In The Coma: Recut, a 2D side-scrolling horror game from Korean developer Devespresso Games, you play the role of a basic high school teenage boy, Youngho, in a small school named Sehwa High. Upon reaching the school grounds, you catch wind of a fellow classmate who has attempted suicide while in the building. In the brief introduction, you get to know a few people, some friends and some enemies, that all ultimately play a role in what begins moments after you fall asleep in class.
You become aware again in darkness. You’re alone in your classroom, and you have no idea where everyone has gone or why you were left to sleep in the classroom. It’s not long after roaming the dark halls that you come across your teacher, Ms. Song, who, now crazed and homicidal, chases after you with a knife. Having no way to defend yourself, you spend the entire game fleeing. Your teacher becomes a regular presence throughout the brief four-hour game, as she plays a role in the underlying scenario that begins to show itself the further you explore the school after hours.
The opening moments to the game, in particular once your character falls asleep, have quite an intriguing impact. Navigating in silence felt safe for a while, moving from objective to objective completing the first things needed doing in order to escape. Then a shadow falls from the ceiling, and your teacher comes into view, knife brandished, snarling and making chase as the music swells. I flee to the nearest bathroom and duck into a stall.
After a few moments of her pacing back and forth maniacally, she leaves and the music stops. The first few times she attacked were quite suspenseful, but the depth of fear in this interaction is quite shallow, even in such a brief experience. The music becomes the one factor that cues you of her presence or her departure, even in the pitch black. So, once you’ve ironed out that pattern, there’s no reason to feel like she’s sitting in wait for you to come out, because the music betrays the suspense she brings.
The aesthetic is rather intriguing. It being a 2D side scrolling game, The Coma: Recut benefits from having all characters and animations hand-drawn, making for a very gorgeous effect in motions. Animations are minimal, however, but there’s enough energy and emotion put into each movement and facial expression to convey exactly what’s needed at the time. Considering the way the music betrays the fear factor, having a pretty backdrop and foreground makes for an appreciated counterbalance.
The school itself is rendered in a similar way, but the game is so short and unidimensional that there’s very little going on in any given place. Unfortunately, all bathrooms and classrooms all look similar to their counterparts, with only a few places having any intrinsic visual value to them, which is a shame to a game touting such an intricate hand-drawn style.
The narrative is linear as well, simply having you run from point to point with very little consequence or interest outside of having to run away from Ms. Song on occasion (which, later on, feels more like a setback than survival). Oftentimes, you’re running from floor to floor to grab keys or items needed to open up a door on the other end of the school, which adds a fair amount of dead space between events. These items do help to bring to light what’s actually taking place while in the Coma, something I’ll refrain from mentioning here, as it’s rather interesting in its own right, but these errands feel more intended to bloat the experience rather than emphasize it, especially since the fear-based elements are so on-cue and readable.
The writing caliber is subpar, but it got me from point A to point B as well as it needed to. Not much holds interest, and there is a lot of tongue-in-cheek stuff that falls flat due to odd placements within suspenseful or thoughtless moments. Without the attempts at overtly-sexualized angst humor, the writing would have been just fine to complete it, but these too often took intent away from the moments that deserved that intent. There are multiple endings to The Coma as well, but each one only adds a little bit more to the ending. There is one complete ending, but much like the others it still leaves the game open-ended so that you can go back and get the other tidbits from the other endings.
The Coma: Recut has some things going for it, but it misses some rather lofty marks that become more apparent in such a concentrated and short-term environment. It’s a hard sell, but at a discount it could fill a couple hours for anyone with just a little horror itch.