REVIEW | Dread X Collection 5

LifeisXbox’s Dread X Collection 5 review | This review is another “special” case because Aaron, another writer from our team, personally requested it. He worked on the hub area, which is also a game, for the 12 other games present in this collection. Most of the games from the Dread X Collection 5 are pretty good, even for someone who’s not used to playing many horror games like me (yes, that means I haven’t finished one of them out of fear). Dread X Collection 5 is developed by Christopher Yabsley, Stroboskop, VisceralError, Nikk F., FYRE Games, Roope Tamminen, Shakles, Darkstone Digital, Philisophic Games, Colorfiction, iwilliams, Matt Reeves, and Abbey ‘Scruncho’ Smith and published by DreadXP.

Most Memorable Moment

There were plenty of memorable moments throughout the collection, but I’ll talk about one from the hub area since it is the place you go back to after you complete or simply open and close every game available. As you progress, you’ll collect comic pages that slowly reveal a pretty cool story that I can’t talk much about, otherwise, it’d be a spoiler.

ℹ️ Reviewed on PC | Review code provided by PR/publisher, this review is the personal opinion of the writer.

What we Liked!

• A good selection | As I’ve already mentioned, there are 12 games available to be played in Dread X Collection 5, I tried all of them but only completed 7 due to a mix of fear and unwillingness to restart my progress from games I closed before finishing. It wouldn’t be a good idea to go into details about all of the 12 games, or else, this review would be considerably bigger than it is, so I’ll go ahead and tell you what I thought were the best ones. Out of the ones I finished, Karao, We Never Left, Hunsvotti, Resver, Beyond The Curtain, and even the Outpost 3000 itself were pretty great. Out of the ones I didn’t finish, The Book of Blood (which was the one I was too scared to finish) seemed pretty good and creepy.

• Great art style | I decided to talk a bit about the most unique-looking games in this collection. Spirit Guardian reminded me of Void Bastards having a drawn version of your hand holding an equipped item and had an overall simplistic look to the rest of it. Hunsvotti was a mix, having a colorful art style in its beginning and becoming monochrome afterward. Karao and We Never Left both looked like a PS1 game, in a good and different way from each other though. Resver looked like graffiti coming to life, it was one of the most unique-looking games from this collection.

• The sounds of horror | With this being a horror games collection, this is pretty important to talk about. I gotta say that some games like Karao had really good soundtracks and some like Gallerie and We Never Left had pretty good ambient sounds and voice-acting. I feel like all of the games in this collection did a good job with at least one of the previously mentioned sound-related features.

Mixed Feelings

• The not-so-great ones | Rotten Stigma was the only one that is played in 3rd person, and it was interesting but fighting the same enemy over and over and having a technical issue made it not as good as it could’ve been. Spirit Guardian, Gallerie, and Ludomalica were the ones I didn’t complete that were interesting but either a little bit problematic or not as fun/interesting as the previously mentioned ones. The Interim didn’t look great and had a flawed mechanic on a part of it that required you to move wooden planks to climb up, they weren’t too easy to maneuver and just made the game a little bit frustrating.

What we Disliked

• A few problems | There were a few problems scattered throughout different games. Reading things on a computer and on the comics in the Outpost 3000 wasn’t too easy as they didn’t look too clear. Rotten Stigma had an issue that whenever I picked up any item on the inside of a building the interaction button ([E]) got stuck on my screen. I got a bug where I fell through the floor on Resver when I interacted multiple times with a character. When you start We Never Left you’ll get a warning about menus not working properly while recording with OBS with a specific configuration, but even though I wasn’t recording, the main menu and the pause menu both didn’t work properly. And despite the collection being updated, I still couldn’t play Vestige as it kept giving me a black screen on its main menu.

• Missing straight-forwardness | I couldn’t complete Spirit Guardian and Ludomalica, in the first one I couldn’t find the ghost I was supposed to even though I opened all lockers, and in the last one, I simply didn’t know what to do or where to go to escape the entity that showed up. I expected the checkpoints (they were called save points before an update) in Gallerie to let me continue playing it even after I exited and re-entered the game, but that wasn’t the case. These issues I had are a bit subjective, I understand that, but it felt like it was worth mentioning here nonetheless.

How long to beat the story | 5-7 hours
How long to get all achievements | 5+ hours

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