Undertaker (PC) Demo Preview

Ladies and gentlemen, the following contest is scheduled for one fall. Introducing first, from Death Valley, weighing in at three hundred twenty-eight pounds — Oh fiddlesticks, I’m reading the wrong script! Let me start over. What I meant to say is that I’ve had a look at the current demo version of Undertaker, a dark-fantasy, stealth-focused first-person shooter game developed by Dobrx and published by Split Signal. In Undertaker, you play as a bounty hunter roaming the lands of Transylvania, who I presume to be the titular Undertaker. Unlike normal bounty hunters, however, your targets aren’t criminals who have jumped bail.

Rather, you’ve accepted a bounty contract to hunt down eldritch horrors, collect any artifacts your quarry might be carrying, and return them to a man called Borven. Borven is a local plague doctor; he’s the one who issued that bounty. I was rather caught off guard the first time I met Borven because, unlike the image my mind conjured up of a plague doctor in Transylvania, I’d say his mannerisms would place him more appropriately in the southern United States. He can also play the saxophone without removing his plague doctor’s mask, somehow. I’ll admit, that weirds me out a little.

Regardless, you and Borven will wind up having to become acquaintances because you both have unique ways of helping each other. You have the skills to slay the undead and other types of ghouls that plague Transylvania to recover any powerful artifacts your foes may possess. Borven, for his part, can pay you for doing this dirty work and sell you weapons or consumables that help you do your job more effectively. As you travel, you’ll find stones you can activate that are basically checkpoints. These create a portal back to Borven’s location, which serves as a “safe zone” for you.

If you need to return to him immediately, though, you can use consumable “magic crystals” that teleport you back to him from anywhere. In order to use these “magic crystals,” Borven emphasizes that you must “rub them vigorously.” My filthy mind had a bit of a field day with that. The inventory system in Undertaker is basically the same as that in most Resident Evil games. That is, each item takes up a certain number of slots based on its size and shape. You’ll have to work around that and arrange things carefully in order to carry everything you might need.

Several actions consume stamina. Sprinting, heavy attacks with most weapons, jumping, and kicking enemies to stagger them all consume varying amounts of stamina. The kick ability, in particular, can come in really handy a lot of the time. Speaking of weapons, switching between them and unsheathing them takes roughly as long as it would in real life. You can’t just press a button to both instantly holster a gun and pull out a melee weapon; each of these actions has its own accompanying animation that has to complete before you can use whatever item you just switched to.

That’s also the case for things like uncorking and drinking health potions. This all means you’ll have to account for the time these animations require as best you can. As I’m sure you can imagine, that’s particularly inconvenient when you’re in a fight, especially against multiple enemies. Still, I actually like this mechanic because it adds a twist to gameplay that I, personally, haven’t seen before. Each weapon you can equip has its own listed pros and cons, as well. For example, early on, you’ll find a pistol that has minimal stopping power, but deals extra damage on successful headshots.

The topic of headshots brings me to the stealth mechanics within Undertaker. Pressing C makes you crouch, which both helps you get through tight spaces and makes your movement quieter. Most enemies can both hear you and see you; there are accompanying meters that tell you how close any nearby enemies are to spotting you when you’re in stealth. Attacks from stealth do additional damage to unaware enemies. That bonus damage can help quite a lot against bulkier enemies like werewolves. You’ll occasionally find points where you can conduct magical rituals for various purposes. These typically give you special equipment.

You’ll find notes scattered around the world telling you about the various enemy types you’ll face, as well as what to do and what items to use at each ritual site you encounter. These can be really helpful, and you can view them at any time, though they also take up increasing amounts of space in your inventory. In my experience, notes on enemies tend to appear shortly after they would have been most informative. Once you’re sure you no longer need any of these notes, though, you can sell them to Borven for a bit of money.

One of the most popular user-defined tags for Undertaker on Steam is “Souls-like.” Since I’ve always made a point of avoiding Dark Souls and its ilk for the sake of preserving my sanity, I can’t speak to whether or not that tag is accurate. I can tell you you’re likely to die a lot in Undertaker, especially if you’re still carrying weaker equipment from earlier on in the game. However, to its credit, Undertaker is fairly generous with those portal runestone checkpoints I mentioned. That should at least help to minimize how much progress you lose each time you die.

At the time of writing, the Steam Store page for Undertaker lists its release date as a frustratingly vague “coming soon.” I hope a more concrete release window is announced in the near future. Based on what I played within this demo, I’m really looking forward to playing the full version of Undertaker once it’s out. Horror games aren’t usually my thing, but there are quite a few aspects of Undertaker that easily outweigh my aversion to all things horror – not just the chance to reference pro wrestling as I did earlier. Still, to quote Theodore Long, I’m excited to “go one-on-one with Undertaker.”