There’s a lot to say about indie games. For the most part the word indie games may make you think of a puzzle game, or something lacking commercial quality thereof. Vigil: Blood Bitterness crosses the boundary of indie game and tries to reach commercial status, but ultimately fails in doing so.
Vigil itself is an interesting game right off the bat thanks to its visuals and demon story. For the most part the graphics are in a black and white tone, with other colors, such as yellow and blue, used on specific objects. This visual style is reminiscent of the movie Sin City and as it did in the movie, the game looks great!
The gameplay consists of opening and closing doors, running around, and solving puzzles. Due to these watered-down gameplay mechanics there is a lack of interaction with the environments themselves, not that the environments are filled with many objects to toy around with in the first place. Moving the character consists of pointing the mouse and clicking. The camera is third person and is usually placed at odd angles to “scare” the player, after all this is a horror game.
Being an indie horror game, Vigil pretty much has no other games to compare itself too. It stands out above the rest of the crowd, but even so it isn’t that fun to play or even scary for that matter. Its story sounds like a good premise, well actually it’s really hard to understand what Vigil is about. This game was made by a French studio called Free Gamer and some of the translations aren’t that clear. Calling a ‘bed’, a ‘couch’ seems a little weird. The story is simple – you play as a demon called Dehon and you want to kill other demons.
Overall there isn’t anything truly wrong with Vigil: Blood Bitterness. It’s simply just not fun. If there is something that Vigil did right, it’s that it didn’t try to be the average indie game. Breaking the mold is always something hard to do and Free Gamer did it.
