Drama of the Dead

Red Colony is a 2D survival horror game created by Rune Storm.

Let me get this out in the open first thing: I really enjoyed my time with Red Colony! Yes, this game is rough around the edges and the story is some of the most B movie gold that I’ve ever seen, but underneath everything is a fun and bizarre experience. This game has issues, and I’ll go over them in their respective areas, but there’s a good amount of fun to be had here!

The story in Red Colony, as I said before, is straight up B movie goodness. You play as Maria, who wakes up in an abandoned warehouse and is separated from her husband and daughter. I won’t go too far into it, but there are a good amount of twists that keep the player wanting to know more and see how everything pans out. There’s so much drama in this game that it could give any serial soap opera a run for its money, and I mean this as a compliment in every way! I want more of this type of story, and honestly I don’t think I’ve seen it handled this way in another game like this.

Hoo, boy. The graphics. Heavily inspired by anime, many of the main characters are over-sexualized. Although blatant and a bit overdone, this works surprisingly well with the style of this game. If you have ever watched the anime “High School of the Dead” you would definitely understand. Now, I’m not saying that I am overly fond of this type of depiction of women in gaming, but in the context of the game it works.

Aside from this, the background scenes are great! The character moves on a 2D plane, but there are times that there are events happening in the background that really add to the creep factor. Speaking of creep factor, there are some real eerie and disturbing scenes and environments in this world and the variety of locales keep the progression from feeling stale. Character animations are decent, but seem a bit unnatural. It’s almost like controlling paper dolls to a point, where you can obviously see the skeleton joints. As a side note, the way chunks of enemies fly off when you attack them was a nice touch.

Gameplay revolves around the main character traversing the different areas, fending off zombies (or crawling under tables to get past them), and unlocking a bunch of doors. The puzzles present were underwhelming, often requiring the player to find a pass code and enter it into a keypad. There were a few that stood out though and presented the “key-code” in inventive ways, but I would have loved to see a bit more variety in progressing. Combat is reminiscent of the old survival horror games of the past. You start with a humble knife and can obtain different firearms through a “3D Printer” crafting system. Each safe house is outfitted with a 3D printer that you can feed items to create weapons and ammo, and they also serve as the games save system. You will collect USB drives throughout that you use to save your game, but it never felt like I was in any danger of running out of these.

If you get a chance to play this I believe it’s worth it, but there are aspects of this game that may not be for everyone. I had fun with it, and I’m excited about Red Colony 2 which is now in development!