At first glance you might look at You Will Die Here Tonight and think it wears its inspirations too boldly on its sleeve. I admit to some skepticism when I saw the premise of the color-coded shoulder-pad-wearing SWAT team being sent in to investigate a mysterious mansion. It has a familiar beat too, as the group gets separated, team members picked off one by one, monsters roaming the halls.

But stick with You Will Die Here Tonight just a little longer and you’ll see the veil of emulation be pulled back to reveal a strong vision, unique gameplay, and some great twists to present itself as a bold and excellent addition to the survival horror genre.

You control the Aries Division, a special tactics squad sent to investigate the mysterious Breckenridge Estate

The premise is about as on-the-nose as expected. It’s not long before the squad is separated and you’re tasked with uncovering what became of them as you explore the mansion.

You do this by controlling your characters via the isometric camera in a pseudo-3D perspective. The graphics look good here and strike a balance between modern and retro-clunky. The character models specifically are animated really well and have this sort of stuttered FPS to their motion which I think looks great and continues to evoke the classics. These models evoke something of the PS2 era as opposed to the hard pixelation of the PS1.

The environments are detailed and create a nice sense of place. The eerie 19th century estate is familiar in a creepy, cozy way and the mandatory torture chambers and science labs all feel right at home, lit through moody hues and lots of hard shadows.

The design makes it hard–but not impossible–to dodge around the many monsters that lurk inside the mansion. Tight hallways open up to wide lobbies, small rooms hide lines of sight, and shortcuts loop back in on themselves to open up exploration, a staple of any good survival horror level.

There’s some really good stuff here. You Will Die Here Tonight highlights the importance of tight level design. Exploration is rewarding as you scavenge around to find ammo and key items. Rooms and wings are distinct and believable, and it’s all tied together with an easy-to-navigate map. Good stuff.

But you’re not just exploring the mansion, you’re fighting for your life (lives)

It’s right about here that You Will Die Here Tonight begins to strike off as its own game. You initially wake up as Lieutenant Ashley Kowalski, and you explore the mansion and quickly encounter the zombified remains of some poor staff person.

In perhaps the game’s most unique mechanic, You Will Die Here Tonight snaps you into locked-in-place first-person shooting combat whenever you engage an enemy.

It might sound jarring at first, but it works really well. You aim your gun and snap into combat quickly. The shift from isometric camera to first person takes a little getting used to but that’s soon overcome.

These sections feel like a take on the combat from Resident Evil Dead Aim, The Umbrella Chronicles, or even Resident Evil Survivor(anyone remember that??) or maybe the more recognizable rail gun shooter House of The Dead.  The combat comes complete with a bullet counter on the bottom right, and enemies that come uncomfortably close before attacking.

They lumber out of the darkness one by one, staggered just enough to not overwhelm you, but quickly enough to punish any missed shots. Their approach is also based on the distance and location you engage with them while out of combat.

To explain, if you see a zombie at the end of the hall and engage them from that distance, you’ll have ample time to gun them down before they reach out. By that same logic if you engage too close, or if you aren’t quick enough to ready your gun, you’ll start the fight with the zombie only inches in front of you.  Or if you engage with one monster in front of you, and one behind, you’ll actually have to rotate around in first person to face it.

Ammo is of course a main concern here. Some weaker enemies can be stun-locked by using the knife, but even that is dangerous as they might slowly overwhelm you while you pick them off. So you can switch weapons on the fly and dispatch foes appropriately to manage resources.

The presentation of the combat is excellent as well. The zombie’s animations are tight and fluid,  and make for tricky headshots as they stumble, lunge and crawl around. Landing a good headshot might obliterate the top half of a zombie’s head and knock them down for a quick knife finish. The guns feel and sound great with strong recoil and punchy feedback. You need to be still for a moment to narrow down the crosshairs for pinpoint shots lest you waste ammo. Everything about the combat is finely tuned and consistent.

This consistency goes a long way to make the combat feel grounded and reliable. I never encountered any cheap deaths or unfair combat sequences because the rules by which it’s prompted are so reliable. Good stuff.

The Breckenridge Estate is a maze of puzzles and traps

You Will Die Here Tonight, as the name suggests, takes place in a treacherous, labyrinthine mansion where your chances of survival are less than optimistic. As you explore you’ll find many puzzles and key items, notes to read and monsters to dispatch.  There is a fantastic cadence to these puzzles, as some are immediately solvable with the information presented in to you, while others you must make note of and come back later when you’ve acquired the code or key item.

Spreading out puzzles like this goes a long way to making an immersive environment. You must spend time getting to know the rooms and routes, which hallways are safe to take, and which should be avoided.  There is some backtracking involved but the way in which the mansion spreads out while folding into itself makes for quick navigation.

The puzzles here are standard fare for the survival horror genre; tracking down missing keys, parsing out riddles to unlock secret doors, placing books on their correct shelves, rotating statues, etc.  But they’re all done very well and their design is baked into the lore of the Breckenridge Estate, which is another touch of expertise by the developers.

If you’re a fan of the cadence and style of classic survival horror puzzles, there is a lot to like here. There are a couple of brief head-scratchers but most are very approachable. Be warned though,  if you make a mistake in some of these puzzles it can result in the instant death of your character, and once they’re dead, they’re dead for good.

Death is permanent in You Will Die Here Tonight

While playing as Lt.  Ashley Kowalski, my beloved Rebecca Chambers look-alike, I pressed the wrong switch during a  puzzle and was promptly flattened into a pancake by a moving wall. All that was left of her was a red smear on the ground that the next character I chose couldn’t even comment on when I returned to the room because there was so little left of her.

This was a devastating loss, as I had made it so far into my run without losing a character.  That pain I felt, that regret of making such a stupid move like pressing a switch when I wasn’t sure what it would do, was amazing.

Survival horror is at its best when it asks something of the player. When it forces you to make real, tangible choices that have consequences.  Now that Lt. Kowalski is dead, I’ll never see her resolution to the game, I won’t be able to use her special herb garden for healing in the safe room, and I won’t get her unique takes and reactions to the events of the game. These sorts of consequences are fantastic and add so much replayability and variety to each run.

Knowing that death is permanent adds a layer of tension to every moment in You Will Die Here Tonight. You must pick your battles, move carefully around and solve puzzles with a heightened level of caution because you never know what trick the game might pull that could result in a death.

Something so simple as forgetting to reload your gun after a fight could mean getting bitten and infected in the next one, which puts a countdown timer life sentence on your character unless you can make it back to the safe room for the vaccine.

But should you lose a character–and you will–each new one picks up where the last left off, items and story progress included. While the loss of your favorite character hurts, you don’t restart the story progress until all six members of the Aries Division die off. The upside of a character’s death is that you’ll be able to experience the other characters’ unique personalities and the special abilities they bring to the table.

You Will Die Here Tonight is a fantastic game

There is a lot of love and talent on display within You Will Die Here Tonight. There is a decidedly professional feel to every aspect of the game from its graphics, writing, gameplay, and level design.  This does not feel like simply an emulation of what made the golden age of survival horror great, it feels like a deep understanding of the mechanics of the genre brought into the modern era with smart twists and additions.

The homages to the classics are clear, but You Will Die Here Tonight strikes out on its own with a unique and well-written story, smart combat, and classic survival horror exploration, resource management, and puzzle-solving.

Awin