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Cannibal Abduction Review (PS4) – Another Resident Evil Retro Clone That Misses The Mark

Cannibal Abduction Review (PS4) – “Dime a dozen” describes a lot of different things, like the amount of games inspired by old-school horror.

Cannibal Abduction is one of those games. It uses some decent ideas, but it utilizes them like Freddy Krueger writing calligraphy.

Cannibal Abduction Review (PS4) – Another Resident Evil Retro Clone That Misses The Mark


Cannibal Abduction technically comes with two games, named Cannibal and Scissors. Cannibal sees you stranded on the side of the road in the middle of nowhere. A cliché representation of an old farmer happens to drive by and offers to tow you to his house to fix your car.

Once there, you end up locked in the man’s house with no warning and must find a way out. The Cannibal story moves a bit slower on all fronts, leaning into a more traditional version of the pursuit horror genre.

In Scissor, you play as a heist member, looking to rob the place. After sneaking into the building, you end up locked in, forcing you to find a different way out. Here, a strange person wearing a pumpkin head seeks you out, using scissors to do his dirty work. In contrast to Cannibal, the Scissors story moves faster.

Both you and the enemy move faster, providing a slightly more intense experience. In result, Scissors ends up being much shorter as well.

Between the two, Scissors stands out as the better experience while Cannibal provides more gameplay. This comes down to Scissors presenting a simpler concept of fast paced cat-and-mouse between an unknown killer and a robber who broke into the wrong place. In ways, Scissors is more user friendly as well.

The linear path combined with simplified actions combines to make it easier, even with both games using tank controls. Plus, this game provides checkpoints for you along the way, which prove rather generous to your progression.

As is traditional, Cannibal requires you to use any item by navigating to your inventory. Even further still, your inventory is limited to 3 slots. If you find more than that, then you need to store something in your toolbox on the second floor. Also, you save your game by finding VHS tapes that act like ribbons in Resident Evil.

When it comes to presentation, both of these games try some interesting ideas that don’t quite work. First, the game uses a low-res visual style and adds in a distorted red-blue filter to make the game look played on a VHS using a traditional cathode-ray tube TV.

The problem is that the red and blue layers show up at the same times and don’t align. This creates a distorted effect similar to those Magic Eye 3D images but combined with red-blue cardboard glasses. It’s not easy to look at half the time. indicate how close the killer is to you, with more snow indicating it’s closer.

This works about half the time. The other half, the killer just pops up out of nowhere and chases you. This is rather simple to deal with in Cannibal. However, with the speed and linearity of Scissors,, having the killer show up out of nowhere practically means death for you. Unlike in Cannibal, you only take one hit in Scissors before dying.

This happens less frequently in Scissors, but the fact that it happens at all ends up causing cheap deaths along the way.

The settings are the real strengths to these games. You find notes along the way, which give you a taste (pun intended) of what’s going on around you. Then, the rooms themselves present a believable place that humans occupied but something went wrong in them. Then, any object or item you can interact with appears vividly when you approach it.

This benefits the Scissors story more simply because there is no inventory limitation in Scissors. In Cannibal, items appear all over, and they usually correspond with something far away. This means you either backtrack to your toolbox or wander around to find where that item goes.

Cannibal Abduction presents you with two retro-style pursuit/survival horror games that both underutilize and misuse some good ideas.

There’s some fun to be had here for the proper audience, but this feels more like a title that strictly targets the hardcore fans looking for another romp in the retro genre.

Cannibal Abduction is now available on PS5 and PS4.

Review code kindly provided by publisher

Score

5

The Final Word

Cannibal Abduction provides two games that use good ideas to unfortunate effect. There is some fun to be had here, but the target audience is too specific to merit a recommendation. If you know you'll like it, you will. Otherwise, wait until a deep sale.