The Inpatient

The Inpatient is simultaneously a familiar yet new experience. Playing off the wonderful formula of Until Dawn, but polishing whatever rust was there, it succeeds in nearly every task it sets out to do. It is chilling without being cheesy. Horrifying without being overt. Disturbing without being grotesque. I absolutely cannot wait to return to the Blackwood Sanatorium and make all the (right? wron...

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The Inpatient excels at immersing the player, and it looks gorgeous. Unfortunately it puts too many barriers between the player and ultimate success.

Welcome to where time stands still.

When the issues of a game are rolled and stomped by its greatness, then it’s something to invest on if you have some spare.

Virtual reality feels like the ideal platform for the sort of horror that would make you soil your pants. Without shutting your eyes or ripping the headset off, you’re stuck in an environment filled with spooks and scares at every turn. Supermassive Games understood this principle and took to the PlayStation VR platform, putting their unique engine to work on a first-person horror story known as T...

By poking fun at slasher films and providing a captivating interactive horror experience, 2016’s Until Dawn was a pleasant surprise. Developer Supermassive Games’ successful storytelling made me hopeful for Until Dawn’s VR prequel, The Inpatient, but I struggled to keep interest due to mediocre scares and a forgettable cast.

There’s two sides to The Inpatient: the first two thirds are tense, intriguing, and gives games like Resident Evil 7 a run for their money, but then the final third is ponderous, dialogue heavy, and has very little in the way of scares. With a play time of three to four hours it’s a decent length for a VR game and does have replay value with its alternate story paths. Despite its flaws, The Inpati...

The Inpatient has a great premise and concept but unfortunately falls flat. Everything that it tries to do has been done better by either its own predecessor or its competition. For someone just getting into virtual reality, it offers a great little” haunted house” experience, but ultimately lacks the substance to please anyone else.

In 2015, Supermassive Games delivered an exceptional character driven horror game with an outcome determined by your own decisions in Until Dawn. It undeniably bore its imperfections but managed to establish itself as one of my favorite titles of that year. After an excruciating three year hiatus from the franchise (aside from Rush of Blood), the follow-up I’d been awaiting finally arrived in the ...

While The Inpatient tries, it manages to be little other than extremely boring. Long scenes of walking slowly while having exposition dumped on you does not make for an entertaining narrative.

Here comes The Inpatient in VR. Am I excited? Well Virtual Reality for video-games is a concept that has been around for a long time. The first VR headset was the Forte VFX1 that debuted at CES in 1994. Sony was a pioneer and produced the Glasstron in 1997. You fast forward almost 20 years and we have Playstation VR. I’ve never been much into VR as a concept; in fact I had almost resigned myself t...