Allison’s Diary: Rebirth review

Back in 1956, Allison, a 9 year old girl, killed her parents and subsequently died in an asylum shortly after. Allison’s Diary: Rebirth tells the story of Guglielmo Carter, a dauntless reporter, who decided to head to the same asylum where the girl died in order to find her diary to find out the truth about she killed her parents.

Allison’s Diary: Rebirth is a first person experience where you roam around an abandoned asylum in search for the truth (sounds familiar, doesn’t it? *wink*Outlast*wink). As with psychological horror game nowadays Carter cannot properly defend himself, he only has his trust flaslight. As you know, flashlight requires batteries. You have to keep an eye on the small light indicator on the device as when it turns red, you’ll need to hunt for batteries. At least batteries are easily spottable as they’ll be bright blue.

The main problem here is that Carter moves slower than a snail; you can’t even run. It’s just a slow boring walk through a creepy, haunted asylum. By holding down LT, you can move *slightly* faster but it won’t help you getaway from the enemies that haunt the asylum. As you search every nook and cranny of the abandonned establishment, you’ll find pieces of Allison’s diary in order to slowly give players an insight of Allison’s disturbed mind.

While our journalist can’t go on the offensive, you can activate a bright mode on the flashlight to have enemies vanish into thin air. And seeing as the game is one hit kill, if you’re out of batteries, you’re screwed. Which brings me to the horrible checkpoint/save system; it’s the worst I’ve seen since Remedy’s Control. Had been investigating for a good 20 minutes; made it to a different floor; assumed there’d be a checkpoint; I got caught off guard because of the high camera sensitivity, couldn’t defend myself and died…only to be thrown back to my entry in the asylum. Given the one hit kill nature of the game, a more forviging checkpoint system would’ve been most welcomed.

Additionally, the camera movement feels too fast and very hectic; barely touching the right joystick will send the camera flailing about. Thankfully, this can be adjusted in the settings in the main menu. You can not access game options during the game as pressing Pause will only bring up the return to main menu option. If you want to be able to properly “defend” yourself, you need to adjust the sensibility to the minimum. This shows that the game was tailored for PC and not properly adapted for consoles.

Allison’s Diary: Rebirth’s presentation is quite frankly lackluster as a whole. Don’t get me wrong, it is creepy and unnerving but the game looks like a late PlayStation One game; it’s dark and blocky. While the dark background and environments are a given in a psychological horror game, this is a whole other level of dark. Despite the shortcomings, it does what it’s supposed to do; an eerie setting to explore with a tense atmosphere. On the sound side of thing, it is what you’d expect. Near silence aside from the creaking and cracking of your footsteps and strange noise until something creepy is about to happen, then the score will get more tense.

Allison’s Diary: Rebirth is generic entry in the genre of psychological horror. That’s not to say it’s all bad, it’s a cookie cutter example of what games from the genre are. It’s PS1 visual, mindnumbingly slow movement will feel like a time machine to throw players back in the past. In a generation where we have games like Those Who Remain, Layers of Fear, Outlast or even the Dead Space games that are backward compatible (and dirt cheap), it’s hard to recommend Allison’s Diary: Rebirth.