15. Past Cure (2018)

There’s sordid plot, shoddy action and oddly ilfitting puzzles in a supernatural third person shooter…and then there’s Past Cure. The development team was small and fairly inexperienced, thus resulting in uneven AI and performance. However, that doesn’t excuse the story which was just a meandering mess when it wasn’t outright dull.

Wanderer Seth – Metal Gear Survive

Agile, brutal and not like most wandering crystal zombies, Wanderer Seth seemed imposing at first. That is, until his poor AI and predictable patterns made it all too easy to topple him. Simply build some turrets, run away and repeat. It was both underwhelming and incredibly hilarious.

To learn more about the game’s development, Gamingbolt reached out to Phantom 8 Studio’s Managing Director and Producer Simon Gerdesmann to discuss the inspirations behind the game, Xbox One X and PS4 Pro development, and more.

"Our ambition was to have varying gameplay, together with a cinematic experience and a good story. We want to show with Past Cure what a very small and experienced team can do with the current technology available."

As a newly started up studio, were there any particular difficulties you faced in getting your first game out there?

Past Cure is our first game ever, also for the 8 team members it is, except for 1 – 2, their first experience of making a game. From the viewpoint of being completely new, we had to learn a lot. Technical pipelines and time it needs to deliver certain items (eg cleaning animations took much longer), limitations of small team in terms of scope and for example how to market a game.

We had to learn everything from scratch and the learning curve was quite high and prepared us to deliver better games in the future. The team is now in good shape, but we cannot deny that it was sometimes a crazy rollercoaster.

Also getting the game out on different platforms at the same time and even deliver an indie game at all is a high achievement that other indies do not even reach. It is a hard business and you need to be sharp on all levels of a game production to achieve a release.

Did you feel like some things were easier or more advantageous due to working as part of a smaller studio?

Communication in the team, between the team members, was very good and led to many good ideas and quick problem solving.

Usually games favor either action or stealth. Have you tried to achieve a balance with Past Cure? If so, how?

Our ambition was to have varying gameplay, together with a cinematic experience and a good story. We want to show with Past Cure what a very small and experienced team can do with the current technology available. This meant for us that we focused on the visual production values rather than on gameplay innovation. We wanted to make an action game but also have stealth elements to give people more strategic options and agency in tackling problems. Also with the more survival / puzzle focused levels, we felt that stealth would serve well there. But the story and especially the experience of an anti-hero and a tormented mind with psychological issues was something we put our primary focus on. This had influence on the voice acting, the level design, special skills, etc.

What inspired you to make a game dealing with the issue of mental illness? Do you see the medium as being able to effectively portray such issues?

A different hero character. In games most main characters are the classic hero. That intrigued us. With Past Cure, we have built a main character that is kind of an anti-hero but grows throughout the game. Games are a great medium to portray elements of psychological or mental issues, as players are forced to experience things a little more, rather than just spectate. On the other side, feedback from early testing caused us tone down the hallucinatory and abstract sequences. Seeing the current reviews, we should have maybe increased it instead. Time to think about a patch that changes that 🙂

Also we believe that people do not understand this major part of the game. Maybe we should have focused more on the gameplay than on delivering an art house story, that takes something to understand. But as an indie studio we dared to go down this route.

Can you tell us a little about what inspired you to make this game?

In addition to the previous point, also the MK Ultra / Project Bluebird experiments of the CIA are part of the games story inspiration. They were a starting point to elaborate what human experiments do with the mind of the people they experiment on. Also movie concepts like Inception (different layers of realities or dreams) and Fightclub (alter egos, psychological issues and how you handle them) drove our inspiration for Past Cure.

On the overall game side, we were intrigued by the technology evolvement of development tools in the recent years. Due to the UE4, motion capture and 3D scanning evolution we saw us challenged to make the best use of those to deliver high production values with a small team.

"We tried to draw on the story telling focus of cinema though, something that a lot of games don’t aim for."

This is a game that has drawn comparisons with titles such as Heavy Rain. What would you say sets apart Past Cure from other games that seem to be similar?

We do not really understand where that comparison comes from. We are a newbie studio and we simply cannot compete (on all levels that make up a game) with the likes of Heavy Rain. The general similarities I can see are more to do with the cinematic look, story driven approach and mature tone of the art style. What sets us apart from a title like that, is our varying gameplay and action and stealth gameplay.

When you look at Past Cure from a small indie studio perspective, the game differentiates in terms of the overall approach. We wanted to show what small teams can achieve in terms of quality of production values. We took quite some risk as this meant that we could not focus on some small core mechanics but had to bring in more and varying gameplay. Otherwise we could have made a walking simulator game to tell only the story. We wanted to give the player more than that.

The superpowers that the main character gains comes at the cost of his sanity. Does this theme tie into the gameplay as well?

Yes it was the intention that you lose your sanity the more you use them. We could have explored this in more detail and will do now as we see that people like the idea and concept. During the production of Past Cure we had a lot of ideas, but were afraid as to the negative gameplay experience. Here we underestimated the gamers. We are working on this and maybe can find a good way to bring this into the game in a near future patch.

The game is said to have been inspired by films such as Inception and Fight Club. Are your inspirations for this game drawn primarily from cinema? If so, how has this affected the development of the game?

Some of the visual styles and concepts behind those movies definitely inspired us. We tried to draw on the story telling focus of cinema though, something that a lot of games don’t aim for. We also tried to mimic the movie feel by locking the game camera in classic movie 16:9 format with the black bars on top and bottom.

What has the development process for the game been like? Is it something you’re eager to get back to once this game is released?

Yes we are very eager to continue and work on a next game. The team grow and showed that it has the skills to make something nice. We just need to focus more instead of going broader, that is what we learned from the reviews and user feedback. On the contrary we also hope that people start to like Past Cure and understand what the story is behind the game. Players that dig into it and understand it, like it very much.

This is a game with a heavy emphasis on story. How have you strived to achieve a balance with the gameplay and the storytelling?

The story should tie the gameplay together and form the base to allow the extreme switches in environment and gameplay styles. People that want to understand it completely would need to investigate all story items in the game and bring them together to unravel the truth of Past Cure. The story is not easy to understand if you just hop over the game.

"There is a lot that I would advice new game developers. Developing the game is only 50% of releasing a game. Take good care of you internal management, PR and marketing as also external production and communication"

Is there any advice you would like to pass onto aspiring new game developers?

There is a lot that I would advice new game developers. Developing the game is only 50% of releasing a game. Take good care of you internal management, PR and marketing as also external production and communication. No one gives you a hand and tells you what to do with the first parties for example. So dive into the different platforms and their specifics right from the start. What we learned is that you should reach out to fellow game studios in your city or region as they probably have more experience and are eager to help you out with some questions.

Past Cure is now confirmed for the PS4 and Xbox One, which also means it will support the PS4 Pro and Xbox One X. Can you please let us know the resolution and frame rate it will run at on the PS4 Pro and Xbox One X?

We are working on a version that is optimised for both, Pro and X. This will come as a patch in the coming weeks or months. But this is not our major focus atm.

And the resolution and frame rate on the base PS4 and Xbox One versions?

Resolution is currently HD and between 30 and 60 FPS. We also found out that UE4 was more optimised for PlayStation than Xbox.

Given that you are now working on both the PS4 Pro and Xbox One X, what kind of technical differences did you found between the two?

We are not working on those consoles at the moment. For example it is not straight forward to even get a dev kit for the Xbox One X, you cannot just order them, they come on a “if available”base.

In a recent interview, Mark Cerny, the lead engineer of the PlayStation 4 Pro claimed that converting a base PS4 game to PS4 Pro version is just 0.2 Or 0.3% of the overall effort. What is your take on this? Do you think that the extra work required to develop an additional Pro version will actually be bigger than the number quoted?

This heavily depends on the engine you use. When you plan for it from the start, I think it is just a little more work. So yes, if you plan it, I would say rather 1-3 % more effort.

"Yes, when you have more freedom on console, you can go to higher specs on PC as well. But all depends on the engine and how well it is prepared for higher specs."

Sony are promising an advanced work distributor in PS4 Pro along with new Polaris features like Delta color compression. What is your take on these features and do you have plans to take advantage of them?

No plans atm. We just recently received our PS Pro dev kit. It is quite expensive to purchase a dev kit for a small indie studio.

Xbox One X has a ton of memory on board (12GB in total and 8GB of that is available for games). Do you think PC game developers such as yourself, will now be setting your PC memory requirements even higher in the future due to Scorpio offering even higher memory allocations?

Yes, when you have more freedom on console, you can go to higher specs on PC as well. But all depends on the engine and how well it is prepared for higher specs. Unreal Engine is getting there on their newest version. The hard thing is that during a project a move from one to the next engine version is not easy to achieve and you are bound to what you can work with.

The Xbox One X has undergone minor but noticeable improvements on the CPU front but Microsoft’s push for DirectX12 for GPU seems to have done a lot of good for the console’s GPU. But do you think the somewhat mediocre improvement in CPU will hold back the Xbox One X?

What we learned is that good mix between artistic direction and technical implementation allows to make high quality production values with limited CPU resources and computation powers.

Is there anything more you’d like to tell our readers about Past Cure?

We are very proud of what we have achieved with this unexperienced 8 man indie team and that we could manage to get Past Cure release on different platforms and all around the world on the same day. Many studios fail way before.

We hope that Past Cure can form the base for many more in the future and that we can grow and learn from Past Cure and enable our team to achieve more.

Past Cure is a game that juggles a lot of interesting ideas draw from varied sources. It’s an indie game developed by a small studio known as Phantom 8. The game draws inspiration from films such as Inception and presents us with the protagonist named Ian who is slowly losing his grip on reality. This also ties into the game’s mechanics as Ian possesses some supernatural abilities such as the power to slow down time and the power to use astral projection to take out security cameras and distract his enemies.

The game mixes action sequences with stealth elements. As we noted in our review, there are many problems involved in how these different ideas are implemented in the game, and bad gunplay and some broken systems makes this game frustrating to navigate. However, you can make use of this walkthrough to help you figure out how to progress in the game as quickly as possible.

"From what’s meant to be a psychological horror game, we’re suddenly thrown off the rails into a puzzle-rific abyss of blank textures, like Portal’s lab settings with even more life sucked out of them."

Let’s start with the story. It begins with Ian, a scraggly-bearded soldier who’s stuck in a nightmare with killer mannequins. The nature of these mannequins and the inconsistent textures of Ian’s beard fascinated me. As I gunned them down casually, running out of ammo in the penultimate encounter and only getting more by dying and resetting, I was suitably less fascinated.

Ian has been having these nightmares for a while. There’s a period of his life that’s a complete blank – three months with no recollection of what’s occurred. The void now hosts these hallucinations, which Ian can suppress using blue pills. Interestingly, the pills help bring down his Sanity meter. “Oh boy!” you’d think. “A rip-off of Eternal Darkness where low sanity causes me to hallucinate various monstrosities!” But no. That’s not quite the case.

Anyway, Ian is looking to hunt down the people who did bad things to him with the help of his brother Marcus, guns and the recollection of a strange woman from his dreams. There’s also a bearded guy that keeps showing up. He has no hair on his head, distinguishing him from Ian but not from the other bearded dudes. Given how nondescript all the personalities are, the shoddy nature of the writing and the ham-fisted “self-talking” form of story-telling that a million other games handle way better, you could be forgiven for never caring about anyone ever.

From what’s meant to be a psychological horror game, we’re suddenly thrown off the rails into a puzzle-rific abyss of blank textures, like Portal’s lab settings with even more life sucked out of them. Ethan, I mean, Ian can use Astral Projection and hit switches. He can also use Bullet Time. You also have the ability to sneak around and – get this – use Bullet Time to sneak by dudes more easily. It’s a potpourri of mechanics that are tossed at you, overstaying their tutorial-esque, blatantly one-note direction for far too long.

"This game’s puzzles don’t need you. They don’t need your intellect or participation or even passing interest."

Apparently our dude’s father liked to punish his boys when they were “naughty” as evidenced by a memory within this dream. But hey, at least Isaiah has that memory of that woman who he gifted a frigging baseball bat of all things to on Valentine’s Day, except he doesn’t know who she is because that’s how mysteries work. It was around this time that I suspected the two didn’t get an amicable divorce and go on their respective merry ways.

It’s a testament to the game’s optimization that even with such bland visuals and an abnormal resolution (the thick black bars on the top and bottom of your screen a la The Order: 1886), the frame rate is abysmal. It improves when there’s literal darkness on your screen or just plain white textures. That’s not a compliment by the way. It’s just that I was so out-of-my-mind bored with the game so early in that I took to noticing the most insignificant things. Between the horrible implementation of anti-aliasing, making edges fuzzier then our dog when he’s had too many KFC bones, glitching textures and clipping issues, I would have thought this game ran on Unreal Engine 2.

Ethan plays chess with a sleeping mannequin and after some pawn metaphors and running around circles, you’re exposed to the other fatal flaw of Past Cure. This game’s puzzles don’t need you. They don’t need your intellect or participation or even passing interest. Click a button, watch the boring cutscene with Iago’s bland voice-acting, click a button. Repeat. Find a door that needs a passcode. Discover a piece of paper with the passcode. Press a button on the door. Repeat. Hate life and ponder about the punishing games that you’d rather suffer through time and time again instead of playing this mess. Repeat, repeat, repeat. The only real interaction I had during a puzzle was a series of button-mashes necessary for possessing a dude’s mind with Astral Projection. That’s being very, very generous mind you.

Oh and using Bullet Time or Astral Projection drains your Sanity meter. But don’t worry! It slowly refills. Why did it have to be a “Sanity” meter then? Lucifer take me, I don’t know.

"I don’t know how I stumbled into this grad school student’s version of Max Payne. I’m not sure the developer knows either."

Still here? Good because now we’re getting into the stealth, cover-shooter portion of the game (surprise! Cover shooting!). Isabel breaks into a hotel where one Dr. Fletcher, who’s had some nefarious hand in home boy’s condition, resides. There are Romanians protecting him though and they’ve got the building all wired up with varieties of cannon fodder. There’s Uzi Man, Handgun Man, Handgun-Man-With-Laser-Like-Aim-And-Oh-Lord-Why-Does-He-Hurt-So-Much and – my favourite – Runs-At-You-With-Fists-Man. Shotgun Man was somewhere in this mess as well. I think he was bald. Not sure if he had a beard though.

You’re educated in the game’s close quarters combat mechanics prior to the “mission”, which involves flailing your fisticuffs at a dude before executing a finishing move in the worst parody of The Bourne Identity since The Bourne Legacy. You can also counter a foe and I suggest mashing the heck out of that button. The small window and poor indication of whether the button must be held – which does nothing – or pressed – which seems delayed enough to do nothing – is why.

Oh, and have fun with the clunky shooting which throws two reticules at you for the realistic shooting portion of the game. If the inner reticule doesn’t line up with the outer, then your bullet won’t hit the target. The former can sway this way and that while moving but seems to steady while using Bullet Time. I don’t know how I stumbled into this grad school student’s version of Max Payne. I’m not sure the developer knows either.

Want to go full stealth? On one occasion, a stealth attack didn’t kill an enemy and instead alerted him. On another, an enemy with its back facing me was suddenly alerted to my presence. The one clever touch I liked was enemies becoming aware when you destroy security cameras using Astral Projection (which you can’t use to just randomly explode their brains, except that one canned QTE sequence). That led to certain instances where you draw their attention with a destroyed camera and then flank around to execute them.

"If this was to make firefights more “realistic”, then why do the enemies have such perfect aim while I battle these terrible controls?"

Actually, the flanking part is negated by the fact that you can mantle over certain hurdles but not others. Still, I’ll give some credence to the game for making enemies aware when their comrades go down. I’ll spit on it for making my enemies deaf to next door gunfire louder than the voice of Cthulhu but immediately turning aggressive when they hear a door close in a cutscene. And no, that particular instance of wanton door-closing rage wasn’t triggered the other dozen times I opened and closed doors.

There’s no option to actually take cover – you awkwardly crouch and peek out to shoot at foes. Here’s how you best succeed in shoot-outs. When an enemy is a few feet away or rushing you, equip a Uzi and gun them down. When they’re far away, activate Bullet Time, quickly pop out of cover, fire one round from the Wood Hawk (it’s a play on Desert Eagle. Get it? Get it?) and then go back into cover after scoring a head-shot.

Any prolonged time peeking out will earn you a million bullets to the brain and a quick death. This is on NORMAL difficulty, mind you. If this was to make firefights more “realistic”, then why do the enemies have such perfect aim while I battle these terrible controls? If this was meant to be more “stylish”, why is the most effective tactic also the most boring available? Why in the seven hells did I receive the sprint function so damn late? Actually, that was so I would be slowly, painfully forced through the prior sequences and nightmares.

"The only reward is that you don’t have to play Past Cure anymore. You might as well not even bother to begin with."

You could argue that the tale of Past Cure is at least somewhat intriguing. However, my motivation to see how this all fits together was undone by the fact that the separate pieces are so badly written with awkward “banter”; badly voiced with drawl characters; backed by horrible cinematography with at least one “camera on the gun” cutscene that’s so bad it’s hilarious; and terribly deflating in terms of motivation. I’m sure Ian is a nice guy but he’s stuck in this magnanimously bad story that’s neither entertainingly terrible nor competently handled enough to negate all the other terrible aspects. I could dissect each and every portion of this game but then we’d probably be here all day.

Past Cure is bad. Don’t play it unless it’s for a bet and even then, ask for the money up front. There is no brilliant moment where all of these ideas come together into an intriguing experience. There’s no sudden catharsis to all the clunky gameplay you’ve endured. The only reward is that you don’t have to play Past Cure anymore. You might as well not even bother to begin with.

This game was reviewed on Xbox One.