Reviews
‘DreadOut’ Review: Let Sleeping Ghosts Lie
Written by T. Blake Braddy, @blakebraddy
The hook for DreadOut is that it is Indonesian-developed. We don’t see many games out of Indonesia or the neighboring countries, so it should be a welcome change, a fresh take on survival horror from a part of the world with a storied and complex history. Even Japanese-developed games often play to an American audience, and so a push for different stories to be told is well beyond welcome.
This game’s problem is that it doesn’t feel fresh or new or even particularly tied to the region’s cultural folk legends. DreadOut is a kind of one-note mixture of Outlast and Fatal Frame, with simplistic mechanics, outdated design, and an anemic storyline that give the impression that the game is incomplete.
In DreadOut you play as teen Linda, who gets separated from her classmates in the school of an abandoned town. Inside are ghosts representative of Indonesian folklore that stalk the dark corners of the building, just waiting to torment the protagonist. Linda can sense them and, using her smartphone, battle it out with the supernatural beings by taking pictures.
If she waits until they get close enough, she can injure them and make them disappear or run away so she can explore various parts of the school. The purpose seems to be to find the building’s exit, but a clear goal is never really expressed. Also, her friends disappear within the first few minutes, never to reappear or impact the story in any way, so let’s hope that they return in some form in the second act. It is the weird solitude and lack of meaningful storytelling that give it a humdrum, rather than horrific, tone.
If it sounds familiar, it should. DreadOut has the basic game mechanic of the Fatal Frame series, kind of mashed together with Outlast’s approach to first-person camera work. I can’t mention those games enough, and though it undoubtedly sounds like a cool mixture of two seminal games from the genre, a lack of complexity, mechanical or otherwise, prevents DreadOut from being something singular and interesting. It feels like a spiritual contemporary to other PS2-era survival horror games, without adding anything to an already rich tradition.
In addition to the rudimentary battle mechanic, Linda will collect a few items – mostly notes and posters – in order to solve some basic puzzles. It was like I played an early build of the game, one without all the fighting and combat. Beyond the handful of enemies and puzzles, there’s just not much to do in DreadOut, and the overwhelming monotony is probably the most severe criticism I can level at the game. There isn’t enough fighting for the mechanics to change, and the game isn’t long enough to establish interesting puzzles.
Oh, and speaking of mundane, there’s also Limbo. Dying in-game sees the player transported to a dark, candle-lit purgatory, from which she must emerge by running toward a distant ball of light. That’s it. Also, each time you die, you are placed farther and farther from the light, and so, at one point, I clocked myself and found that I was running for nearly two minutes to get back to a boss battle. Such an odd design choice ruins any sense of rhythm the game builds, especially in the more difficult, tense scenarios later on. This purgatorial walk of shame only highlights the game’s monotony.
I get it. DreadOut is a survival horror title, so it shouldn’t be about all the fighting. It should be about the world and the environment and the sense of fear. Okay. Fair enough. In that case, there just needs to be more of the game. A fleshed-out story. More enemies. Longer sequences. Better puzzles. Mechanical variety. DreadOut has none of that.
For the record, the game looks okay, but it has a samey-ness that pervades all of the hallways, both upstairs and downstairs. The perfunctory collectibles highlight some historical aspects about the building, but a sense of place never descends upon the player the way it does in games that consider the environment more closely. A really cool and unsettling story could have emerged from the setting but it never does. There’s plenty to work with here, but the circumstances of the ghost encounters appear to be merely coincidental, and out-of-context of the world that’s been built here.
The last third of the game does some things that would otherwise be worth checking out. (Scissor Lady, for example, is one of the creepier things I’ve seen in video games this year.) Not only that, but the ghosts are well-designed and interesting to look at, and the sound effects that accompany each are equally disturbing. In that way, DreadOut comes close to redeeming itself, if not for the lack of storytelling.
If only the reasons for all of these weird obstacles had been relayed to the player, perhaps the game would make for a worthwhile few hours of gameplay. The problem is that the whole thing is over before its best argument for itself can take place.
Play the Fatal Frame games. Play Outlast and Outlast: Whistleblower and Amnesia and Depths of Fear::Knossos before you play DreadOut. It just isn’t a very full or satisfying experience, and I’m a fan of this genre. I even like short games. For me, a good five or six hour experience is well worth its price tag, if the game is fun, the story compellingly told, and the horror elements interesting or new. DreadOut unfortunately, feels dated and not in a hip, retro-y sort of way.
The good news is that the developers are actively working on the game, so perhaps they will make some interesting design choices in the run-up to the release of the second part of the game. Adding more combat, enemy types, and collectible lore would be a step in the right direction, I’m convinced.
My final take on DreadOut is that it has some interesting ideas but never quite builds the narrative up enough in the first act to warrant anybody care about it. The second act will be released at some point in the future, and so part of me thinks this review might be premature, but unless some major changes happen, I’d say pass on DreadOut.
Reviews
‘The Death of Robin Hood’ Review: Michael Sarnoski’s Ultra-Violent, Dark Subversion of Legend
Myth gets brutally dispatched in The Death of Robin Hood, A Quiet Place: Day One filmmaker Michael Sarnoski‘s dark, loose adaptation of the 17th-century ballad Robin Hood’s Death. The 13th-century outlaw gets a gritty makeover in a subversion of his legendary heroics, forcing a reckoning as Robin Hood seeks peace and death in his final days. Sarnoski’s deconstruction of popularized myth comes forged in shocking violence and poignant introspection, yielding another deeply affecting story of meeting death on your own terms.
The Death of Robin Hood bypasses rehashing the origins of Robin Hood and his Merry Men, instead introducing a grizzled brute who opens the film with a ruthless culling of a young girl seeking vengeance against the outlaw. It’s a downright gentle introduction to Hugh Jackson’s Robin, who only escalates the jaw-dropping carnage when reunited with righthand Little John (Bill Skarsgård) as they seek to reclaim Little John’s home and family from vengeance seekers. These early sequences set up a stark contrast to the Disney-fied legends; Robin Hood’s heroics have been grossly exaggerated compared to the blood debts his violent exploits have racked up over the decades, which in turn have made him a hunted man spanning generations.
Photo Credit: Aidan Monaghan/A24
Grave injuries from battle lands Robin on a remote island priory under the care of Sister Brigid (Jodie Comer, 28 Years Later), where the strange, idyllic community, an enigmatic leper (Murray Bartlett), and a traumatized young girl, Margaret (Faith Delaney), force him to confront his legacy.
Sarnoski, who writes and directs, makes the hero the villain in his adaptation, ensuring a deeply rewarding character arc. At every point in the film, Robin is openly, often actively, seeking death. The stroke of poetic beauty here is that his view of a worthy death seismically shifts from beginning to end. What’s a hero’s death? That answer deepens and evolves along with its “hero” in his waning years. All the impressive survival instincts and battle savagery can’t outmatch or outrun endless cycles of death and loss, after all, despite Robin’s attempts to shrug off his own myth over the years.
Those cycles of violence loom large as a constant threat as the aged outlaw finds himself surrounded by those directly impacted by his past. It breeds conflict, external and internal, reflected in tense encounters and tenuous alliances that let Robin’s humanity slowly slip through his hardened survivor’s shell. It’s the type of role with just enough similarities that’ll draw inevitable comparisons to Hugh Jackman’s stellar work on Logan, but the tenured actor quickly sets the emotionally and morally complex Robin apart, whose primal ruthlessness belies a surprising capacity for aching empathy.
Photo Credit: Aidan Monaghan/A24
While it’s Robin’s relationship with Sister Brigid that drives his final story to its soulful conclusion, it’s the unexpected friendship between the outlaw and the cautious Leper that has the greatest impact. A quiet conversation between the pair comes barbed with soul-shattering revelations, one that irrevocably alters Robin’s outlook while serving as one of the bolder myth revisions. Still, it’s Comer’s quiet heartbreak that yields the film’s biggest devastation.
Sarnoski depicts medieval life for all its cruelty and filth. Death is not remotely gentle in the 13th century; it’s downright nasty and vicious. Cinematographer Pat Scola captures it with startlingly dark realism and grit, but so, too, the breathtaking Northern Ireland landscape that provides this intimate tale with the scale of a sprawling epic.
The Death of Robin Hood removes the simple binary of heroes and villains, combining both into a complicated interrogation of myth itself. But the biggest magic feat is its demonstration of how myth-making and storytelling can heal even the most grievous wounds, and even provide peace if earned.
The Death of Robin Hood releases in theaters on June 19, 2026.
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