Divis Mortis

Divis Mortis is in a word, split-personality. The first few moves reveal a stomach-wrenching experience and with that out in the open, you think you know what kind of ride you're in for. But you're wrong, because then the silly one-liners show up. Danielle is right. These attenuate the horror instead of amping it up. Lynnea, if you're listening, we can handle it. True horror fans don't need lighter elements. Give us the soul-soaking dread and doom of pure zombie madness. Ahem.

Yes, this game is a zombie survival game, but more fair and playable than some others of the genre (Resident Evil series, I'm looking at you). It's a richly-detailed world, and the author knows her medical terminology. The descriptions are succinct, sometimes cold, but always sufficient. The puzzles range from fairly simple to medium difficulty, with the exception of one which requires the hints.

Anyways, Divis Mortis (cool name BTW) has some other problems. These are mostly grammatical, but occasionally, are more serious. For instance, you can escape one particular zombie simply by running past him, even though your character is rooted to the spot in dread. That zombie then disappears. He's nowhere to be found. Another rather serious issue involves the order in which you do certain things. (Spoiler - click to show)It turns out that you need to retrieve an item from your car; however, if you barricade the doors to the outside first, you can never get back out to get to your car. Yet another issue involves (Spoiler - click to show)what happens to the lamp once you drop it into the basement. The basement has light, but the lamp and the rope disappear.. More troubling still are some of the logical leaps that the game makes, as if the plot were not throughly worked out.

It looks like there are multiple endings; I finished the game with a score of 88 out of 100, but I'm uncertain what else I could have done. The ending that I did achieve was again, split-personality. It proved to be initially interesting (why did the former victim behave the way he did?) but panned out to be cheesy and unsatisfying. The PC flavor and the humor closed the game with a wink and a nod, not a roundhouse to the solar plexus.

Divis Mortis is not a suffocating overcoat of gothic dread, despite the name; it is a partly serious survival zombie game. All horror fans should give it a whirl, but the hardcore aficionados will most likely be disappointed by its nonserious bent.

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