If you’re familiar with my writing, then you’ll know that while I genuinely love that there is a prominent indie horror scene, it’s also one I need to approach with hesitation. Hence why The Renovator: Origins surprised me because I wasn’t aware there was a The Renovator in the first place, let alone an origin story for it to have. Following Look Outside and KARMA: The Dark World, apparently late March/early April is just the time for horror—given the state of the world, I guess that tracks.
The Renovator: Origins feels like a game I’ve talked about 100 times in the past because it is exactly the kind of game I’ve used as an example of what not to do when making a horror game. It is a trite experience that does nothing to innovate and commits almost every sin of the horror genre. Honestly, I would be more upset about this game if it wasn’t so conventional.
The story concerns the son of an art restorer who goes to his father’s studio to collect some personal effects after his death. However, spooky happenings soon transpire, and the son becomes trapped in a supernatural occurrence where art and reality begin to intertwine. There is some expanded story regarding the son’s family history and why they may or may not be cursed, so I won’t spoil it for anyone who’s interested in playing The Renovator: Origins.
What I will say is for all the story it does have, at no point is it ever interesting or worth engaging with because of how poorly structured the whole of the game is. It commits the first sin of bad horror games by being unbearably slow at almost every moment, with large gaps of wandering filled with nothing. When you do pick up text logs or get some minor piece of plot, you’re so bored from The Renovator: Origins’ tedium that it barely registers in your brain.
“But the biggest problem of all with The Renovator: Origins is that it’s not remotely scary.”
On top of this, The Renovator: Origins commits the second sin of bad horror games. Sometimes, you get games that have obtuse puzzles that give you no clear indication of how to solve them. However, the flip side is rudimentary “puzzles” that require no real logic. I hesitate to even call them puzzles because the game basically guides you to an obstacle, then generally guides you to the solution—and sometimes, it doesn’t even do that.
At one particular moment, I found a bolt cutter in a drawer with a little text that basically said it would be good for cutting metal, but the game wouldn’t let me pick it up. It wasn’t until later, when I found a chest that was padlocked that the game decided to give me permission to add the bolt cutter to my inventory. I have always loathed puzzle design like this because it completely disrespects the player’s time and ability to reason out solutions ahead of problems. Instead, it just becomes a hand-holdy game of find-the-object, and it’s not challenging or engaging.
But the biggest problem of all with The Renovator: Origins is that it’s not remotely scary. It pulls the worst sin of any bad horror game and conflates darkness with horror—putting players in pitch-black rooms at almost every moment with the most pathetic excuse for a light imaginable. It builds no tension or suspense, hoping that being unable to see anything at any time combined with some horror ambiance is the same thing as actually having something threatening in the room.
“The Renovator: Origins is a great reminder that with the right editing, you can make anything look scary.”
Because of this, the only trick The Renovator: Origins has up its sleeve is cheap jump-scares that are only effective once before they get incredibly tiresome. A good horror game will usually earn its jump-scare by slowly building tension, creating a hostile atmosphere and catching the player off guard. Here, nothing happens for such disparate amounts of time, and the jump-scares basically come out like clockwork. Once you realize that there’s nothing threatening waiting for you in the darkness, the scares lose all value—they’re startling, not scary.
Visually, The Renovator: Origins is just kind of ugly as well. It doesn’t look appreciably better than any other game made in Unreal Engine. There’s a terrible motion blur effect that can’t be turned off, and the aforementioned darkness is just so pitch black that it becomes annoying rather than atmospheric.
Honestly, I kind of wish I had more to say about this one, but it’s so genuinely uninteresting and so commonplace in its misunderstanding of the horror genre that I can’t muster up anything else. If for nothing else, The Renovator: Origins is a great reminder that with the right editing, you can make anything look scary. But with horror games, the devil is really in the details and these kinds of rote horror experiences that seemed designed just to get a reaction from streamers are tired and dated.
Maybe I shouldn’t have played it after a genuinely scary game like Look Outside, but I think, even without comparison, this one falls on its face.
