Initially, I am in the woods, in an isolated house, where Adam came to live with his wife. This American cryptanalyst is coming to an old family estate to decipher Soviet codes in peace, except that no one has lived on the property for many years, and it seems miserable and overthrown. I was just waiting for the night to go down and some spooks pop out of the closet. But it's still early, not even dusk, and needs to be unpacked first. Maybe paint the wall. This one has creased for all those years when no one has stayed in the house, it looks the most boring of all. It's hard to imagine anyone sleeping in a house with such walls. Yes, the walls should be painted. Then there was nothing but going to the attic, finding the tools and buckets needed with paint, going back down, doing some painting while there was still sun to see something.
The Beast Inside contains two stories: the first, set in the Cold War era is less horror than I initially expected, this section is mostly reserved for segments in which it goes back to the past, when played in the role of Nicolas. The diary that Adam goes through in the attic is not complete, so Nicolas's story does not play out as a whole, but alternates with that of Adam. Nicolas's story begins in the house, where upon his return he is covered by bloody footprints leading to the basement, and with them, a spooky staring at him from the top of the stairs. But he soon leads him further into a dark forest and an abandoned hotel, into impenetrable fog and an old mine. The standard is the story of family, damnation, madness.
Along the way, Nicolas finds a variety of stunts, from sheer spooks and menacing decoys with a huge machete to humpback grandmothers with long nails. Nothing comes off of the usual horror genre: every moment someone slams the door loudly for Nicolas, let the decency run toward him to suddenly disappear, the path that has existed until now is no longer there, now you are heading in another direction. And the moment you think you've saved yourself, oh no, someone or something Nicolas suddenly grabs your arm!
As different motives are accumulated, so are the mechanics. They change constantly, almost never staying long enough to be noticed, just like motifs, and they seem to be thrown together from below. At first you just walk around trying to find matches and lamp oil to light your way, exploring, then run through the woods a little and find a gun to shoot a ghost, that gun magically disappears, now all of a sudden you have to hide in the mines in a sequence that is almost over. copied from The Vanishing of the Ethan Carter.
This scene may be understood as an allusion, not in itself something particularly bad, but when almost all aspects of the horror in The Beast Inside can be linked to other games, then things like that come to mind. And that's a big problem, because instead of acting in its entirety, the nightly sequences at The Beast Inside are more like driving through a park of horrors and horrors that, with its range of attractions, seeks to encompass absolutely everything and everything that's just awesome.
You should definitely look for the title box house in Adam's story. She is the one who pulls The Beast Inside out of mere conventionality, giving it an upgrade that is unusual for the genre. Because after Adam reads the first part of his grandfather's diary, and strange things happen to him in the house, he instinctively doesn't think the house is necessarily obsessed, but goes to the shed to get some sort of sci-fi scanner. To catch Russian spies! He seemed more likely to be the ones who found him, even in a new location, than the house being possessed. Is that really so, that is yet to be discovered.
Not that the daily scenes are completely devoid of horror. And there is blood and grotesque scenes in them, unsolved murders and threats. But, compared to the nocturnal ones, they are much more relaxed. There is a lot of walking around, often through the sunlit nature, with a scanner in hand. Occasional and problematic tasks, such as message decryption, are solved. The wall is also painted.
At times the game is very reminiscent of Firewatch, almost too much, especially based on landscapes that are extremely striking and beautiful. She uses photogrammetry to create a convincing representation of space, and although the technique itself is unknown, the result cannot be denied. Adam exits the house, and a nearby path leads to a control cabin on the slope. There is also a cave, carved deep into the stone. Right in front of one of the entrances, a camp built by foresters: tents, sleeping bags, campfire. When the river crosses, the intersection. One path leads to the hills, the other to the coast; it's quiet there, you can hear the noise of the sea and the waves. That's nice, nice.
It is a great pity, then, that these beautiful sites are largely devoid of any specific content. They're not even wrapped up in a particular atmosphere like in Firewatch, so at least it saves them. Melancholy and solitude pervaded the title, and the beautiful but abandoned nature mirrored that aspect, almost in part. Something similar is missing from The Beast Inside, which is the realization that becomes especially painful when you find that the control box model in it literally matches that of Firewatch. But there is no walkie-talkie in that house, no Delilah voice; this cottage is just a side station through which you will rush through the path to the new spy trail, as if there was nothing in it, as if it were completely empty.
The scanner Adam is wearing signals him in which direction he must go in order to get closer to his target. You can have it on the screen even when you are running, and otherwise easy to lose, the question is not to do it. Once he gets close to the trail, Adam will scan it to come to some new conclusions about the situation. Sometimes there will be a problem, so scanning will prevent the appearance of anomalies that will appear on the scanner in the form of some hovering jellyfish. If these occur, they will need to be removed first by being directed by the scanner. Mini-game scanning is, in addition to solving problematic tasks, the primary thing Adam will do while exploring the forest, which, of course, is not particularly fun.
However, it is not the gameplay that drives the player forward, it is primarily a story, or rather a desire to find out where it all leads. Whether Adam and Nicolas' stories intersect or not will be one of the questions. Are there still ghosts or do they belong to a bygone age? Else. Who is chasing whom and why? What about spies? It cannot be denied that while the horror aspect of the title itself is conventional, its association with other genres gives The Beast Inside a charm and distinctiveness that at least partly sets it apart from the competition.
If the game had no problems with coherence at the level of motifs and mechanics, this would be quite a prominent title. It's worth playing it, and it might be especially interesting to see what the Illusion Ray team does next. It has this potential.
