Maid of Sker

Maid of Sker was reviewed on a PS4

Exploring the well-designed hallways of Hotel Sker is an absolute treat. The hotel is filled with frightening noises, disfigured villains and a threat around every corner. You’re always at the edge of your seat in Maid of Sker, despite the abundance of foes constantly roaming with their abysmal AI.

What is Maid of Sker?

Save your lover from the Hotel of Sker in this first person horror adventure. The year is 1897; you play as Thomas, who recently received a blood-curdling letter from his lover Elisabeth. Elisabeth has been imprisoned by her father and her uncle in their family-owned hotel of Sker. Like her mother, Prudence, she has a beautiful singing voice and you suspect that her father and uncle have held her captive in order to exploit her talents, but the truth is far more sinister than that.

After stepping off the train and walking towards the hotel, the first thing you’ll notice is that Maid of Sker is an absolutely gorgeous game. The graphics of the environments are truly some of the best I’ve ever seen, and they do a well job of emphasizing the hotel’s dark and dreary ambiance. Although the hotel setting is a bit clichéd, it’s well designed and exploring its hallways is pure horror fun.

A Ton Of Options To Choose From

On the PS4, you get the option of changing quite a few graphical settings such as setting the Anti-aliasing and turning off the post-processing effects, which is rare to find on a console game. This feature is more than welcome since it means that you can play the game on a higher frame rate by turning them off, at the cost of the graphics of course. For me though, I wanted all those eye candy effects turned up to the max. Seriously, this game is so breathtaking that I often found myself stopping in my tracks just to take a few screenshots.

First off, the game offers multiple difficulty options, but there’s no combat outside of the challenge modes. The difficulty options mainly change the amount of damage you can take as Thomas, and the amount of save spots. Which brings me to my next point; Maid of Sker doesn’t use an autosave system. Instead, you’ll have to use gramophones to save your game, that’s not much of a hindrance though since on normal difficulty, you’ll encounter a gramophone in almost every area of the game.

The Audio Is Top Notch

Maid of Sker’s audio and music design is some of the best around. The music is hauntingly beautiful and it goes great with the hotel’s atmosphere. The sound design is also expertly crafted for a horror game; it really amplifies the game’s spooky atmosphere. The creaking of the floorboards, the dim humming of the flickering lights, the constant footsteps that will keep you on your toes.

The only issue with the sound design is that the footsteps often sound nearer than they should be. What I mean is that it’s impossible to know where your enemy is located by hearing their footsteps. It always sounds as if the foes are in the next room, even if they weren’t. Which can be problematic for a game that focuses so much on stealth. The voice acting is decent enough, but the protagonist is silent, which is always a shame.

Hold Your Breath

Maid of Sker’s gameplay mostly boils down to solving puzzles, while under the constant threat of the faceless goons that roam the hotel. The stealth sections are both the best part of the game and the worst. What’s good about them is that they’re genuinely terrifying, up until the point that you realize you can go through almost all of them easily.

The AI isn’t very good at detecting you, which is both a curse and a blessing. They don’t disrupt the pacing since they don’t pose any actual challenge, yet they’re still tense enough to keep you on edge. The enemies are hunting you by sound, so in order to hide from them; you have the option of holding your breath. Its only drawback being that as soon as you stop holding your breath, Thomas lets out a few violent coughs that attracts every enemy in the vicinity, instead of breathing like a normal person would do. You also have a weapon but it can only be used in a pinch, and it only stuns the enemies for a few seconds. It’s an audio-based circular object, and you have a limited amount of ammo for it.

It Makes Up For Its Short Length With The Enjoyable Challenge Modes

Maid of Sker isn’t a long game, I was able to finish its story mode in about 3 hours. The recently added challenge modes though increase those numbers by quite a bit, and they’re a wonderful addition to the game. They’re a literal game changer, allowing you to use firearms and an axe to get your sweet and well-deserved revenge against the hotel’s goons. If you’re worried that the challenge modes ruin the scare factor of the game, well they don’t. There’s a mode where the hotel is darker than usual and you have to use your flashlight to navigate it. Despite your arsenal of firearms, you’re still at a disadvantage because of this darkness.

As you can see in our gameplay footage above, the challenge modes are a literal game changer. They add combat to Maid of Sker, new enemy types and they allow you to explore the hotel as the predator instead of the prey.

Overall,

Exploring hotel Sker is a frightening and entertaining experience, and it’s hard not to recommend Maid of Sker to any horror addicts out there. Despite the occasionally frustrating stealth sections because of the enemies’ incompetent AI, it’s still a spooky good time. The game’s claustrophobic atmosphere is elevated thanks to the masterfully designed audio-visual presentation.

Don’t let the short length of the main campaign keep you from trying out Maid of Sker, as it delivers a great horror title and the four different challenge modes will keep you more than busy for quite some time.

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Special thanks go to Heaven Media for providing us with a review code.

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You should play Maid of Sker if you

• Would love to explore an abandoned hotel
• Don’t mind the short length
• Enjoy stealth-based horror
• Don’t mind the dumb AI
• Love the Victorian era
• Don’t mind hearing footsteps all the time
• Love the addition of combat

Maid of Sker’s Score

8/10