More Waking Dream than Horror Movie, with a Soundtrack That Will Make you Murderous
I played The Fissure, a horror visual novel from SMV Games and Eastasiasoft, while extremely tired, waiting for the England vs Mexico World Cup match to start. Wow, was that a mistake. The Fissure likes to punch holes in reality, moving through states of being and different time periods. It’s more like a dream than a horror movie, and I was pretty close to sleeping myself. I found myself in a tired and confused state, wondering what on earth was going on.
Luckily, The Fissure was a game that I could – and should – play twice, finding the good ending among the bad ones, so I experienced it the next day, without a late-night football game to mess with my attention span. Although, I do think I enjoyed it more the first time, when it felt like a waking dream.
From Azteca to San Adraín
The Fissure is the story of Nahuel, who is visiting his late mother’s hometown of San Adraín. His assumption is that he’s never been there before, but of course we know what assuming does to someone. I’ve also watched enough horror movies to know that you should never return to the house where you or your parents grew up. There’s always a skeleton, metaphorical or otherwise, waiting to jump out of a closet.
Nahuel finds the house, after an encounter with some suitably dodgy neighbours, and explores its woodchip-smelling rooms. What happens next is liable to be spoiled if we’re not careful, but it involves lots of jumpscares, PT-style moments where rooms change even though Nahuel has recently been in them, and ghostly scribbles everywhere. In terms of movie or game parallels, it feels somewhere in the middle of a Silent Hill, Sinister and The Ring triangulation.
All of this is told through the medium of a visual novel, with seven or eight choices littered across the experience. The choices do matter: there are a few endings to experience, and the branching takes you to different locations and events so the divergence is significant.
Making the Most of a Limited Palette
Presentation-wise, The Fissure is pretty decent. The art is murky and brown, but no less painterly and well made. I wish there was an AI flag on Xbox games, as I am not wholly convinced that generative AI wasn’t used (some characters repeat in the game, but look oddly different in each instance, which is often an AI hallmark). It might not matter to you regardless. There are some memorable scenes, like a staircase made from sinew.
I have a deep-seated dislike for the audio, though. There is a rising discordant sound that builds and builds as you play each scene. It’s meant to make you feel uncomfortable as you play, and uncomfortable is exactly what I felt. As you near the jumpscare or horror moment, it gets incredibly loud, to the point of distraction, and I found myself skipping through dialogue and text in the hope that it would stop. Which is probably not the effect you want on your reader. It grew to the point where I muted the audio, and that’s only going to dampen a horror game.
Writing-wise, The Fissure is a little patchy. It’s clearly translated from another language, and there are the odd snatches of prose that don’t quite flow. If you are vulnerable to a bit of clunk in your visual novels, then you might want to keep that in mind with The Fissure.
A Bit Like Watching The Ring on Shuffle
In terms of the story, I’m on the fence with The Fissure. On one side of the fence, the experience is clearly effective. As I wandered the upstairs, downstairs and outsides of the house, I genuinely felt like anything could happen, and the knot of tension grew in my chest. I really liked the choices, which were mostly foreshadowed in previous dialogue. If you pay attention, and read the warnings that you are given by ghostly figures, then you can often anticipate the choices and make the correct one.
On the other side of that fence, I grew a little impatient with how unstructured the story is. At its worst, it can feel like a jumble of experiences that could have been sellotaped together in any order. Poor Nahuel keeps getting teleported to different realities and locations, bewildered and unsure of where he is, and that feeling was contagious. The Fissure is a little too much like a ghost train rather than novella, where the sensation matters more than the narrative. And I wanted more narrative to go with my jumpscares.
That becomes most clear when the events get repetitive. There are multiple tomes with spectral scribbles in, and several keys for previously locked doors. The intention was probably to make the experience cyclical or fractal in some form, but I couldn’t help finding it a little wearing. Perhaps I was just tired from the footie.
More of a Short Story Than a Horror Epic
Ultimately, though, The Fissure isn’t a long experience, so any infuriations are quickly wrapped up. I played The Fissure from back to front in roughly forty-five minutes, and slightly less than that on the second playthrough.
If The Fissure is a visual-novel ghost train, then it’s an uneven but still effective one. I don’t think I will remember much about it in a week’s time – most of the highlights, like a well in a forest, are borrowed from other sources – but that doesn’t stop it being occasionally effective. There’s an uneasy, building tension throughout The Fissure, and while it doesn’t pay off particularly, there are still some bumps in the night.
Important Links
The Fissure Wants You To Question Everything You Remember – https://www.thexboxhub.com/the-fissure-wants-you-to-question-everything-you-remember/
Buy from the Xbox Store – https://www.xbox.com/en-GB/games/store/the-fissure/9PM678G8FSFL/0010
