Preview: Montas First Impressions

Montas is an upcoming survival horror game, which is currently in Steam’s Alpha Access. So mind you, it is riddled with bugs and aesthetic issues at the moment. However, that does not mean it can’t still scare you witless, because oh boy… It sure can.

It began with me in an empty office, my office… lights fluttering in the far corner,  chairs left everywhere. The computer screens around me were still on. Whoever had decided to leave, they sure were in a hurry. It is after that, that I took control of my character and walked him through this bleak looking office, entering a dimly lit elevator. As the elevator starts taking me down, the sounds start getting creepier and the game’s unsettling music kicks in. I wasn’t just descending a building, I was descending into the very depths of insanity, and something told me that things were about to get pretty weird.

Basically, throughout the experience that is available to you at the moment, you will be taking on different settings in different locations. At one point, you are in this normal looking office, then you are in this cave, and all of a sudden you’re on a street, about to get hit by car. There isn’t really a structure tying things together at the moment, or strong objectives that you can follow. All it is at the moment, is a journey, a little taste of what is to come, and if this is anything to go by, get ready to be severely terrified.

The game as you know, is a survival horror experience. Meaning, it is something specifically designed to scare the living daylights out of you, and it does it pretty well too. Contributing to a job well done are many factors, such as solid sound effects, creepy but memorable music, and downright terrifying enemy models. I understand that we have a lot of survival horror games at the moment, but almost all of them rely on making us run. If you were to break most of the experience down, you’d find out that more often than not, you are afraid of dying and not the creature itself. In fact most people stop getting scared once they find out a certain game has no threat.

However, in this game the models of the ghosts (yep, they had to go with ghosts) are so scary, and their agonising screams are so bone chilling, so much so that you don’t even want to look at them. I really can’t remember the last time I was really actively trying to avoid looking at a game’s monster, due to pure fear and not hard-coded insanity level that would make you go insane the more you looked at the monsters. In this game, I sure as hell tried.

For example, this is how one of the sections played out.  I found myself outside a lifeless lobby, the lights were flickering on and off, creating for a very disturbing atmosphere. As I entered the room, I started hearing the dreaded static noise, alarming me of nearby threat. As I started going further in, I started hearing a woman screaming in pain. That should’ve been enough to warn me of the possible danger, but my inner adventurer had a different idea in mind. I wanted to see the source of this blood-curdling voice, I wish I didn’t.

As I cut through this dark corner, I saw a scary looking woman standing right in front of me. She was draped in a white (in torn wedding dress I believe) with a see-through net gown covering her facial features. Her gown started to swerve in the air and she let out a blood-curdling scream. Before I could even make sense of what had happened, I had joined her in death. It was definitely a nerve-wrecking experience.

So as you can pretty much see, the experience has started out extremely strong. It has everything a horror experience needs to give you a kick. Robust sound effects, creepy music and simple but scary looking enemies that keep you on the edge of your seat. Furthermore, so far the game looks really good and it puts a lot of emphasis on lightning and shadow casting. Every object in this world casts an accurate shadow, relevant to the light source.

Now I would like to talk about what doesn’t really work in this game as well, but seeing how it is clearly in an alpha state, the problems are likely temporary. However, what I would like the developers to definitely fix are the movement controls. As it stands now, controlling your character feels really stiff and unresponsive, because the speed of your character is really slow compared to other horror games. I understand it might be deliberate, but it just doesn’t seem natural, and may end up ruining the final product if not tempered with. Besides, for a game that really relies on evading enemies, it should make the movements feel more natural and less restrictive.

Also, the game currently requires optimization, as the frame rate is all over the place. At times I’d have my FPS reaching up to a 100+ level, but then it would start dipping to around 35FPS at parts where there was a lot of lightning involved. Framerate at around 30FPS does not feel laggy, but the huge spikes occurring occasionally does make your game stutter. Lastly, the game might a bit too dark at times too and despite the gamma and contrast options existing, I am afraid they don’t do much to deter darkness at the moment. Hopefully in the next update, this will also be fixed.

This isn’t really a problem as such, but with such a ripe quality of indie games making their way to the PS4 of late, such as Outlast, I really hope this also comes over to the PS4. Anyways, as I said, the game is in a very early state, and is riddled with bugs and problems. There are times when certain events don’t even trigger properly, preventing you from progressing. However, these problems are bound to get fixed in a later version and from what I have played until now, I really cannot wait for more.