The Chant catches players with its plot but confuses them with its presentation and very uneven gameplay. This is our PC review of Brass Token’s The Chant.
Story
Canadian studio Brass Token has developed The Chant, which tells an interesting story. However, you shouldn’t expect Silent Hill-level revelations from this game, and the plot here is somehow unusual.
We play as Jessie, a sweet little girl who, apparently, suffered some serious mental trauma in the past. Her friend Kim invites her to attend a seminar on spiritual growth in nature. Yes, yes, you understood correctly: We will go to the same island from the prologue which, of course, makes perfect sense.
Kim meets the heroine at the dock. She is dressed in some light-colored linen rags and is always barefoot since the spiritual teacher and chief instigator of this sect has ordered it to be so. This guru turns out to be someone named Tyler, exactly what one would expect of a cinematic “Jesus,” complete with a beard and long hair. He speaks softly and seems kind on the surface. It is difficult to imagine a more stereotypical leader of another sect. It turns out that Tyler’s family has owned this island for generations. The place is definitely very picturesque.
Following each retreat participant, players randomly immerse themselves in their experiences. Everyone has some personal problems, including the main character, who carried childhood trauma through the years and eventually realized that she still needed help. Other characters are no less interesting: One has outbursts of anger, another mourns a dead child, and yet another needs self-affirmation.
However, you can enjoy the game’s atmosphere because from the very first moment a girl arrives on the island, there is a feeling that something is wrong. Everything that happens is too similar to one of those charismatic sects whose followers soon leave for another world. Only now people say goodbye to life not voluntarily but through the fault of horror monsters that have crawled into our world from otherworldly cracks.
Numerous cutscenes impress with beautiful camera work but fail in terms of production. Heroes speak out of place, their facial expressions go astray, and their mood changes. Sometimes it causes bewilderment, and sometimes it causes laughter, which the game’s authors clearly did not count on.
At this point, in order to avoid spoilers, it is worth stopping the discussion of the story. But I will say that the script is written strangely. There are too many direct inconsistencies and contradictions that clearly emerge even during the first passage, on the second or third it will all look even worse.
Gameplay
The gameplay is also a bit annoying. Instead of weapons, we literally have bunches of grass with which Jess drives away monsters. They can be crafted from flowers and vines collected in corridor locations. And that’s not all. How about stunning the monster with a pinch of salt thrown in its face?
The game has three main parameters – the health of the body, mind, and spirit – almost like in Don’t Starve. As her sanity drops to zero, Jess has a wild panic attack, so she needs to meditate or chew on lavender to get through.
The combat system looks as ridiculous as it sounds. The protagonist clumsily dodges enemies, pushes them, and attacks with makeshift weapons. Opponents here to match: flying flowers, half-animals, half-humans, flocks of flies, and other evil spirits.
No one bothered to write the characters either. Take, for example, the main character Jess. Literally from the first sentence she speaks, it becomes clear that she works in the field of biomedicine. Yet there are no experiments on animals. In the first 5 minutes of the gameplay, she almost falls into a stupor, frightened by a flock of flies. However, she begins to fearlessly beat otherworldly monsters with a broom and drive cultists around the island with homemade fire grenades as if she is no longer a pharmacist but a real Van Helsing.
In The Chant, there are few resources for crafting weapons, and they run out quickly, so you need to balance and make a choice to enter into an open clash with another enemy or try to run away from him.
The combat system is simple: hit, hit hard, push with your hand, throw an object, set a trap on the ground, dodge, and dodge again, turning into a crawl. Boss battles are like copies of games like Dark Souls.
Locations will have to be explored jars and items for crafting weapons. Scattered here and there are notes that reveal the stories of those who have been here before, and quest items are hidden in secluded places, such as keys to locked doors and parts of mechanisms that need to be started. Puzzles in the game do not scare away with their complexity. On the contrary, they are solved very easily. Only the absence of a map can confuse you. You will have to remember which parts of the level you have visited and which ones you haven’t yet.
But what the developers failed to address is optimization. It’s not that the game misbehaves all the time, no. But you will often stumble upon moments when the FPS drops sharply to almost zero, creating stutters, or the picture starts to move in jerks. And this is taking into account that graphically the game looks like a product of five years ago. This is not to say that the picture is ugly, but you will not get something outstanding either.
The Brass Token team got a good mystical adventure, but, alas, it was not destined to become a hit.
The Chant was reviewed via a verified Steam purchase.
