Remothered: Broken Porcelain was one of the surprise announcements during Gamescom Opening Night Live. I was even more surprised to learn that the “Unannounced Horror Title” I was scheduled to see at Gamescom 2019 a couple of days later was, in fact, the very same game.
In case you’re not quite sure what the Remothered series is, let me catch you up: Remothered: Tormented Fathers is a survival horror title inspired by classics such as Haunting Grounds and Clock Tower. Remothered: Broken Porcelain is the game’s sequel and part two of the planned trilogy. Well, according to creative director Chris Darril, developer Stormind Games doesn’t like calling this game a sequel or a prequel, but I’m still going to do that for clarity’s sake.
Broken Porcelain doesn’t continue where the previous game left off. Instead, we travel all the way to a small hotel in the mountains of Italy. We play as a young girl named Jennifer – a name that should be very familiar to fans. Could she be the missing Celeste Felton?
When the demo starts, Jennifer wonders the halls alone, with a large cast on her left arm. The game is immediately recognizable to anyone who played Tormented Fathers, or any other survival horror game: you walk around, search drawers for key items, and arm yourself against potential attackers, here referred to as “Stalkers.”
Stalkers are what you need to worry about. They hunt you throughout the game, and can’t be killed, only incapacitated for a short while. In the original, there were a total of three different stalkers, but Broken Porcelain is going to have a lot more. At some points, you’ll be chased by multiple stalkers at the same time, ramping up the difficulty even further.
The sequel does encourage you to be more aggressive. You can still run and hide (and for the most part you should), but there will be situations where you need to go on the offensive. In the demo, Jennifer had to steal a set of keys from the belt of the hotel caretaker, a little old lady with a pretty big knife. To get the key, you need to sneak behind her and perform a takedown. It doesn’t kill her, but she’s out of it long enough for Jennifer to grab the key and skedaddle.
The Ashmann Inn hotel is full of locked doors and areas to explore, though I didn’t get to see much of it apart from a few rooms and a staircase. However, Darril mentions there a few locations to explore in the game, each self-contained and closed-off from the others. Overall, the sequel is supposed to be twice the size of the original, with more environments.
Fans will be delighted to know Rosemary Reed, the protagonist from Tormented Fathers, returns. I don’t know in which capacity, and creative director Darril didn’t really want to talk about her, but he did say there are multiple playable characters this time around, so Rosemary might be one of them.
Remothered: Broken Porcelain is shaping up to be a bigger, better version of its predecessor. It looks better (with real-time cutscenes instead of pre-rendered ones), plays better, and offers a better sense of progression.
I wish I could see more of it at Gamescom, but the demo was hands-off and didn’t focus on story, but more on “what’s new.” All I can say for sure is that fans of the series have something to look forward to. I know I have.
Remothered: Broken Porcelain is scheduled for a 2020 release on PC, PlayStation 4, Xbox One and Nintendo Switch.
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