There’s a lot to unpack with regards to this game, Secret of Harrow Manor 2, by developer Brandon Smith and publisher Only Human Studios. I will say that I’ve never personally played the first game to which this is a sequel, but I still believe the game should function as a standalone. That being said, you start the game supposedly at the end of the first game where you have escaped a laboratory and must traverse the nearby town to find a way to get as far away from these zombies as possible.
Secret of Harrow Manor 2 works in VR and non-VR, which is probably one of the few pluses I can give it. In terms of controls, the VR controls are much better than the non-VR, but still clunky. In VR, the inventory is hard to control and the movement is even harder. Most games either try to walk in the direction your hand is currently facing or the direction your head is currently facing, but this game seems to do something that isn’t either of them. I could never fully figure it out, but I found that if I kept my hand and head both pretty much straight, I’d go where I wanted to.
Some sort of tutorial here would be helpful. In non-VR, the movement was pretty straightforward – WASD to move, shift to sprint – but the inventory (at least for me) was unusable. I was mashing buttons hoping something would change in the inventory, but could never select anything other than the default gun. That being said, my experience with the gun out of VR was pretty horrendous. There is no crosshair, so I didn’t really know where I was aiming. In VR, I could mostly just aim for the heads, but out of VR, I had to rely on my flashlight to even know where I was shooting, so aiming for the heads wasted a lot of ammo. I ended up just sprinting past the zombies (something I couldn’t do in VR because I didn’t know where the sprint button was). It’s clear that this game was designed for VR, but in my opinion, neither version is really completely playable. I would recommend this game go for further playtesting and definitely add a tutorial.
The artstyle in Secret of Harrow Manor 2 is grungy, as you would expect from a zombie game. It’s not bad when you’re inside a building – I really enjoyed exploring the starting area – but beyond that, once you get outside, there’s this weird artificially small render distance that makes it so you can barely see right in front of you. When I say that, I don’t mean fog or darkness like most games handle render distance. I mean you can actually see the edges of buildings progressively popping in as you get closer to them. It feels like a computing power restriction, but if this is a design choice, I would say it doesn’t really work, especially given that the sound still travels farther than the render distance, so I always know when there’s a zombie about to pop out of the skybox.
I can’t comment much on the storyline since I never managed to make it very far in the game with my limited ammo and unwieldy controls, but it looks like there’s a lot of exposition through text in books. I managed to find one book in the church that I could barely read because there were still zombies chasing me. I would definitely recommend any story like this to be voiceover or at least pause the rest of the game so I’m not distracted.
All in all, Secret of Harrow Manor 2 is an ambitious game that does a lot of things halfway well. The inventory and shooting work in VR, but not out of VR. The movement works out of VR, but not in VR. The storyline is there, but players will have a hard time committing time to actually reading it. The overall spook factor is approaching where it should be, but the render distance and loudness of the zombies breaks that. With a few tweaks, this game could be a whole lot better, but from where it is now, it’s pretty much unplayable in VR or not.
Check Out the Secret of Harrow Manor 2 Steam VR Trailer:
Secret of Harrow Manor 2 is available via Steam with both VR headset and standard mode.
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I am an aspiring game designer looking to explore the philosophy behind game creation. Some of my favorite games include Overwatch, Super Smash Bros, Portal, and Beat Saber.
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