Scratches Review

I love getting the shit scared out of me. Urine and fecal matter on my draw’s are always a pain to scrub off, but to me, the surge of adrenaline that I get from a good scare is on par with the greatest of earthly pleasures.The ability of any piece of art or media to genuinely give you the shivers and make you feel uncomfortable in your comfort zones is a true feat, in my book. That’s why today I’m tipping my hat to Agustin Cordes, Argentinean game developer of Nucleosys Digital Studio and visionary behind the PC game, Scratches.

About a week ago I was at my local Target looking for some cheap speakers. I meandered over to the books and games section when I found myself face to face with an almost barren clearance rack. On it sat  but two items, each priced a meager $2.48. One was the aforementioned Argentinean horror adventure game, and the other one was Got Game Interactive’s Barrow Hill. Unfortunately, had I known how irredeemably poor the latter game would end up being, I would have been two dollars and 48 cents richer by the end of that day. But thank Cthulu I purchased Scratches.

Scratches originally came out in 2006, so I had heard about the game for years, but for some reason, I just wasn’t sold. A terrifying adventure game with an indie budget? The idea was pretty intriguing, but I didn’t think it could be pulled off. Silly Thomas. How wrong can you be?

Cordes and his crew certainly pulled it off alright, and it is thanks to Scratches that my love and hope for adventure games has been revitalized. Like some kind of freaky, kinky second honeymoon, Scratches was just what I needed to put the spark back in my floundering marriage to adventure games. Now it’s till death do we part.

Scratches takes place, as so many horror stories do, in Britain. With a moody climate, incessant precipitation, old castles, and disreputable cuisine, the United Kingdom has long been a home to famous scary stories and their authors. In the case of Scratches, you play as Michael Arthate, a horror novelist in the 1970s who is seeking some peace, quiet, and inspiration in the old Victorian-stylized boonies of England in order to finish his follow up to his last bestselling novel. Hell, what better place to write about ghosts and murder than a creepy, old, and previously abandoned Victorian house in serious need of a twentieth century upgrade?

In just his first few hours at the house, which has no working electricity or even running water, Michael begins to realize that his instinctual uneasiness with the house is not at all unjustified. Something seems to be inhabiting the house with him. One of the plot devices Scratches employs is that of the “disconnected” ally: the friend in a horror story who can be contacted to consult with and impart advice, but who really has no ability to help or reach the main character at all. It’s that little pendulous lifeline that is so often seen in horror films; the person who grounds the story in reality and may even provide a little bit of comic relief, but in the end, serves only as a reminder to how alone the protagonist really is.

Here’s another reason Scratches is such an undeniably creepy and amazing experience: Cellar Of Rats. That’s not a level or area in the game (actually it sort of is come to think of it); Cellar Of Rats is the moniker of the Dark Ambient and Electronica artist who makes Scratches such an amazing aural nightmare.

Allow me to go on a little tangent in order to demonstrate just how potent Cellar Of Rat’s creepy musical brew is:

I recently finished working at a summer camp where I was in charge of a popular “class” that I like to think resembled hide-and-go-seek meets Resident Evil. The game entails yours truly wearing a Halloween monster mask and chasing kids around a large, dark gymnasium with a hockey stick, with the ultimate goal of the kids solving puzzles, avoiding capture, and reaching escape. Of course, my goal in this activity is to help the kids have as much fun as possible while at the same time keeping the excitement-to-frightened-tears ratio as high as possible.

So naturally, a game such as this requires some spooky background music to set the mood. I’ve used Akira Yamaoka’s Silent Hill 4 soundtrack, and Mikko Tarmia’s Penumbra soundtrack, but nothing, I’ve found, scares the pants off people like Cellar Of Rat’s song, “The Lurker.” Works like a charm every time. Ah, scaring kids…it’s one of the things that makes this country great.

Likewise, the overall audio and sound design of the game was excellent. The voice acting was surprisingly spot on, particularly by John Bell, who played the protagonist, Michael. The makers of Scratches were exceedingly aware of one key precepts of the horror formula which helped make their effort such a success: your ears, not your eyes, are the true gateways of terror.

During an early sequence of the game the protagonist finds an old journal in the house with an entry that vaguely describes a horrific experience in South Africa, and how the writer is haunted by visions of a tribal mask and drums. When I revisited the African Art gallery in the house, after reading the journal, I swear I heard the faintest sound of a slow tribal drum beat for just several seconds.

I need to replay the game in order to test if my perception of this audial cue was correct, but even if it wasn’t, Cordes succeeded. He planted that seed of terror. When the player starts to see and hear things that aren’t even there, the writer has done his or her job.

In terms of the game’s difficulty, most of it felt pretty logical, though few solutions are readily handed to you on a silver platter. There was one particular item that was required for one of the game’s final puzzles that served as an embodiment of the loathed “pixel hunt,” the dreaded plague that fouls up so many adventure games. Puzzles should be challenging; finding where they are should not be!

Especially later on in the game, I found myself referring to an online walkthrough many-a-time…sometimes not so much out of needing a solution as much as from a fear of not knowing what hid around the corner. Scratches taps into this fear very well. There’s one particular instance when you finally unlock an old garage in the game with an old fashioned car inside. When you examine the car, Michaels says he doesn’t want to get any closer because he’s afraid something will leap out at him from it. There’s actually nothing inside the car, and it serves no purpose in the game’s plot, but such little bits of dialogue go a long way in keeping the player on the edge of his or her seat.

There were occasions when I felt flat-out clueless on how to solve some of the puzzles. Some puzzles were a bit unnecessarily obscure in my opinion, but most of them were well-crafted. If you end up playing the game and get stuck on the briefcase puzzle, as I did, my advice to you is to stick with it. Once you look up the answer you will feel like you could have gotten it on your own.

With that said, Scratches is a phenomenal game, all the more so considering it was independently developed. Check out the demo for Scratches on Nucleosys’ website, on which was recently posted the tragic news that they are shutting down shop. Fortunately, Cordes and co-foudner Alejandro Graziani are both planning to stay in the industry, which means all the more creepy Victorian houses to explore in the future, and many more nights asleep with the lights on.

http://www.nucleosys.com/site/