I’m old enough to remember when American localization teams would actively rewrite shows, films, and games from outside the country, due to some strange conviction that Americans couldn’t handle all that scary foreign culture. As a result, it’s still a pleasant surprise for me when I play a game that’s come through translation with its identity intact.
The Bridge Curse 2: The Extrication is a first-person horror game from the Taiwanese studio Softstar, and it clearly wasn’t designed for an audience outside the country. The further you get into it, the denser it gets, with a story that revolves around feng shui, sacred geometry, and Taoist symbolism. It’s not completely inaccessible, but it’s clearly a game made by and for people who grew up in Taipei, without any attempt to change things up for a foreign audience.
On the other hand, some things work regardless of language or cultural barriers, and BC2 hits a few good scares. No matter where you’re from, it’s creepy to get chased around a dance studio by a murder ballerina.
In 2016, a group of students shoot a short horror film on the grounds of Wen Hua University, and in the process, accidentally record some footage of what might be an actual ghost. As a result, the film quickly goes viral.
A local reporter, Sue Lian, connects the student film to another strange story from Wen Hua, about a freshman who got on an elevator in 2000 and never came out. When she goes to Wen Hua to investigate, Sue and 3 members of the university’s film club discover that the main building becomes a different place after midnight, where monsters stalk the hallways of a basement that shouldn’t exist, and you step into the central elevator at your own risk.
Off the top: BC2 doesn’t make the best first impression. It’s the sort of first-person game that comes off like it’d rather be a movie. You spend much of its first hour watching unskippable cutscenes instead of doing anything that could be considered gameplay.
BC2 also initially has an issue with a lack of focus. Over the course of BC2, you alternate between 4 playable characters, each of whom has to deal with a separate incident from Wen Hua’s secret history. At first, I figured the game was going to be a simple horror anthology about an evil building, as none of its stories seem to have much to do with one another.
I stuck it out, somewhat despite myself, and it slowly got more interesting. By the time you reach its halfway point, BC2 starts to tie its disparate plot threads together and becomes a surreal adventure game. You’ll hunt for clues, solve puzzles, collect items to use in the investigation, and every once in a while, run screaming from an unstoppable monster.
For several of the latter sequences, you’re equipped with a special lantern that can dispel evil spirits and reveal clues. Most crucially, you can use the lantern to slap the taste out of a ghost’s mouth.
If an enemy catches you during a chase scene, your character immediately whips around to smack them across the face with the lantern, which stuns them so you can escape. It doesn’t last long and the lantern has to recharge between uses, but there’s a weird sort of satisfaction to being able to show an evil ghost the back of my pimp hand.
The lantern doesn’t remove the challenge from any of BC2’s levels, but it does dial back some of my usual frustrations with one-hit-kill horror games. That makes it all the more irritating when BC2 hits you with a stealth or escape sequence and you don’t have the lantern, but it doesn’t happen that often.
There are a few other assorted pain points throughout BC2, like a couple of sequences that don’t explain their new central gimmick, but this was an easy enough recommendation once I’d reached the end.
To be fair, it’s a fairly serious flaw to have a weak opening in a game that’s only 6 to 8 hours long, and it’s got a couple of gratuitous gross-outs that I didn’t care for. Once The Bridge Curse 2 steps over the line to being a video game, as opposed to a weakly interactive horror movie, it’s not bad. It’s creepy and occasionally intense, with a slow-burn story that eventually turns into more than the sum of its seemingly disconnected parts.
It could stand to have less talking and to give you as the player more to do, but if your favorite kinds of horror games are the ones where you’re mostly helpless, Bridge Curse 2 should be on your radar.
