Way back at E3 2009, Gemakei got a sneak peek at Hudson's Calling for Wii. Hudson wanted to create a survival horror game that relied more on the Japanese sense of horror and less on the slasher-gore horror usually associated with the genre in America. Well if you like movies like The Ring and The Grudge, as well as games like Fatal Frame, you may just end up liking Calling a whole lot too.
The graphics do a decent job of showing the lighting perspective between having a flashlight and not having one, and the entire game is played from a first person perspective so you’re going to get a good view of everything. Calling’s graphics aren’t going to impress anybody. The textures are pretty muddy looking, but because you’re constantly shrouded in darkness, the shortcoming is masked pretty well. Animations are a bit stiff, likely resulting in a few flashbacks to the early days of survival horror.
In order to preserve the haunting atmosphere, the game’s soundtrack is almost non-existent. When there is music, though, it’s mostly bland tracks--nothing special, nothing to offensive. As for the voice acting, it’s hilariously bad, which will either be a plus or minus depending on what you’re looking for. But it really sounds like a group of confused foreign interns accidentally walked into a sound booth and had a script and microphone shoved in their face.
The main premise of Calling is that there is a website known as the Black Page, and anyone who visits the site mysteriously vanishes. Actually the website is more like an IRC channel, but that's not really important. The game plays out by switching the roles of four individuals who have visited the website and are trapped inside the Mnemonic Abyss, which acts as a dimension between life and death. These areas are shrouded in total darkness, so your first objective in each area is to typically locate a flashlight, which would seem obvious in such a dark environment. But it’s not that you can’t actually move around easily without the aid of it, but rather for some reason inspecting anything without a flashlight results in a message telling you it's to dark to see anything.
Each level is made from the memories of the dead, and you spend the game trying to get out of them. It's not a bad set up, and many levels are based on the usual creepy locations like abandoned schools and hospitals. The game is always played in first person with the nunchuck controlling walking, while the buttons serve to perform your basic actions. You’ll aim your flashlight with Wii remote by pointing it at the screen, and the controller can also serve as a mock cell phone to take calls. If you’re not down with the Wii remote’s speaker, then you can switch the audio option to have calls come through your TV.
As you might have guessed, phones play a large role in the game. You can use phones to record messages through white noise, get photo clues of where to go next, and ultimately use them to travel between areas. When you enter a correct phone number to travel to a new level, you completely lose everything you have including the cell phone. It is a bit like The Terminator movies where only living things can teleport, though thankfully you retain your clothes. This feature helps keep the game nice and segmented, though you would expect that kind of design more from a portable game. The basic structure of entering a new area, figuring out a set of puzzles, and leaving before getting killed by a ghost eventually feels a bit shallow, though.
It’s worth noting that Calling does succeed in creating a genuinely scary game without relying on gore factor. One good way it accomplishes this is through the use of shadows and imagery that randomly flash across the screen. Since these occur randomly and aren’t scripted events, it really does catch you off guard. It may not be original, but it works. When dealing with a menacing ghost though, the game takes a very Silent Hill: Shattered Memories approach. You don't have a camera to steal their souls or a proton pack, so you’re only option is to run like hell. Your life meter is called a horror meter, and when it fills up you crack like a nut and the game is over. The only real problem is when ghosts do attack it’s usually just a race to get to a specific area while shaking off assailants. It’s a pretty easy combination of waggle and pressing A. The other big issue is that sometimes the game can be too vague. Unless you inspect everything thoroughly, one minor missed detail can result in an hour of wandering the same small corridor over and over again.
