Creepshow Review
PHL Collective and DreadXP adapt horror anthology franchise Creepshow into an adventure game.
Creepshow. Credit: PHL Collective / DreadXP
George Romero’s 1982 classic Creepshow, with its darkly funny and spooky campfire-style stories, is seared into my memory. PHL Collective’s game based on the franchise is totally forgettable. I haven’t watched Greg Nicotero’s AMC+ series, but DreadXP is my favorite indie horror publisher, so I was eager to see what it would do with Creepshow. It captures the comic-book aesthetic and anthology structure of the franchise and not much else.
Creepshow has three stories to tell, though the first is just a thin framing device. We open with teenager Danny and his friends exploring a mall abandoned after a fire, as Danny looks for answers about his father’s disappearance. Danny gets separated from the group and encounters The Reader, a mysterious man trapped in a fortune-teller machine, who promises Danny a means to escape in exchange for stories.
Danny finds Creepshow comics for The Reader. The first, “Metamorphic Love,” is about a man caring for his ailing wife, whose obsession with insects bleeds into his perception of her. “The Toll Keeper” is about a priest disgraced by financial malfeasance sent to renovate an Irish church with strange forces at play.
Creepshow. Credit: PHL Collective / DreadXP
The framing story is easily the weakest. I never cared about Danny or his friends. The game’s voice performances are flat overall, and this story suffers from the worst ones. The two anthology stories are better, and I was left wishing for at least one more. The TV show typically features two in an episode, but that’s not an excuse.
I spent most of Creepshow walking around, picking things up and taking them somewhere else. The game doesn’t always care whether the story has given you a reason to do any of it. In one glaring case in “Metamorphic Love,” I found drain cleaner and unclogged a shower drain before the story gave me any reason to do it. Because I had already done it, the game never asked me to or revealed why it was relevant in the first place. “The Toll Keeper” was even more frustrating when it allowed me to walk for several minutes down a long, winding path in the wrong direction, reach a dead end with absolutely nothing there, then walk all the way back. Why let me do this?
Minigames and standalone puzzles—sometimes cleverly themed to fit the stories—mostly feel like padding. Like the long walk I took in “The Toll Keeper,” they hurt the rhythm of the stories and drain them of their punch. None of the gameplay is engaging enough or gives me enough agency to justify the interruptions to the narrative. I would have rather watched a tighter, better-paced version of these stories as a show.
Creepshow. Credit: PHL Collective / DreadXP
Creepshow. Credit: PHL Collective / DreadXP
Creepshow at least looks the part. Its cel-shaded graphics evoke the lurid horror comics that inspired the franchise and match the comic-book framing associated with the original movie and the show. The art direction is right, but the execution is poor. In motion, the rough character models and animation make it look like a poor man’s Telltale game.
Creepshow is short. Its individual stories, even shorter. It still drags. Too much of the short runtime is wasted on tedious gameplay and forced puzzles that make every tale feel infinitely longer than it is. The game conjures the spirit of Creepshow on the surface, but doesn’t offer anything thrilling or darkly funny enough to make it memorable. It’s even more disappointing as a DreadXP game. Watch the movie or the show instead.
Creepshow
Creepshow would be better off staying as a TV show, where tedious gameplay couldn’t get in the way of its stories.
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