The Coma 2: Vicious Sisters Review for Nintendo Switch

Horror games need to work hard to stand out from the rest. You can only find so many ways to put the player in darkened corridors filled with monsters ready to startle you so you can feel alive for a fleeting moment. The Coma 2: Vicious Sisters, by developer Devespresso Games and published by Headup and WhisperGames, starts with a lot of promise, but the game wore me down quickly. (Check Out our Steam Review!)

              The game focuses on the journey of high school student Mina trying to escape an alternate version of the world called The Coma. This space is where demons and other monsters of the night roam. You find out some of your professors are a little too into blood sacrifices and demon worship. It is up to you to end the blood moon ritual to stop the Vicious sisters from entering our reality. You play in a 2D side scrolling environment where you explore areas to find out clues and tools to help you survive. Beware, nightmarish beasts are skulking the grounds of The Coma hoping to cut your adventure short, oOoOOoOoOO.

The gameplay started strong and creepy but became tedious for me. Your primary method for dealing with enemies is running away and hiding. While you hide, short quick-time button presses keep you from life and death. The Coma 2: Vicious Sisters falls into the same problem I have with most horror games, once enemies stop being scary, they become very annoying. The main enemy, your  English teacher (Yes, I’m serious), has a clicking heel sound that gets louder as she’s closer to you. I feel this enemy succeeds the most at creating suspense. They’re also a one-hit kill, so the stakes are high with your main enemy. However, when you’re focused on looking for your next item to progress, having to stop for a few minutes to deal with one enemy slogs down the gameplay.

I wish there were something more to fight off the monsters. You do get mace to save you in case a one-hit kill enemy catches you. I’m not saying you should have a colossal shotgun to fend of enemies with, but I wanted more options. For example, one enemy crawls on the ground, and it completely blocks your path. If you run at it, it will take off a point of health. I never figured out if there was a way around this enemy besides just taking a different path. Instead, I would just run through and take health loss; Since most enemies are either a cakewalk or kill you instantly, one point of health holds little value.

None of the game’s puzzles felt like puzzles more like “Go here, find this; bring it to this person.” Even the game makes a joke about “fetch quests.” The Coma 2: Vicious Sisters takes inspiration from Adventure games, and I wish there were some level of creativity in progressing rather than finding the right key or finding another exit. Sometimes you have to infer where to go based on dialog from characters, and I liked those moments because it felt you needed to understand the location you were in. I wanted more stuff like this; it would make a lot of the progress more rewarding. My least favorite aspect of the game was the crafting items that let you survive cutscene encounters. You find some items and then make a tool to fight off an enemy in a transition between locations. If you don’t, the game will permanently remove one point of health from the total. The game does not tell you this until the first time you either succeed or fail these encounters.

              The Coma 2: Vicious Sisters’s presentation is slick, but nothing stood out. The art fits the tone with its thick lines and its expressionist comic book style, but the art style didn’t try to have an identity. The Lovecraftian tentacles lining the walls and accenting many enemies made this feel like an invading menace to our world. The variety of horror monster ropes portrayed through this game’s art style was fun to see. You’ll encounter crawling zombies, cleaver-wielding butchers, long-haired screaming demon English teachers, and poison spewing slimeballs, to name a few. The choices of locations were a little unoriginal, school at night, and hospital at night. I loved the open-air market filled in neon nights. I can’t get enough of monsters wrapped in gaudy purple and reds. I thought the ambient music was fitting. The soundtrack was always understated, but still building tension no matter what was happening.

I have been delaying the inevitable; the story did not engage me. It’s as clichéd as it gets. I don’t mind overused ideas if it does something interesting with it, but it felt more a victim of sub-par writing rather than a team embracing the silliness of horror tropes. The story is ‘stop the evil thing from happening or else.’ It never felt like you had any stakes in this world. What happens if we don’t stop the evil thing? Who is Mina fighting for? What will the vicious sisters do if they get a vessel? The Coma 2: Vicious Sisters didn’t do much to give context or weight to what we were doing, mostly just it will be bad if we don’t. The dialog is painfully corny. I know this game is originally from Korea, so there may be issues of intent between translations. A horror game where there are Pulp Fiction references in the dialog and an unironic use of the word “normie” forgoes any chances of building a grave atmosphere. There are passages for the player to read to get more backstory for the villains. I love books but choose between being a book or a game, don’t try to meet halfway. Horror games are great for sparse fill-in-the-blank storytelling, but when there is so much information given to the player and none of it is interesting, why bother? I don’t want to spoil the ending for anyone who may play it. It does culminate decently, but having to get through so much boring story to get to it didn’t feel worth it for me.

I feel the biggest take away is that this game is not for me. It’s a genre I often don’t like in games, and a method of scaring people I don’t like. I love horror, it can be a fun and thought-provoking method for telling a story when it’s focused. Jumpscares don’t do much for me, and this game relies on them to scare the player. This game was trying my patience at every turn, but I could see someone else enjoying it a lot. If you liked flash horror games from the late 2000s and early 2010s, The Coma 2: Vicious Sisters will be right up your alley.

Check Out The Coma 2: Vicious Sisters Trailer:

The Coma 2: Vicious Sisters is available on the Nintendo eShop, the PlayStation Store , and Steam.

For more information, please visit: https://www.devespressogames.com/the-coma-2

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