Calling

The strangely named 'Calling' is a first-person horror adventure game. While Silent Hill is a Japanese take on western/American horror, Calling is just straight up J-horror, drawing material from movies like The Grudge and One Missed Call. It has that one prominent but bizarre element of J-horror where technology is some kind of medium between the living world and the dead. That video you're not supposed to watch, that website you're not supposed to go on or that phone you're not supposed to answer because bad shit will go down if you do.

In Calling it's a website forum with the people on it connected in some way. They've all been spirited away to some Limbo region called the "mnemonic abyss." There are many locations in the abyss but the only way you can get around from one to another is teleporting with a cell phone that has absolutely no effect or animation aside from fading to black. The phone doesn't go with you so at each location, you need to ultimately find a phone and a cell number that corresponds with a location. 

The game is only on the Wii and it only supports the Wii remote... Goody. Going into Calling, it's hard to not know how bad the game is and here they are starting it with one foot in the grave by not allowing you to use an actual controller. You basically control the flashlight with your movement. If you're lucky, your view pans the direction the Wii remote cursor is aimed when at the edge of the screen. If you're not lucky, you're stuck looking at the ceiling or ramming straight ahead into a wall until you can quick-turn or waggle spasticly out of it like you're trying to fix a stuck roller-ball mouse.

Dead Space is a the golden standard of jump scare abuse. It delivers probably 95% of its "scary" this way. Hence why the games fail to be scary. I thought this was the lowest form of fear delivery in movies/games. But it turns out that it's not. Calling has lowered the limbo bar. On occasion, particularly when you unpause the game, something will flash or shoot across the screen like a scary face or... some kind up tumbleweed hairball, (I can't figure out what the hell it is!) Dead Space has one thing going for its jump scares and that is that Necromorphs jumping out at you actually pose a threat. This however is just random visual shit flying around in front of you which is tantamount to someone just out of sight dangling a grocery bag ghost in front of you with a fishing pole and going WOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO~! It's grade school haunted house quality and there is no context or reason for it to be happening. This is as cheap as it gets.

There are actually a few subtle ghosts in the game that you might not even notice if you're not looking for them. The head sticking out of the water in the bathtub was a good one. In the hospital, you can see pacing ghost feet underneath a curtain in one of the rooms. You're character will only say something about how a bed is stored in there when you try to interact. That really bothers me. You'll comment on the stupid broken vending machine or the state of a potted plant but not the ghost feet?

You play as four different characters who have different stories intertwining. I like how you can't crouch, run or quick-turn as the old woman. Actually I don't because those are the only tools I have to make gameplay almost tolerable. Other than that, it's just walk and waggle to shake off ghosts. There's a fear meter that changes color. You die when it gets to solid red which never happened to me. I only died in instant death scenarios.

The voice acting is terrible which is awesome. I'm serious when I say that. I love bad voice acting and I don't know why. The characters say all of their lines awkwardly slow and deliberate like they're reading them for the first time and they're scribbled in terrible handwriting. The great thing about Calling is that you'll get calls on your phone and you'll answer them by putting the Wii remote to your ear. Then you hear a spooky voice that sounds like your dad hamming it up at the punchline of his ghost story with a flashlight glowing under his chin. THE KILLER WAS IN THE BACK SEAT/UPSTAIRS/ME! Entertains me to no end. If you've ever played the first Echo Night game, it's very similar in voice acting quality... and graphics for that matter. Actually both of those games are similar in a lot of respects. In fact, right now you're probably a little confused about that screen cap, wondering if it's actually from Calling. The biggest difference between the two is that I thought Echo Night was awesome. 


There's a part when you first enter the school on the 4th floor where you get a creepy call from someone that says you have their phone and they're coming to get it. They call you back momentarily to say they're on the 1st floor. Then they call to say they're on the 2nd floor and then the third floor. Oh shit! They're coming! What do I do? When the call came again, presumably to say "Look behind you," I wasn't fast enough and the call went away. Then nothing happened. I was kind of disappointed because I wanted to see where they were going with this but the weird thing was that by the way this sequence played out, it inadvertently gave the illusion that I actually stopped them from reaching me by failing to answer their call. It got me thinking, what if answering the phone actually WAS bad and it caused bad things to happen sometimes? You don't want to pick it up but at the same time you are compelled to pick it up to hear what happens next or maybe it's even mandatory for some puzzles. But you don't know if the call you're answering is a key to a puzzle or a prediction about the death of your friend.

Speaking of puzzles, there are hardly any. I played for about two hours before I saw anything that qualified as a puzzle. It's just a whole lot of wandering around, occasionally fending off ghosts, with rarely any clear objective or direction, almost waiting for shit to happen. You'll trigger events, (mostly jump scares,) and you'll often have to follow a ghost or a cat to the next whatever.

In some places you're flashlight goes out because the batteries died and you have to find some batteries or matches and light a candle so that you can see. Except you can still see fine, it's just a little darker. You can go about business as usual until you try to interact with things and then your character goes DUHHHHHHH, IT TOO DARK! EYES NO WORK! Well I can see fine, I don't know what YOU'RE problem is. Ignoring how stupid that is, there's also the fact that you should just be able to use your damn cell phone screen for light which would make the whole candle search pointless.

The no clear direction thing is particularly bad when you're in huge places like the hospital and school. You have four floors and keep looking in rooms, each one of them identical to the last one with identical furniture that's filled/covered with identical items arranged identically. They seriously modeled one of about a dozen different things and then copied each one 200 times and scattered them around. On top of that, everything looks grey and washed out. You have to look at the map every 15 seconds or you get confused. It's like the scrolling infinite background in a Hanna Barbera cartoon. There are many extraneous rooms with no purpose and almost every object that has a door is searchable and contains 1-8 separate compartments you can manually open and inspect and there's never anything to find in ANY OF THEM. I keep opening those stupid utility lockers only to find the exact same bucket, broom, dust pan and three rags posed in the exact same arrangement every single time.

Players need boundaries! Why the hell would they design it this way? It's like some kind of cruel joke, like a Where's Waldo book with no Waldo in it. This game would turn you loose in a 100 room mansion and tell you to go apeshit when only two of the rooms are actually pertinent to the progression of the game.

Almost all of the time, the only thing that you'll ever find inside anything is something scrawled in white kanji. I don't know about other English speaking people playing a game that's in English but I can't read kanji so it might as well be scribbles. Why couldn't they just translate it or even take it out? It makes me wonder if in the Japanese release of Dead Space they left "CUT OFF THEIR LIMBS" in English. Wouldn't that be a bitch? I bet they did.

Looking at a walkthrough on the internet, I found that a lot of the kanji is actually passwords. You see as you play, you can actually find keys pried out of a phone laying around with more unidentifiable characters on them. If you collect enough of them you can put them back in the phone and use them to enter some of these sequences in to unlock bonus stuff. That's nice... Except that I still can't fucking read Japanese. Did they just forget about this aspect of the game when they released it in North America?

Imagine for a second that there is no internet and no walkthroughs and you're an average American punishing yourself with Calling and wanting to unlock gallery stuff. Because the codes you have to enter have eight characters, the chances that you are missing one of those characters is very high. So to be able to enter any codes at all you need to find about 80% of the phone keys or you might as well have none of the phone keys. The keys themselves are super tiny and can be anywhere. Some of them even only show up in the dark. (I didn't even know you could turn off your light until around the end of the game.) Then you need the codes. The codes are also hidden all around too. And they're written in Japanese and they're not just numbers. They're actually all characters for zodiac animals. If you see one of these collections of squiggles and scratches which are often pixelated, you'll have to write it down and hope that what you wrote resembles what's on the keys because you have no idea what you're writing. Now what are the odds that all of these variables will line up correctly? You're not unlocking jack shit.  

For a game set in the mnemonic abyss with ghosts and teleportation phones, it mirrors the mundane of reality a little too closely. Think about if you went to a school at night when it's closed and no one's there. It would be dark and you'd need a flashlight. There wouldn't be any puzzles to solve. You could go in all the rooms and look in all the closets and all around you you'd find everyday items that are in no way interesting. That's basically what this is except sometimes there's a ghost. You're ultimately just wandering around in the dark in an excruciatingly ordinary and boring place with no secrets.

At the end of the school level, you get trapped in a room with three ghosts that are attacking you. You're supposed to look at this scribbled phone number on a desk and then call it on your phone to teleport away to the next area. They attack about every four seconds. In that amount of time you have to open up your phone, punch in the 10 digit number and hit send. (I hate calling phone numbers in this game as it is WITHOUT distraction because of how awkward and tedious it is.) If you don't accomplish this before they grab you, you have to fend them off and start over, because as we all know, mobile phones don't have the capability to not erase the number that you're putting in if you momentarily pause to think about it. That's like some kind of crazy sci-fi technology that we just haven't figured out yet like time travel or functioning home computer printers. And don't forget that you have to read and memorize the number before you can even attempt to do that. Just trying to LOOK at the number on the table can be impossible if the cursor gets stuck as it has a tendency to do. I tried to dial this number 15-20 times and I could not fucking do it. My thumb was not fast enough. It wasn't until I used both hands on the controller that I could finally do it. And here we see another fundamental flaw with the Wii remote.

At the end of the game, you get a bad ending and then you get the feeling that it was really short and yet took an eternity at the same time. When the title screen comes up after the credits, there's a new game+ option. Now what could this possibly mean in a game where you have no weapons, items or abilities. Well it means that you now have access to the bonus chapters and can experience the "full story." WELL HALE-FUCKING-LUJA! I just knuckled down and grinded my way through the most boring video game I've ever played in my life, (and I've played Borderlands,)  and now you're telling me that I didn't actually complete it? That was the fake game. You took a shitty game and removed significant parts from it and then made me play the fake game first with the bad ending instead of just putting the most complete game up front. This is like making someone eat 20 ice cream cones before you give them the actual ice cream. No one's going to stick around long enough to get the ice cream. If you had just given them the ice cream from square one, perhaps it's still mediocre ice cream, but they still had the best experience that it was possible to have and they hate you less. What kind of dumbass is going to go back for more after all that?

So after starting a new game plus and playing the first new chapter, I realized that this is actually significantly better than the regular game. You play as the one character that you saw before but never played as, Makoto. All of the areas you go to are interesting and small versus gigantic and empty/bland as hell. You also have a note book for phone numbers which you can pull out and read while dialing a number.  See, this is what I'm talking about. The game designers had a solution for a shitty problem and they purposefully left it out of the first playthrough because they're assholes. It's completely idiotic.

The story makes more sense and all around flows better. For the first time it actually feels like a game. You should have just played as this guy the whole time. But in general it's soul-crushing, mind-numbing and will suck the life out of you with its blandness. If video games were food, this one would be a STALE rice cake.