While telling a unique story, Theresia is so unintentionally hilarious that I REALLY wish it were a book.
Theresia puts you in the feet of a young amnesiac woman named Leanne trapped in a dingy $#!t-brown multi-purpose facility where everyone else in it is dead. All ready this sounds like the perfect set-up for a perfect, straight-up Survival Horror game, but Theresia immediately establishes itself as a Horror themed Adventure game, the kind of game Kenji Eno would make for a Sega console where you play another blonde mute with a name starting with 'L.' Come to think of it, Theresia feels a lot like an Eno game: you can only move your character over stiff blocks of hallways in a very slow manner - almost Fatal Frame kind of slow... eehhg - and most of the rooms you explore are in Point and Click adventure format only they lack the nifty 3D effects Warp Studios did so well. Also, I disclose the main character's name because it's not a spoiler; it would be a little, but it isn't because THE BACK OF THE BOX SAYS IT FIRST!!
Theresia actually crosses into Illbleed territory because 100% of the enemies in this game... are booby traps. Great... suddenly foot-tall squids in suits of mumbling robot armor sounds like an atmospheric step-up! The traps actually contribute immensely to the story, but I don't give a $#!t; half way through the game I literally told the game to stop wasting my time with the traps because half of them weren't so much traps as they were common hazards. You know, the kind of hazard you could simply brush away with your hand or point out to yourself as an actual hazard, yet the heroine literally throws her hand into the trap at full speed so that it actually hurts her. Sometimes the traps don't even make sense: there are corpses in this game that have spring-loaded traps in their clothes where the moment you move them in the 'wrong' direction... BAM! A piece of metal tears your hand up!
Most of these traps really do feel like a waste of time, but so do some of the item searches. There was literally a moment near the end where the character had to continually check-up on a dead body to which every other time she examined the corpse, she'd find a new item to proceed. What the Hell?! She's been spending the past ten hours observing and looking for items around viscera and dead bodies and now all of a sudden she just refuses to look around an entire corpse? There's even this irritating segment where you have to go back several rooms to restock your hand grenade stock to destroy rocks in your path just so you can get a sledgehammer that can destroy more boulders faster!! I don't know which game had worse backtracking: this or Silent Hill 4.
The puzzle elements in this game however are okay. Some of them are either really easy to figure out or end up being hard only because you didn't look at everything first. The puzzle involving the winch and the gate just didn't make too much sense to me considering how the game's continuity got in the way: you have to pull down a gate that's literally three rooms away with a piece of rope, but every image of the rope you get is about as long as a bed! It isn't until you actually use the rope that it turns out you cut a piece of rope that's longer than bus!
Graphically, Theresia is stuck between great and out-right stupid. I've seen games with bad continuity (Horror games especially), but never in a way that was so hilarious it broke the experience for me. Theresia is loaded with moments where you'll be wandering hallways and you'll find a Search Point of an empty space on the wall or having just one object. Then, upon investigating the Search Point, you'll suddenly see dead bodies all over the place! WTF?! And trust me, this doesn't happen once or twice... this happens all the time. You'll be walking through catacombs containing empty, open-graves, but once you look at them up close there will be dead bodies. You'll investigate a lonely switchboard and all of sudden there's a body laying on explosives next to it. You'll examine an enclave in a wall then HOLY $#!T someone's been crucified!! That's like if you see a chip of paint on a wall from afar, but upon closer investigation you find a car!
Sometimes, they can't even get the corpses to look right. Never mind the crucified body in the stupid, un-chilling Tutorial of Dear Emile that looks more like mud and tree bark; in the beginning of the second, unlockable chapter "Dear Martel," the hero discovers a dead body in the hallway that's been burned to the point of charring, but the Search Point for it is connected to a wall and all we see is a close-up of a blurred, dead man's face... that hasn't even been burned!!
Other times, the graphics look fine with decent cut-scenes, but they are continually saddled by awkward, lazy and even funny effects. Every trap you encounter features blood spraying all over the place even when you shield yourself with a 2x4 and sometimes the traps don't even make sense. You'll reach for an object with glass around it, when suddenly a chunk of metal shrapnel will spring up and cut you, but the pain will immediately be blamed on the glass!
The bad graphics only really glare in your face like fog lights when you finally go outside the building. The sky and clouds are clearly the ceiling of the area where you can easily see the corners of the boxed-in map! At least in Deep Labyrinth most of the outdoor areas where dome shaped so it was slightly harder to notice! It's really bad when you make a first person perspective game with background effects that are worse than Duke Nukem 3D! It wasn't really laugh inducing or grade-reducing however until the very end of the Dear Emile game where we see fire effects during real-time gameplay...
Hoh, my god... You have no idea how hard and long I laughed the moment I saw that. It was the most enriching moment of the entire month for me whereupon nothing could be funnier than seeing this game try to do fire effects... Thank you Theresia for making me learn to laugh again.
The unintentional hilarity of this game doesn't stop at the graphics either; Theresia could rival Haunting Ground in video games with mature, serious and deeply horrifying themes that are presented in a truly comedic light (and 90% of the females are buxom anime beauties... seriously, this is the only game I can think of that has a MILF)! Remember how I said this game is similar to Illbleed beyond its over abundance of atmosphere-killing traps? Here's why: the soundtrack.
The soundtrack is much like the graphics in that sometimes it's effective, but most the time it fails. 90% of the game throws this cheap, stupid sounding song consisting of fake chanting at us that's supposed to be empowering and bold, but it just forced me to turn down the volume. Most of the real-time exploration levels have really lame songs with them consisting of pretentious organ sounds or wannabe 1980's horror movie sounds. The latter is more annoying because the ominous synth noises are spliced with what sounds like a harmonica! Seriously, Don't Answer the Phone had a more effective horror-movie score and that movie sounded like it was ripped from Red Book audio!!
Granted, there are a few levels where the music really is scary or touching like the prison level or the garden area, but the former is a given: every prison level is going to be ****ing scary, because prisons are ****ing scary (except for the prison level in Silent Hill 4). Most of the good music though are in mere snippets in the flashback scenes that tell the story, but most of them you'll only hear once compared to the rest of the recycled bad music in this game.
The sound effects just barely try to pump life into the game; it's like Fatal Frame where you'll hear a few sounds that fit, but most the time they just recycle the first few noises you hear. Seriously, there was a door I opened a la Phantasm using a bullet and a hammer, but rather than using an explosion noise, they made it sound like a gun had been fired, like the bullet actually left the muzzle of a gun rather than just exploded. It's pretty bad when Bill Cosby can folley better than your game.
Now I've lived through games with silly Engrish errors... in fact, some of them I still tolerate and even take seriously despite the bad grammar (since most of them are imports). Theresia on the other hand... hooo, boy is this bad. I can understand hurried mistranslations in arcade games where you're not supposed to pay too much attention to the written words, but how can you sell a story-driven text-screen based Horror/Adventure game with text that reads like THIS:
"which can be are visible to the naked eye"
"must be inject into the bloodstream."
and...
"It has bright sound that remind me of the run."
No, none of it ends there, either... but you want to know what's even funnier? This game had two proofreaders. TWO.
This is the only horror game I've played that would have worked better as a book. No, really, nothing else in this game was scarier than the story and the cut scenes that delivered it! The flashbacks, diary entries and the characterization after each one were the only aspects of the game that kept me playing it. There are few moments in DS gaming where you can read a text screen, see a series of anime stills and see a pair of shocked eyes looking back at you only to realize they're yours; even though Theresia wins in that regard, it would've worked just as well if Theresia was a book with mirrored pages during the shocking moments. This isn't just because the scenes had the makings of a good story, but they were the only forms of ANY kind of talent behind a game! This game is like Kenji Eno's revenge on the DS gaming populace because it feels almost exactly like his kind of game: excellent story, interesting characters, $#!tty everything else! This is like watching cut-scenes from the first three Silent Hill games only to be interrupted every twenty minutes to fill out WiC checks!!
As much as the game tries, it's just not scary. It would be, dear GOD, believe me, it REALLY would be scary. But there's nothing scary about plodding along over tight square-flooring confronting horrible continuity errors every five minutes to TRULY corny organ/harmonica music where the only threat you face are stupid-@$$ traps set-up by an idiot designed solely to harm an even bigger idiot. A moron once said that an action game can still be labeled horror because of a few moments that were scary in it even though they were saddled by the worst possible Z-grade Action trash bull$#!t ever devised in a game; if that argument were even remotely valid, then Theresia would be The Shinning equivalent of Adventure games.
But it's not. You can't do that. You can't sell anything as Horror by having a lame soundtrack, cheap traps, no enemies and bad play-test background editing during the main game play and put all the atmosphere and emotional connection into the cut-scenes alone. I understand what Aksys was going for in making the main character's struggle and backtracking lead-up into the cut-scenes, but all it makes me feel is resentment knowing that in order to see anything shocking or unsettling in a Horror game is to trod painfully and slowly through poorly designed maps to bad music, reloading every time I run into a nonsensical trap or to re-read an Engrish error.
At least I was able to sympathize with Leanne. Not only was she an interesting person, but she thought the exact same thoughts as I did at two points: "I hate this place" and "This is bull$#!t!!" Honestly, I hate this game because a lot of it is BS, but you know what? I had fun laughing my butt off the entire way. If you're looking for a black comedy DS game, Theresia is your ticket to unintentional hilarity.