Wick

Some people are scared shitless by creepy girls that crawl out of old tube televisions. Others are freaked out by security footage where nothing much happens. And even more people worried about a slow-moving zombie apocalypse. Chalk it up to growing up in a heavily-wooded part of the Pacific Northwest, but what I find scary is the idea of being trapped in a haunted forest in the middle of the night.

Given this phobia, you would think I would be in my element while playing Wick, a brand new PlayStation 4 horror game from appropriately named Hellbent Games. It stars a bunch of teenagers who challenge one of their friends to spend the night in what is supposed to be a forest crawling with ghouls and ghosts. It has the kind of setup I normally can't resist, which is why I'm so disappointed that Wick is yet another mindless Slender clone.

The game is played out over the course of one night, giving our hero new quests to complete from one hour to the next. The idea is to scour the forest looking for clues and evidence that will piece together a mystery involving the disappearance of a bunch of school kids. You'll find all of these items in one small gated off area of the forest, which is also where you'll find a creepy old wood shed, an old school bus and a rickety bridge.

The goal is to grab all of these hidden items and then survive for approximately six minutes. That's pretty much it. You don't need to collect all the evidence in one go, but you do have to find everything and wait out the clock before moving on. You'll repeat this process several times before daybreak, with each stage adding new ghosts to contend with.

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Without a weapon for defense, our teenage hero is forced to wander the same exactly area countless times with little more than a candle in hand. You can't fight back or take control of the situation, just run away and avoid dying for as long as possible. The ghouls of the night become more aggressive when there's no light around, so you'll spend a lot of the game simply searching for the many hidden candles scattered about.

To the developer's credit, they do get the creepy atmosphere right. Wick may not be very deep or involving, but the haunted forest is genuinely unnerving at first. The problem is that you'll revisit that one location so many times that it ceases to be scary. What we're left with is a bunch of cheap deaths and unearned jump scares, neither of which add much to what should have been a more compelling horror game.

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I think part of the problem is that this type of experience feels like a huge step backwards, especially when compared to other games in the horror genre over the last two decades. It would be one thing if we were getting trapped in different parts of the forest, but to repeat the same static location endlessly just felt lazy. Even with the added ghosts, Wick quickly grows repetitive.

It's worth mentioning that the brand new PlayStation 4 port comes with an additional mode called "No Way Out." Here you will get a more traditional story mode, complete with an annoying YouTuber who gets stuck in that same gated forest area. Here he will need to find and distribute a series of items connected to the dead school kids. This is a harder and more interesting way to experience Wick, but it still doesn't do much to fix most of the underlying issues with the game.

Individually, there are some good ideas to be found in this shallow horror game. I like the idea of a YouTuber finding ghosts or a teenager trying to conquer a dumb challenge. But the game doesn't do enough with either of these two setups, and the result is a whole lot of mindless wandering around through the same exact stage until you eventually get bored. Even with the clues to find and the mystery to solve, it didn't take long for me to grow bored of Wick.