Dead House Saisei mini review
It should perhaps come as no surprise that Dead House Saisei -or Vaccine as it’s known outside of Japan- is heavily inspired by the original Resident Evil: from its survival horror mechanics, right down to its PlayStation level graphics. Dead House Saisei starts with you choosing between two characters – either Manuel G.P. or Rita O’Connor (each with slightly different stats) before being transported into a room inside a haunted mansion, with your partner infected and thus requiring a vaccine (hence the western name for the game). Also in the room is your first weapon (a knife) and of-course the exit.
You have just thirty minutes to find the vaccine, and where it is – I can’t even tell you, as after opening the door, every other room after the first is entirely random. Here is where the game’s major problem lies – this randomness can be entirely unfair. You can either walk through several rooms instantly finding a gun and without even a whiff of rotting flesh, or get ambushed in the first doorway by a pair walking corpses that you can’t even see let alone comfortably fight back against without at least a few chunks taken out of you. The game’s problems do not only lie in just the time-limit and randomness however.
To progress in the game, you need to find and pick up items – these are both sometimes easy to miss and hard to pick up. Equipping them involves the clunky menu system which seems to work hand-in-hand with the clunky controls. It’s not all bad however – the atmospheric soundtrack is great, the exploration aspects are often fine and the levelling-up system is a welcome dynamic. Dead House Saisei is unashamedly aimed at old-school Resident Evil fans and whilst it reaches a certain level of competency, it never once comes close to the heights of Capcom’s 1996 classic.
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