“Remothered: Broken Porcelain” sets itself up as a promising return to the horror genre but is fundamentally ruined by a miasma of incompetence. Its predecessor, “Remothered: Tortured Fathers,” was also reasonably messy but fans hoped that its scary D.N.A. could flourish if given some polish. What was delivered instead was a shorter, glitchier and less entertaining experience than most could be expected to stomach. 

Set in the Ashford Mansion, players take on the role of Jennifer Felton, a sarcastic witty juvenile that has been sent to serve as a maid. This all turns on its head when her bosses begin to transform with moths floating around their heads and their skin turning into a decaying gray. When nightfall comes, these stalkers wander the halls in search of her and their strength greatly overpowers that of their teenage target.

The player is fairly powerless in terms of actually fighting these adults. To escape danger, Jennifer either needs to run away, hide or stab them in the back when they aren’t looking. Even the lethal option only knocks them over for a brief period of time. Players should instead try to hide and navigate the inn to solve various puzzles.

That said, the Ashford Manner lacks a certain amount of depth. It expressing itself as a very small set of hallways and lobbies, with a myriad of dead ends that can leave the player with the arduous task of trying to run past their attacker without getting stuck in a wall. This might not be all that much of a problem though, as the game is remarkably short, clocking in at five hours for an average playthrough.

Jennifer is the only interesting part of the package. Her constant swearing and bratty demeanor is charming, especially when paired with the authoritarian moans of her stalkers. This can elicit fun in its own right, but the overarching storyline is a dump of hypnosis, evil conspiracies, betrayals and time skips, which tend to detract from the very few things the plot has going for it. 

The game often has no way to transition its cutscenes from gameplay, so it does so by simply cutting to a black screen and jumping into the cutscene before it’s ready to load, making the plot feel like a powerpoint presentation. This leaves a very messy visual smear on the characters, who otherwise look okay when given the time to render. This is evident of “Remothered: Broken Porcelain’s” biggest issues: coding bugs. Every moment of this game harbors some issue. The sounds that aren’t supposed to play will go off, stalkers will get stuck in doorways or most irritatingly of all, an important key to progress forward will simply disappear, requiring the player to restart the game to progress.

Horror games rely on inverting common design, often bending backwards on ideas that set out to inconvenience the player. “Remothered: Broken Porcelain” has a lot of these but never truly repays that with any kind of payoff. For example, the player is beholden to a stamina meter, which can be used to sprint away from enemies or shove them in a pinch but drains from the meter that recharges over time. In order to recharge it to full capacity, Jennifer should expect to spend at least 50 seconds standing still.

There are also tons of crafting materials. One can hunch down to turn certain things into traps, like a music box that explodes when a stalker comes to check it out or a cable to bolt a door shut. The issue is that chapters are very short and Jennifer loses all of her items when a new one starts. These are also matched with the same buggy reactions that everything else has. Sometimes traps will explode with no one around or simply not do anything when someone comes close.

Very few of the encounters in the game truly let the player use these items anyway. Most of the time the stalker is actually meant to catch Jennifer so that the plot can continue. When that’s not happening, the map is too small for something like a diversion to be useful, usually cramming the player into a dead end with a raving old man toting a handgun.

The most notable part of the game is at the very beginning, where the player has to sneak up on an insane maid in order to fight back. This requires getting past various yapping birds that can easily reveal one’s presence, meaning that one is very vulnerable to being caught. In the same breath, escaping the threat is fairly easy. Healing up is almost always present, which can easily erode one’s patience when the entire encounter has the exact same droning music.

One could augment these moments with a large selection of character upgrades. Sadly, the buffs that they provide are very incremental for a game of this length. The game also features almost no replay value, so going back to collect them all should be reserved for absolute psychopaths. It’s nice that the player finds the materials to upgrade their character by exploring the nooks and crannies of the inn but the stations to spend them are incredibly rare.

All that remains of “Remothered: Broken Porcelain” is a game that feels like polystyrene: cheap, uninteresting and very easily broken. The gameplay fails to elicit scares and its story lacks fundamental framing techniques to garner the slightest piece of viewer engagement. If one was truly interested in Jennifer’s plight, YouTube has hundreds of playthroughs waiting to be watched.

Image from PlayStation via YouTube