Jesus, I don't do well in horror games, especially first-person ones. What fun that both this and my second game for October are spoopy first-person games! At least in this one I have weapons..
Anyway, Condemned: Criminal Origins.
You play as Agent Thomas, an FBI agent investigating the latest crime scene of a serial killer in some old, dilapidated office building in some east-coast megalopolis. I say east-coast because you gain entry from below the road level and everything is really cramped together with no windows, like in a very populated city with a long history. Agent Thomas uses some strange forensic tools to investigate the scene, ones which use the W and S keys to zoom and focus rather than the scroll wheel for some reason, also the correct one is automatically selected when you hit the "Tool" button.
After the investigation is complete one of the other officers notices the smell of cigarette smoke indicating the killer is still in the building! You chase him and that's when the combat "tutorial" starts. The building is suddenly infested with ruffians and thugs, vagrants who have suddenly been driven mad and are out for your blood. You get to shoot them for a while, then you get a surprise knockout from a fuse box exploding and the serial killer picks up the gun you've dropped while you're still slightly stunned. Then you get melee weapons to beat back the unwashed masses with.
The building becomes a labyrinth with sections of broken drywall revealing metal studs, and random amounts of debris like painter scaffolds and desks sometimes blocking your way. At one point you get overwhelmed by a flashback or a premonition and you find yourself in an entirely different section of the building, next door it turns out, and you are given a fire ax to break through select doors that have hallways behind them.
I should mention the premonitions, in the crime scene you have a premonition to tell you where to search for the next clue. I suspect that will happen again in other crime scenes but for the time being I'm still trying to escape from the Decaying Office Building From Hell.
So, as I noted in the beginning, I don't do well in horror games because I get very engaged and tense as I project myself into the game. There's a Half-Life 2 Mod called Nightmare House 2 that I could not even go into the building in the prologue without freaking myself out to the point that I had to stop. Hell, even watching the Markiplier playthrough I linked to is becoming difficult. There's an incredible sequence with mannequins later in the mod that I saw in a different video a while back that I'm waiting for him to get to and even watching the playthrough is getting to me real good.
Back to Condemned, the character models are pretty rough. I believe the vagrants don't even have facial features aside from rough approximations of where eyes and a mouth would be around the nose. I don't know if I have the right melee weapons yet to feel the near-realism that Yahtzee described in the sidebar of his Condemned 2 review talking about the original. I hope his claim of the climax putting him in "pants-wetting terror" is accurate, though I don't think I'll ever experience it for myself.
The game has been $15 on Steam for a while, which I think is a bit high for an 11-year old game that looks the part. It's gone on sale as low as $5 which I think is a better value. The environment and soundtrack make at least the opening level creepy and unsettling so if you're looking for that in a game Condemned will deliver.
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