Survival horror didn’t start with Resident Evil. That’s the thing most people don’t realize. Was it good before then? Well, that’s a matter of opinion. I for one really liked Alone in the Dark for the Panasonic 3DO. Apparently I’m not the only one as the developers at Riverhillsoft set out to create their own take on the formula established here. Their end result was Doctor Hauzer on the same platform. This Japan only release has gained notoriety worldwide and has even been translated by its fans. Today I’m taking a look at this game. Is Doctor Hauzer worth your time as we near Halloween? Keep reading to find out!
Doctor Hauzer takes place in 1952. The titular doc is an archeologist that has received numerous awards for his work in the field. That’s all fine and dandy but he has gone missing. You play as a reporter in Boston who has made a career of following and documenting the exploits of Doctor Hauzer. He gets a hot lead on the whereabouts of the archaeologist in question. Apparently he’s hiding out in a mansion outside of the city. Our do good protagonist sets out to interview him by entering the estate. He’s greeted with an empty house full of memos left by the not so good doctor, and it is through these that you put together what has happened.
What we have here is a very basic survival horror game. You guide Adler around a series of 3D environments (all within the mansion) via tank controls and changing camera perspectives. It looks a lot like Resident Evil in both screenshots and video. Honestly, the comparison isn’t far off. The two games have a lot in common. Surprisingly, in some ways Doctor Hauzer is actually more advanced than Capcom’s zombie series. It’s because the 3DO hardware renders the environments here in real-time. There are no pre-rendered backgrounds in Doctor Hauzer. This is pretty darn impressive for the 3DO hardware. The graphics engine also allows you to change the camera’s viewpoint. You can view the action from a first person perspective, or an overhead one instead of the aforementioned fixed camera angles. Sometimes this is beneficial, but mostly it’s just neat.
So the real bummer here is that Adler doesn’t get any weapons that he can directly use. There actually aren’t any ghouls or ghosts roaming the halls. Because of this you don’t even have a health meter. The only thing that can harm you in Doctor Hauzer is the traps. If you get caught by one it’s an instant death and you’re brought back to the title screen. Thankfully you can save your game anywhere by accessing a journal via the menu and then simply pick up from where you left off. The game isn’t that difficult by any means, but it does rely on a lot of trial and error.
This is Doctor Hauzer’s real weakness though. The game doesn’t give you enough indications that you’re approaching something dangerous. In like half the rooms there’s an instant death awaiting you that can occur simply by going through the wrong door or interacting with the wrong item. There’s very little indication as to what you should and shouldn’t do. You’ll find yourself saving often because it’s hard to tell just what’s going to take you out. There are so many ways to die here that the game becomes very tedious very quickly. Repeatedly being cast back to the title screen will test your patience on a frequent basis.
The puzzles themselves are a step below what you’d find in a basic survival horror game. It’s far too much ‘interact with this item’ to unlock the way forward in a different room. You’ll also have to manage a large collection of keys, and instead of using them being fully automatic you actually have to select them from the inventory every time. At least Adler let’s you know when you interact with a door whether or not you have the correct key, but he fails to mention which one it is exactly. Doctor Hauzer relies on a whole lot of backtracking, and without enemies populating the rooms and hallways it’s actually pretty boring. There’s almost no action to alleviate the search for clues. Even when there is it’s something like an easily avoidable boulder rolling down the hallway.
That’s the big problem with Doctor Hauzer. The game just feels empty. It feels like more of a proof of concept than a retail release, and because of this it’s not hard to see why it was never released outside of Japan. Listen, I love exploring spooky mansions just as much as the next survival horror fan, but there’s very little that’s interesting here. The notes left behind by Doctor Hauzer are the most interesting part of the game as you piece together what happened, but even these are kind of a slog to read. The developers should have come up with something, really anything, to fill the space instead of just running from room to room interacting with items while hoping you don’t die.
It also doesn’t help that your running speed is so slow. You could walk, but that’s a waste of time, and instead you’re jogging at a rate of just a few frames per second. That’s not all though; Adler can also make short leaps through the air. It seems pointless for the longest time, but there are a few spots where he must cross short gaps. The animation is tediously long, and I found myself accidentally pressing the button too often while playing. Because it’s used so seldom, and not in any interesting way, Doctor Hauzer would have been a better game without this ability. The developers attempted to hide loading screens with the ever popular door opening animation. This is more tedious than in something like, say, Resident Evil, because the rooms as so small here. You’ll be seeing it a whole lot, that’s for sure.
Doctor Hauzer is not a pretty game. It uses a unique style with shaded polygons that sort of resembles an early cel-shading style. The environments here are heavily pixelated and drab in colorization. Meanwhile the characters (well, it’s most Adler you’ll be seeing) look weird and off-putting with exaggerated features. To top it off the game runs at a snails pace due to the archaic hardware. I would have preferred pre-rendered backgrounds if it meant Adler would run even just a touch faster. The full motion videos are grainy and lack detail as well. The soundtrack would be okay but there are only like three songs in the entire thing. Every time you change rooms the music starts over instead of looping. It’s really quite bizarre that they couldn’t figure this one out.
If you’re a big fan of survival horror (like me) then I’m sure nothing negative you can read about Doctor Hauzer will deter you from checking it out for yourself. On paper it sounds like a great game. There’s something magic about the atmosphere in these early 3D horror games. Unfortunately this one quickly becomes downright painful to play. The developers should have populated it with something, anything, to break up the monotony of running through doors and interacting with items. Combat and enemies would have been a welcome addition and could have saved Doctor Hauzer from being nothing more than a footnote in the genre’s history.
