enemies are approaching you while you shoot them. The amount of enemies in that battle space corresponds to the amount of enemies that were aggroed and in the vicinity and the distance and their state of aggression in the isometric view is estimated in this battle view. Oh and, the battle view covers the full 360 degrees of rotation and enemies can attack you from all sides.
When you’re not fighting enemies, you’re exploring the very Resident Evil 1 inspired mansion, find weapons, upgrades, ammo, healing items and solve puzzles to get equipment and key items. Most of which is done really well and exploring the locations is genuinely fun. Except for one big thing that in a typical survival horror game would be pure bad design – the game is exceptionally rude with its enemies, bosses and traps. In many spots you’re not given any second chances or ways to undo whatever you did when clicking the interactable spot, so if the game asks you if you wish to do something, you say “yes” and it trap hasn’t been disarmed yet – even if there’s a delay for the trap, you cannot undo your action.
So how is the game excusing this behavior? It’s also a time loop roguelite-ish game. In a concept that is introduced right from the beginning, you have a team of 6 people and as soon as one of them dies, you just switch to another. All of them have some unique perks, one of them has a unique quest and two can give you permanent upgrades. All of your key items and equipment within one loop is preserved between characters and between whole loops all of the equipment is always kept, but the events and key items are reset. Which… I guess it could be cool? Maybe? I’m not much of a fan of rogue-like/lite games or permadeath, so I’m not one to say if this idea can work in theory or not. But what I can say is that it doesn’t really work for this game.
The big problem the game has is that, apart from some especially rude and unforgiving moments, it plays like a proper classic survival horror game. To the point, where it seems far more natural to ease the moments and build in a normal save/load system than find more ways to excuse it’s main gimmick. On my very first attempt I’ve finished about 85% of the whole time loop events, including all secrets, with just one character without dying only to die to an especially obnoxiously long boss. Partially because I couldn’t upgrade any of my equipment as you can only switch characters when they die. So as soon as that character died, I switched to another to finally do all of the upgrades and then went so easily to the end of the game that I decided to die intentionally by the end just so I can switch to the other upgrade-necessary characters and do the other upgrades. And an even more frustrating thing is – despite having this team of 6 characters, most of them don’t even have anything interesting or special about them.
Apart from the story, I suppose, which serves as the main excuse to have this gimmick and… Wow is it terrible. I mean, the characters are horribly written, which seems to have been done intentionally – to create a gallery of tropes. But it’s not charming or funny, it’s just dumb. And then you have several layers of stories, none of which have any proper resolution or even proper progression, apart from the big twist for the true ending path, which explains the whole time loop thing and… again, it’s so stupid and poorly done I don’t understand why the developers got hung up on it so much. And yeah, since I did drop the final path almost near the end I had to watch the rest in a video just to see if I’m missing anything that makes things better. I wasn’t and I wasn’t about to waste more of my time doing laser dodging in an isometric game with invisible collisions and no way to judge distance.
It’s a shame that the developers decided to sabotage their own genuinely solid, if a bit too reliant on classic survival horror tropes, game for the sake of a story twist and a mechanic that aren’t any good. Because for the most part the game was really well put together. Yes, they’d need to make enemies less plentiful and less aggressive, make some boss battles a bit less long and slightly rebalance a few traps. But if they’d do that, we’d have a simple but extremely well made, very stylishly looking isometric survival horror title that proves that Resident Evil Gaiden could’ve worked with few tweaks. I especially want to praise the people who did the pre-render cutscene visuals to look like a perfect recreation of the PS1 CGI feel, but with modern resolutions. And the normal game had me thinking that Parasite Eve or Blood Omen could still work even in modern very high resolution games if approached smartly.
Nonetheless, I would still recommend not ignoring You Will Die Here Tonight. Some of it’s more minor annoyances might get improved with updates and the main chunk of the game is really good, especially if you’re a sucker for classic survival horror. Sadly, I don’t see a way to remove the core issues of the game as removing the main gimmick would require rethinking the whole story structure, while moving harder into the gimmick would probably make the core survival horror gameplay more frustrating. Still, a very good attempt and I’m highly interested in what the developers can create next.