Remothered: Red Nun's Legacy Isn't One for the Ages
I’ve been playing survival horror games for a really long time. Arguably, since the birth of the genre since I first cut my teeth on games like the Alone in the Dark series before I even started playing Resident Evil. In this time I’ve played some great survival horror, and some terrible survival horror games. (Ironically, games in the Resident Evil franchise touch on both ends of that spectrum.) I would love to say that Remothered: Red Nun’s Legacy is a great survival horror game, but it’s just okay at its best, and frustrating at its worst.
It’s October, so I knew I’d find myself sneaking around, hiding under couches and inside closets from bad things trying to find me and hurt me. It’s always some monster or crazy psycho. This particular flavor of aggressor is a nun, transformed into a blind, sound-reactive killer by whatever enigmatic forces power The Red Nun.
Remothered: Red Nun’s Legacy is the third game in the Remothered franchise, and while it promises to finally tie up the loose ends of the trilogy, I jumped into this entry with promises that I don’t need the previous two games before I could get into this one. And while that’s mostly true, I still felt like I was dropped into the middle of a series with no idea what’s happening.
Remothered: Red Nun’s Legacy is a survival horror game played from a third-person perspective. You take control of Susan as she searches for her missing daughter. This search brings you to an evil residence full of nasty, mutated creatures and puzzles to solve involving statues and other unlikely keys. While there is a bit more combat in Red Nun’s Legacy, since you have the ability to use makeshift weapons to temporarily stun enemies, you’re still as helpless as ever. Run, sneak and hide as you delve deeper into the horror and uncover the truth of the Red Nun.
I mean, if you care.
And that’s a lot of the problem. While Red Nun’s Legacy is a competent enough game, it did nothing to excite me or compel me to keep playing. The entire time I’m playing I couldn’t help but compare Red Nun’s Legacy to a more competent Resident Evil game. It’s like the “we have Resident Evil at home” meme.
That’s not to say that Remothered: Red Nun’s Legacy is a bad game. It’s just an at-times boring one that brings few original ideas to the survival horror genre. From the setting to the types of bad things you see, they have all been depicted in one way or another. That’s not to discount the game’s atmosphere and creepiness.
It is definitely a scary game, and some creative work has gone into it. The enemy design and grotesque imagery do a lot of the heavy lifting to keep things unsettling, and the sound design is great—especially when you’re listening in the dark for a blind killer that reacts to every noise you make.
Gameplay-wise, there’s something a bit off about Remothered: Red Nun’s Legacy, too. Moving around never feels quite as fun as it should, making the long stretches of sneaking tedious. The stealth just feels slow, and it doesn’t really add anything to the formula that other survival horror games haven’t already done. And there are few times when the tension is laid off enough to appreciate the down moments, making the pacing feel way off.
I know inevitably someone’s going to love these games and hate my take on it. That’s fair. But Remothered: Red Nun’s Legacy isn’t a bad game, it’s just not a good game. And mediocrity sometimes is worse for a game.
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