Anyone who has had the opportunity to play Until Dawn , a well-known horror graphic adventure from Supermassive Games , will surely have been intrigued by The Inpatient . The title is the prequel to the adventures of Sam  and his friends, so you will have the opportunity to experience the events that took place inside the sanatorium years before , seeing with your own eyes how the experiment carried out by Professor Jefferson Bragg did not go the right way. On those mountains are darker than expected mysteries, the origins of which date back long before the creation of the asylum itself. The development house has already demonstrated “nails” thanks to the publication ofUntil Dawn: Rush of Blood , but this time it returns to the scene telling how the curse of the wendigo has spread to those lands.

Welcome back to Blackwood Montain

Slip on the PlayStation VR and make yourself comfortable. The opening scene of the game in some ways resembles that of Until Dawn : this time you will be tied to a chair with the primary doctor of the sanatorium intent on asking you questions. You know nothing about yourself, much less why you are in that place; your only goal is not to lose your reason and understand what is happening. I won’t go into details to avoid any kind of spoiler, but just know that, like the main title, The Inpatient also uses the butterfly effect , so pay attention to every single decision you make.

Anyone who hasn’t tried Until Dawn will find himself groping in the dark in some of the choices, but on the contrary if you are aware of the events related to the main video game, you will know what to do. Just a shame that by doing so you will completely lose the “WOW” factor . Let’s also add that some decisions are not marked as we would have liked, certainly the development house could have dared a little more. With a fragmented plot branch and the narration of past events via flashbacks, The Inpatient will take you back to the distant 1952, even if at the end of the adventure it will still be difficult to dispel the various doubts.

The other side of hunger

The Inpatient , despite the obvious limitations of the current generation VR, confirms a graphic quality of splendid workmanship. The facial expressions of the main characters are well done and make the various emotions they feel evident and clear. Too bad we can’t say the same about the secondary characters, too flat in their expressiveness and very little empathic. Obviously, the use of some jump scares is obvious , banal in their simplicity but which still have an impact on the player. The dubbing is certainly thick, useful to emphasize some moments within the experience.

The overall duration of the game is about a couple of hours, which can easily increase if you want to discover every secret and every possible ending. Even the initial choice of the protagonist’s sex will determine the progress of the adventure, so the decision of how much time to invest in The Inpatient is entirely up to you. Some moments of tension could be handled differently since, in the long run, they don’t really show anything original. The potential to create something really scary was all there, unfortunately, however, the software house preferred not to dare by offering a scary but not too scary video game.

In conclusion we can say that The Inpatient was a good experience that manages to keep the user glued to the chair until the end. Too bad that the production fails to truly terrify, as it is limited to a few moments of tension and jump-scare scattered around. net of this, the guys of Supermassive Games showed their skills again, proving to be a close-knit and competent team, able above all to manage with great familiarity multiple experiences based on a single thread, in this case the events of Blackwood Montain . Leaving out some gaps, we can say with certainty that The Inpatientis a title that must absolutely be part of the collection of anyone who owns a  PlayStation VR.