This review presents a problem for a desk that scores games on attempt counts and tell lengths. Two of the five encounters in Hollow Choir have no attacks to time and no health to remove. They stand in front of you, they are enormous, and if you fight them you will lose, not because they are strong but because fighting is not what they are for.
We argued about whether they count. They do, and the argument itself was more useful than most of what we normally do here.
The three that are fights
Competent, unremarkable, and worth describing quickly because they are not why the score is high. The Verger, the Bell Ringer and the Pale Aunt are all standard three-phase encounters with nineteen-frame minimum tells and clear silhouettes. They would sit around seven point five in a game made entirely of them.
Fifty-eight of our sixty-two attempts went into these three. Our named-cause figure of eighty-eight per cent comes almost entirely from them, and it is a respectable number. Nothing here is broken; nothing here is memorable either.
The two that are not
The Puppet in the flooded theatre has no attack that fires while you are looking at it. Turn the camera away, walk backwards, check your inventory, and it will have moved. There is no health bar. Our first three attempts were spent trying to damage it, which is exactly what the encounter is designed to punish, and the fourth attempt resolved it in ninety seconds once we understood that the mechanic was attention.
The fifth encounter is stranger still and we will not describe how it ends. What is worth saying is that it also cannot be won by fighting, that it is preceded by roughly twenty minutes in which the game teaches you the verb you will need, and that our logger's note reads simply: attempt one, understood at minute six, did not want to finish it.
An encounter that cannot be defeated is still an encounter, provided the game has taught you what it wants instead. Both of these had.
Why this scores above the games with better fights
Because our four measures exist to detect whether a game communicates, and these two encounters communicate at a level the rest of this issue does not attempt. Nothing is hidden. The Puppet's rule is demonstrated twice in the twenty minutes before you meet it, in a corridor with a mirror and in a scene with a lamp.
Compare Tidewake, which is far more spectacular and tells you nothing at all — a fight on a stopwatch that behaves identically whether you are competent or absent. Hollow Choir's unfightable pair respond to precisely one thing: whether you worked out what they were.
| Measure | Hollow Choir | Archive median |
|---|---|---|
| Shortest tell (fights only) | 19 frames | 18 frames |
| Attempts to first clean phase | 11 | 14 |
| Camera or geometry deaths | 11% | 9% |
| Named-cause deaths | 88% | 84% |
| Encounters resolved without combat | 2 of 5 | 0 of 14 |
What it gets wrong
The three conventional fights feel like a different game, and the ordering is unfortunate: two of them arrive back to back in the middle, immediately after the Puppet. Having been shown something remarkable, you are handed forty minutes of a competent boss rush.
There is also a save-point decision that hurts. The Puppet's checkpoint sits before a two-minute unskippable approach, which for the three attempts most players will need converts a ninety-second encounter into a fifteen-minute one.
The short version
- Five encounters; three are ordinary three-phase fights.
- Two cannot be damaged and resolve on understanding rather than execution.
- Both unfightable encounters teach their rule beforehand, twice.
- Eighty-eight per cent named-cause deaths across the conventional fights.
- Poor ordering in the middle third; a punishing approach before the best encounter.
Verdict
Eight point six. Three fights we will forget and two we have not stopped discussing since. It is the only game this issue that made this desk question whether its own measurements describe the thing they are meant to describe, and that is worth more than another well-telegraphed sword.