Horror’s revival has brought several games—Outlast, Amnesia: The Dark Descent, and Silent Hill: Shattered Memories—that leave the player defenseless and on the run. Removing empowerment creates an additional layer of fear and it shies away from levels of violence thought to be implicit in its genre. Survival is the law of the land. Albino Lullaby acknowledges this, but paints its canvass from a slightly different angle.
Albino Lullaby’s opening is an exhibition of environmental storytelling. After a rough landing, you, the shapeless first person protagonist, emerge into an assemblage of sketchbook architecture. Never mind the odd configuration, where buildings seem mechanically hinged to each other, the look of this place is both arresting and uncomfortable. Environments in Albino Lullaby, kind of like 2014’s Cloudbuilt, are formed from fairly basic geometry, but they’re decorated with highly stylized, seemingly hand-painted textures. It creates the illusion of a real and familiar space but slightly off enough to suggest there’s something sinister lurking above the covers.
There is something malevolent out there. A lot of somethings. Early parts of Albino Lullaby coerce the player into flipping switches and solving impish environmental puzzles to open doors, but this soon fades into fields of the game’s roving menace, the grandchildren. Somewhere between a slow sentry and a corpulent punching bag, grandchildren are eventually everywhere and, should enough of them swarm around, can result in your eminent demise.
Grandchildren also create two relatively different challenges. When they’re spaced out and essentially on patrol, Albino Lullaby acts like a basic stealth game. You sneak around corners, try to find out-of-the-way means of exit and entry, and basically hope to god a grandchild never sees you. One grandchild is fine, but if a bunch swarm you (and they will) your vision starts to close and you’re sent back to the last checkpoint.
Eventually, roving flocks of grandchildren become too difficult to manage. Albino Lullaby solves this problem by giving you a device that, essentially, knocks them over like bowling pins. Reprieve is temporary, grandchildren either respawn or get back up, but it’s usually employed to create safe, if not brief, passage.
Albino Lullaby’s stealth segments and feeble swipes at combat are mechanically dissimilar, but both operate with a blunt-force approach to level design. The game doesn’t feel finely tuned for the usual sort of precision demanded by either stealth or action games. It compensates by making both mechanics relatively easy, but executed with the grace of a pugilist wearing Hulk Hands. All of your actions in Albino Lullaby feel “big,” like the space your in wasn’t explicitly built for the challenges ahead. This isn’t necessarily a problem—Albino Lullaby is fairly easy to manage until its last act—but it leaves the gameplay somewhat dim in the light of its peers.
Surface level mechanics are, after all, in service to Albino Lullaby’s larger themes. Specifically, you’re in some sort of alternate reality funhouse hell formed from BioShock’s neon aggression and David Lynch’s commitment to disconcerting ambience. The very idea of grandchildren—childlike beings whom were formerly human but bludgeoned into an obtuse mutation—is equal parts creepy and alarming, and seeing them swarm and operate within Albino Lullaby’s oddball world gives credence to the game’s implicit fiction.
Obviously I don’t want to go into huge detail regarding Albino Lullaby’s more overt themes, but there is a certain way to appreciate particulars without spoiling the imagery. The game is quick to leave hastily assembled notes at every corner, usually lost commerce between grandchildren, and it really helps surface the dynamics fueling their obscene culture. Most of the grandchildren benefit from hearty vocal performances, granting information that ranges from absolutely nonsense to malicious fury. I still don’t know whether to fear or feel sorry for them (probably both!), but their gruesome instability makes either approach effective.
There’s also a certain dreamlike madness that calls the nature of this world into question. There were times when I thought I was a tourist in some sort of post-modern freak show, and there were times when I was convinced this was some ultra-secret subterranean society. Albino Lullaby’s finale draws a more concrete conclusion, but its ability to develop a world and suggest there’s something else to it, regardless of your interpretation, is really cool. Explicitly, it says very little, but it loads the periphery full of detail and allows your mind to forecast a revolving door of plausible scenarios.
Notable in its absence is traditional “videogame” horror. There are no zombies, or monster closets, or anonymous pools of blood. Violence is merely a suggestion, and Albino Lullaby never gives way to quick scares or cheap thrills. The entirety of the game feels intimately designed to weird you out and/or make you feel distressed, and while it does borrow a few tricks (peeking on a grandchild through a door, being a careful visitor in an assembly hall), it’s more often inclined to go its own way. The very nature of Albino Lullaby’s mechanical environments, always rotating to shift into something new, are novel enough to fuel the three or four hours it takes to complete.
If only some of Albino Lullaby’s lessons weren’t so obtuse. There are times when the game literally spells out what you should do with either signs on the wall or arrows on the ground, and there are other times when you’re left with just your intuition. Both of these are fine, but occasionally Albino Lullaby leads the player around without proper signposting. In the rooftop segment I was hunting around trying to find my way, and I leapt over the some pipes and became lodged in a part of the game where I wasn’t supposed to go. Another time I continued to battle endless hordes of grandchildren in what I thought was an elevator, unaware that I was supposed to exit somewhere else. That may not sound particularly bad, but it was just after the game’s hardest sequence—leading a rogue grandchild through a series of gates—and I begrudgingly had to repeat the entire thing.
Toward the end of the game, technical performance also suffered. One of the last segments of Albino Lullaby loads a small monster house with heaps of grandchildren, and, no matter what I dropped the settings to, the frame-rate hit single digits. This made it very hard to play. Dips in performance lasted nearly the remainder of the game, suggesting this section (and the large object composing its centerpiece) were too much to handle. I have a higher mid-range rig and haven’t suffered similar problems with other Unreal Engine games, leaving Albino Lullaby’s last act as an anomaly.
Despite its label as a first episode (with two more on the way), Albino Lullaby wraps up in internal narrative quite nicely. Many questions about the world remain, and the alarming status of your nameless protagonist persists, but Albino Lullaby provides a satisfying resolution to its most pressing questions. Most impressive of all is that Albino Lullaby creates horror not out of open defiance of genre norms, but from a place of genuine inspiration. “Scary” exists elsewhere, and it great supply. Albino Lullaby prefers to linger in a frightening sense of curiosity.
* Ape Law, via Twitter, reached out to let me know the performance issues I experienced have been corrected in a patch.
