‘Lake Haven – Chrysalis’ Review – Throwback Video Game Channels ‘Silent Hill’ and Early PS1 Survival Horror

Until recently, Konami had left the Silent Hill franchise dormant, leaving a huge hole in the survival horror genre. Since then, many indie developers have taken up the mantle. Games like Lone Survivor and Signalis each took the ethos of the series and put their own spin on it, creating personal works that reflected what made the original titles great to begin with. The latest attempt at capturing the glory days of the series is Lake Haven – Chrysalis, a brief prologue to an upcoming full game. While developer Encrypt Games does a good job of emulating the look and feel, it does so often at the cost of its own identity.

Lake Haven – Chrysalis starts with a very Twin Peaks set up. You are a detective who has been assigned to what seems like a basic case investigating a missing woman at an isolated farmhouse. Of course, nothing is as simple as it seems, leading the player down a mysterious and menacing journey to uncover some truly strange happenings. All the action takes place in a fairly tight area, but there’s enough variety within the environment that keeps the areas distinct for the purposes of backtracking. Notes are scattered throughout, filling in the story of the people who lived here while also building a dread-filled mythology. None of it feels super revelatory, and is sometimes undercut by an off-tone jokey attitude that never quite lands for me, but there are some late game moments that show bursts of creativity, demonstrating the potential this game has for expansion in the future.

Puzzles in the game mostly come in the form of collecting items and figuring out where they will be useful. This is mostly intuitive, but can sometimes become frustrating, as items can be difficult to associate with what they unlock. It’s easy to understand which door the “Crescent Moon Key” will unlock, but less so with the “Heavy Iron Key.” There are some inspired moments where notes you find will help you figure out how to use particular things you’ve found, but for the most part there’s a lot of testing keys as you go. I also ended up picking up a lot of keys before running into the actual locks they are associated with, which makes the puzzle aspect of it slightly less satisfying. The inventory screen is fairly close to the one in Silent Hill, but you can inspect and interact with the items a la Resident Evil, making for some neat little moments of discovery while solving the puzzles.

One thing that I generally appreciate about old survival horror games is the way the level design creates small but dense areas through use of shortcuts and slowly unlocking areas. This helps alleviate the tedium of backtracking, because you’re finding new paths through the more doors you unlock. This is something that Lake Haven doesn’t do quite as effectively as the classics. None of the areas feel particularly interconnected, forcing you to continuously retread sections of the level. There’s only one brief, cinematic combat moment in the game, so it can’t even rely on enemies to keep the backtracking interesting. I understand that this is a small-scale prologue, so hopefully this is something that Encrypt focuses on when they are designing more expansive levels for the full release.

The presentation in Lake Haven is really well done and achieves exactly what it sets out to do. The PS1 aesthetic is one that I always love for horror, and this manages to pull it off with style. Fixed camera angles do a great job of setting a mood, occasionally giving me an eerie feeling of being watched by an unseen sinister force. While some may not like the return of tank controls, the way they interact with the stylish viewpoints makes them feel about as smooth as any game that adopts that control style. Occasionally I found spots in the level where either the camera won’t change and you’ll wander off screen or the camera will pop between two different angles very quickly, breaking the intended effect of the carefully controlled cinematic perspective.

Lake Haven proudly displays its Silent Hill influences, for better or worse. They do a good job at capturing the lonely, melancholy mood of the classic Konami series, but don’t seem to really carve out their own identity until the final stretch. The music, camera and sound effects all feel evocative of Silent Hill, and there’s even a hidden easter egg containing references to the series. Late game imagery eventually strikes out on its own path, with strange twisting vines and seemingly endless eerie spaces, but the majority of the 90 minute runtime feels a bit like a Silent Hill cover band, albeit a very good one.

Last year’s Signalis did such a great job at taking inspiration from Silent Hill while making something wholly unique and beautiful, so it’s my hope that the full Lake Haven game will find its own path to doing the same. Chrysalis is a great start, but seems more interested in replaying the past than forging its own future.

Level design nitpicks aside, there are some clever moments in this that demonstrate they’re capable of crafting their own identity going forward. There’s a fine line between homage and mimicry, and hopefully Encrypt finds a way to balance that with their full release. All that being said, this is a fun little package for the reasonable price of $3, but it may leave you reflecting more on the glory days of Silent Hill than the future of Lake Haven.