WARNING: I'm spoiling this entire game, also a CW for self harm/suicide
DISTRAINT is one of the least effective horror games I've ever played. It is neither scary in a visceral way, nor does it dive deeply into some sort of psychological horror. Its premises are stated very plainly about 15 minutes into the game and the plot is simple enough to be predicted basically from the outset. Its method of foreshadowing is to simply tell you what is going to happen in a few minutes. Plus it's really ugly.
The premise of the game is that the main character works in a vaguely debt collecting related job, and his job is to seize people's property from them. Just a few minutes into the game he starts hallucinating things like blood on the walls, and zombie elephants. Maybe 20 minutes his dead parents show up to tell him that greed is bad and that's basically the moral of the story.
Oh, and the elephant is literally referred to as the "elephant in the room" and is later explicitly defined as his subconscious guilt given physical form. It's so bad.
The main character ends up seizing 3 homes, then deciding he's going to quit even if it means living in a dumpy, leaky apartment forever. At the last minute he changes his mind because he's made Partner in whatever this vaguely debt-related firm is. Then it cuts to 10 years later and he lost his job because his guilt elephant made him mentally unstable and now he is being evicted.
Then he kills himself.
Oh and also an old lady who died earlier in the game gets to meet her husband in heaven as the credits roll.
THE END
...As much as I'm giving this game shit, I actually didn't hate it. It's sort of charmingly bad and is so blunt with its message that I almost (almost (almost)) like it for being so naive and sincere. I could go into some giant speech about how criticizing the lowest members on the capitalist food chain for not wanting to live in a dumpy leaky apartment is totally missing the point, but...I don't think it really matters.
But it is interesting how not horror-like this game is! Everything is super concrete and obvious, so even jumpscares aren't scary because there's no atmosphere. The puzzles can be a bit trippy (the last house involves taking psychedelic drugs to go through doors that are locked in real life) but for the most part they are very straightforward.
There are a couple of moments where it tries to go for a "horrific absurdity amongst mundanity" feeling. The one I liked was the nursing home where a janitor is cheerily grinding up a body, and you have to take a chunk of it to the Cook because he wants to make meat. The main character is just sort of like "Well, this is gross but whatever" and it's kind of funny/scary. But then it's undermined again by how straightforward and back-tracking everything else is.
So I guess what I'm getting at here is that even things in this game that are actually scary:
Your dead parents chopping up mystery meat in the middle of the night
are undermined by the lack of atmosphere and lack of vagueness:
They immediately tell you they're going to feed you the elephant of your guilt and they want you to quit your job
I know it's obvious to say that "good horror has both atmosphere and scares" but it's amazing how completely gutted horror is by missing one entirely.
Friday the 13th wouldn't be scary if everything was well lit and we all knew that it was Jason's mother in a burlap mask the entire time. It would be funny, but not scary.
Halloween wouldn't be scary if it was set in a bright, crowded wal-mart, and Mike Meyers wore a mask that said "I LIKE TO KILL PEOPLE" on it.
Anyway I'm rambling at this point. Don't play DISTRAINT.
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