I'm two hours deep into Maid of Sker, a new horror game from Wales Interactive - and so far, it's so box-ticking. It sure is a horror game alright, full of creaking floorboards and flickering lamplights; safe-space save rooms where the typewriter of another horror game franchise is swapped for a phonograph; and very-genre-adherent visuals (ruined hotel lobby, bloody-floored basement, spooky graveyard) married to eerie audio design. In terms of its moment-to-moment actions, the emphasis is more on survival than taking the fight to any nasties, with enemies in the game sensitive to sound. So you need to creep cautiously around them, holding your breath as you pass by smoky fires and dusty sideboards, sometimes using items to deafen them into backing away. There are puzzles to crack, collectibles to find, several long-established formulas to follow to a tee.
It is, so far, fine. (And again, I'm stressing so far because I'm only, I think, a quarter or so through the game.) Nothing to drop what you're playing right now for, but a game that will probably fulfil the elementary demands of horror fans easily enough. It has moments to make the skin crawl a little, a handful of jump scares, and the baddies - the Quiet Ones, cult-following types with their faces wrapped in bandages - are creepy enough to make you actively want to avoid them.
But beneath the surface of Maid of Sker beats a haunted heart much more fascinating than what we're given to play. This very British horror game is inspired by a real location in Wales, its hotel based on an old house that's had quite the history, and is said to be home to not one but two ghosts.
Yes, reader: I switched off the game the other night and immediately fell down a Google rabbithole. I'll return to the game in time - but did I ever need to learn more about Sker House, and its gruesome history, right away.
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It's rare to find British folklore, and some old-fashioned Victorian chills, folded into a modern video game, so that in itself was reason enough for me to investigate Maid of Sker. It's set in the late 19th century, on Sker Island, Wales - not quite a real place in real life, but Sker Point certainly is, found just north west of Porthcawl in the county borough of Bridgend. It's here where you can, today, find Sker House - a renovated and now-private grade-one listed mansion (whose owners weren't immediately into the game's marketing) with foundations dating back to the 12th century. It's said to be one of the most haunted places in Wales (and the 38th most-haunted in the UK, in a 2018 list), where "screams, wailing noises, dark moving shadows and figures" have been reported.
It's said that a resident of the house, Elizabeth William, was locked inside the building by her father, and there she died of a broken heart. She now haunts the place, supposedly alongside a sea captain whose ship was wrecked off Sker Point - and, indeed, the SS Samtampa was sunk there in 1947, in an accident claiming 47 lives. There are also reports of shipwrecks happening there in the 19th and 18th centuries, and the latter of these seems to tie into the game's story, with the Quiet Ones seemingly stripping the stricken ship of its cargo.
And it's Elisabeth Williams (I'm not sure if the "z" to "s" swap is deliberate or not) who represents the quarry, the end goal perhaps, in Maid of Sker. You, as her lover Thomas Evans (who her father, Isaac, wants out of the picture), have to avoid the Quiet Ones and collect parts of a song necessary to snap them out of a supernatural trance, and subsequently reunite with Elisabeth who communicates with you over an internal phone line. As a silent protagonist even in exchanges with Elisabeth, Thomas doesn't exude much in the way of personality, albeit maybe because his lungs are knackered - at least, that's the impression given that he can only hold his breath, to avoid a nasties-attracting cough or splutter, for a matter of seconds. Honestly, Guybrush Threepwood can manage ten minutes. Up your game, Tom.
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There's more to it, naturally - Maid of Sker, the game, is written by some of the talent behind SOMA, so there's always going to be more to it. And I'm just starting to see what some of that more is, in my own playthrough. But based on the game's opening couple of hours, it's definitely the inspiration behind it that strikes me as more fascinating, let down as Maid of Sker is by some pretty rudimentary design and, if I'm honest, really lousy UI. There's no zoom function on a map that uses miniscule icons, menu commands aren't as clear as they could be, and objectives are so vague as to be next to useless.
But I love a good ghost story, and Sker House sure is home to a couple - and that's before you get into reports of ghost ships off the nearby coast and spectral lights, known as corpse candles, seen on the beach. And it's this real-world spookiness that still piques my attention, even when what I'm doing in-game is, well, sometimes pretty boring.
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The game also appears to be drawing some influence from author R.D. Blackmore's (he of Lorna Doone fame) 1872 story The Maid of Sker, in its connection to something being brought in from the sea - as discovered through letters and records you find lying around, alongside map fragments and musical dolls, because video games. But I don't want to leap to any conclusions there, just now, as to what this something is.
The game also features something so, so rarely heard in modern media: the Welsh language. A selection of Welsh hymns can be heard throughout, in the phonograph recordings and as vocal embellishments over the ambient sound, usually cued by the sight of a glowing golden orb (echoes of Everybody's Gone to the Rapture, there). It's great to hear them - but a shame that the more original elements of Maid of Sker are bound to what is, so far, a pretty by-the-numbers horror game.
I'll probably keep playing it, though. I feel I owe it to Elizabeth - or Elisabeth - to see how her memory, and the legend of Sker House and the surrounding area, has been incorporated into a video game. And if it ends on a note even close to the potential promised by the location's rich and devilish past, Maid of Sker's no-alarms-and-no-surprises gameplay will have been worth it.
Maid of Sker is out now on PlayStation 4, Xbox One and PC. A Switch release is planned for later in 2020. Xbox One code was provided by the publisher.
Featured Image Credit: Wales InteractiveTopics: Xbox, Switch, PlayStation, Indie Games