Test of Courage is a first-person indie horror game. You play as Marco, an alumnus of Brave Wood Academy, who returns to his alma mater along with his friend Ralph after the latter uncovers a hidden message in a letter he had received a year prior from your former classmate and current missing person Natalia hinting at a mysterious “Courage Test” at the academy. Throughout the duration of the “Courage Test,” you learn a bit about Ralph and just what makes that guy tick. And let me tell you, that guy needs therapy. But unresolved issues aren’t the only thing festering in this abruptly shut down school. No siree. Turns out that this school is the home of mysterious creatures called Buffers with reality-altering powers. Through various documents and notes scattered about the abandoned school campus, you discover that these Buffers first appeared near the ruins of the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki during WWII. Throughout the test, you will have to rely on the guidance of some of the more well-intentioned Buffers while avoiding the ones that want to make a nice fall jacket out of your skin. Easy peasy!
Gameplay involves exploring dark spaces with meager light sources in order to find the 10 objects needed to pass the “Courage Test.” Along the way, you’ll have to solve puzzles and answer pop quiz questions, which is very germain to the school setting. You’ll also have to keep an eye on your dwindling sanity and health, tending to them with standard fare survival horror healing items. This is all pretty par for the course for a rootin’ tootin’ good time in any survival horror game, so consider an adequate amount of boxes checked!
Now, let’s talk shop. As stated above, Test of Courage checks the boxes of a survival horror game, but I didn’t really find the gameplay to be that engrossing or novel. That being said, this game had a strong showing of jump scares, sound effects, and visual effects that contributed to a creepy and, at times, terrifying atmosphere. Seriously, I cannot emphasize enough how much promise the development team exhibits in setting up some very nice scares, which is even more impressive, considering the low budget graphics of the character models. This just goes to show that you can have the biggest budget and all the developer know-how in the world, but none of that is worth a d*mn in the horror gaming industry if you don’t have a mastery of scaring the living sh*t out of your players. This team far exceeded my expectations in this department. Really well done!
If I could harp on one thing, it would be the puzzles. All of them were thematically sound, but I wasn’t in love with the chalkboard quizzes in the dorms. Unscrambling words and doing arithmetic just felt a little too lazy compared to some of the other puzzles in this game. Also, there’s a platforming puzzle toward the end of the game, and I’m not sure that was a wise choice to include, given that that particular puzzle came off as less of a thrilling, death-defying challenge and more served to lay bare the shortcomings in the mechanics of movement and control. Probably the best and arguably most annoying puzzle was the bookshelf maze. Oh my god. I thought I would never get out of that. And throw in the fact that someone or someTHING else is in there with you. Someone call the doctor because I’ve got an acute case of the willies!
All in all, Test of Courage is a fun, short experience. Run time is approximately 2 hours, which seems pretty fair for the price tag. I truly think this is worth the investment if only for the master class the team delivers on setting up scares.
