Game Review: Bendy and the Dark Revival (2022)
Joey Drew Studios
Bendy and the Dark Revival was my first foray into the world of Joey Drew Studios, and while I wasn’t familiar with the original game, Bendy and the Ink Machine, that didn’t stop me from finding an immediate appreciation for the studio’s work. While there are some snags that keep this game from being a true masterpiece–particularly around combat–Bendy and the Dark Revival does far more than most games when it comes to creating a memorable gaming experience. This is one of those properties that leaves me happy that, if nothing more, a worthwhile creator has gotten to try their hand.
The Magical World of Joey Drew
The player takes on the role of a cartoonist named Audrey, who is busy working late in the offices of a famed animation company, Joey Drew Studios (same name as the developer) in 1973. She has a cryptic encounter with a cartoonishly creepy janitor who pulls her into an animated alternate universe that appears to be the Joey Drew Studios at the height of its power in the 1930s. The halls of the studio are haunted by ink-stained studio staff as well as terrifying manifestations of the Bendy cartoon’s popular characters. Faced with no choice but to pursue the janitor and search for a way out, Audrey presses forward into the nightmarish realm.
Joey Drew Studios
The first thing that grabs you as a player is the uniqueness of the story, and the game’s commitment to giving you time to soak it in. Here we see a world rendered in the style of early animation, a well-blended mishmash between nightmare cartoon and twentieth-century Technicolor nostalgia trip. There’s something to be said about nailing an aesthetic, and Joey Drew does so here.
At first there is no combat, no systems, no real objectives apart from the following the few clues before you. It’s a very patient build that doles simple systems out slowly, walking you through them without bouts of trial and error and letting the player devote the vast majority of their attention to just appreciating the whimsical and occasionally unsettling animated world. This is something I would like to see more of, and something that I believe would stick with gamers.
Joey Drew Studios
Many games are able to start thematically strong, thrusting the player into early levels which have impressive degrees of polish before tapering off sharply in later areas. I can say that even when B&tDR gets going, pushing the plot forward and delivering Audrey and the player up to the game’s finale, it always remembers to take a breath, drop the mechanical demands, and reiterate that the world of Joey Drew Studios is one to be savored. It’s excellently paced, trotting out new details and plot revelations at regular intervals, and these forays into story development never last long enough for the player to get impatient. While the story itself may be a bit fuzzy at times, the delivery is smooth enough that even if you get lost, you’ll probably find something new to glom onto until the next story arc begins.
The Ink Demon
There’s a key mechanic around the character of the Ink Demon, a supernatural boogeyman who haunts the halls of the studio and whose genuinely terrifying voice speaks to you periodically throughout the game. The Ink Demon will occasionally show up to murder you–in this case preventing a respawn–and you’ll have to quickly find a hiding spot nearby. This effective is deeply unsettling and keeps the player on-edge virtually all the time, as you constantly have to be marking and remembering the nearest hiding locale, but it also carries frustrating elements, as time you have to hide is short, and the Ink Demon often chooses inopportune moments to show up.
Joey Drew Studios
I personally found it a great and well-implemented mechanic, but I can see a lot of players being frustrated. It also carries the regrettable decision of plastering THE INK DEMON IS COMING across the screen when audio and visual cues alone would have been adequate and much more effective.
Flies in the Ink Pot
Bendy and the Dark Revival is really a game of two palettes. The first is story and worldcraft, which are excellent and go a great distance in engendering favor with the player, while the second is the systems and level design which are, respectively, regrettably sparse or hopelessly clunky. The game has very basic stealth mechanics which work well enough, even if Audrey creeps along at the rate of an ink-covered snail, and chunky melee combat is so redundant and simple that you almost wish the developer had found another direction(I personally think this would have worked better as a stealth game) in which to take the gameplay. It makes for a tragically uneven experience where the player will likely be invested in the world and narrative, but feel burdened by having to grind on these problematic systems to push it forward.
Combat consists of bludgeoning the corrupted writers, cartoonists, and musicians of the Joey Drew Studios to death with a pipe, but there’s no dodging, blocking, wind-up, or other mechanics. It’s just kind of clicking until they fall or you do. It also carries the additional barb of being largely inconsequential–on death you simply respawn from a nearby inkwell. At one point, I took down a chapter boss by simply respawning and wading back in a few times.
I get it: combat isn’t what this game is for, but it really feels like a more elegant solution could have been identified. The end result of this is deeply unfortunate because B&tDR relies too much on combat for the system to be so poor.
Joey Drew Studios
The level design can be quite lackluster, particularly later in the game where goals are marked by frequent backtracking and often inscrutable directions. The game does a poor job of signposting where it wants you to go next, and the placement or location of a particular story item may leave you scrambling for details. I typically try to finish games without consulting a guide, but B&tDR had me tabbing out and opening my browser on multiple occasions, simply because there was no clear indication of where to go either through in-game marker or story clues. There were many, many instances of ‘I pulled this lever, now what the hell did it do?’
Black and White
Bendy and the Dark Revival is an uneven game that opts for being scary and interesting over challenging or especially fun. This is a game about the experience and on that front it delivers, it’s just tragic that the solid story and rich world get mired in bad mechanics.
Verdict: 6.4/10
Strengths
Immersive world rendered in the style of the period it depicts
Genuinely scary moments
Feels like a real passion project
Weaknesses
Abysmal, redundant combat void of consequences
Leans heavily on weak gameplay systems
Bendy and the Dark Revival can be purchased on Steam, Xbox, and Playstation.
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