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Maid of Sker Review: Made To Scare
Folklore and horror have often gone hand in hand, and these stories have often been retold in commercial media for a tidy profit. From horror movies like The Curse of La Llorona through to some of the story elements of horror game series Fatal Frame, such tales have been converted - for better of worse - to a more marketable format countless times. New horror game Maid of Sker is the latest example of this process, and it's a solid addition to its genre.
Maid of Sker is a loose adaptation of the Welsh ghost story of Sker House, itself a tale of love and loss. According to the story, in the 1700s Elizabeth Williams fell for a local harpist named Thomas Evans, but their romance did not align what Elizabeth's father wanted for his daughter. After an elopement was halted, Elizabeth would eventually be locked away, and died of a broken heart nine years into an arranged marriage. Elizabeth's ghost reportedly haunts the location to this day.
Although not one of the most well-known of ghost stories on an international scale, it's a major ghost story in Welsh folklore. It's also been the influence of many a tale over the years, perhaps most notably with a very loose adaptation from Lorna Doone writer R. D. Blackmore. Maid of Sker stays a little closer to its source than Blackmore's novel, although it does take things in a different direction.
Developer Wales Interactive takes a few liberties, with the most noticeable being that its setting is moved from the 1700s to the end of the 19th century. However, its plot also sees a fair bit of change, with a more immediate threat to the player than the existential tragedy of the original story. In short, those who have played other first person horror games will know what to expect here, particularly fans of the Amnesia series.
In Maid of Sker, the player takes on the role of Thomas as he searches for a missing Elisabeth. A letter from his beloved leads him to the Sker Hotel, a decrepit building that is filled with people who have transformed into the ‘Quiet Ones’, fearsome creatures unable to see but very alert to sound. Thomas must try to make his way to Elizabeth, avoiding the Quiet Ones through stealth and through sound-based weapons.
The setting of the Sker Hotel is effective, full of dark and dusty corridors on its interior and overgrown, maze-like landscapes in the surrounding areas and caverns. It’s a haunting and bleak location that plays well into the atmosphere of the game. Its lighting adds to this with pockets of colored light, which do well to break up the muddy darkness that occasionally detracts from the game.
All in all this means that Maid of Sker maintains a gothic horror sensibility extremely well, although this does makes way for strange rituals and dark science. The player uncovers more context to the Williams family through the use of phonographs found throughout the game, which also act as save points as a neat way to add some mechanical use to its environmental storytelling.
A lot of the wider plot relates to a bizarre and powerful song, much like recent episodic horror title Song of Horror. This musical theme is consistent throughout the game, with some haunting reworked versions of traditional Welsh hymns adding much to the overall tense ambiance of Maid of Sker.
Unfortunately some of this strong atmospheric work is undone by how Maid of Sker operates from a gameplay perspective. It's a story that doesn't necessarily need the direct threat of monsters, and maybe would have been better served by having a slower burn horror experience. It's not quite as frantic as games like Outlast, which works in its favor, but nonetheless the physical threat of the Quiet Ones does negate a little of the larger, spiritual menace that the game provides.
Maid of Sker is still overall a strong horror game. Veterans of the contemporary survival horror scene will know what to expect from its stealth gameplay, but its story and sound design carry it beyond the confines it sets for itself. Meanwhile, seeing a lesser-known story in a different form is certainly a change of pace from a game genre that can sometimes be a little too conservative to really deliver scares.
Maid of Sker is available today, July 28, 2020, for PC, PS4, and Xbox One.
