Scratches: Director’s Cut flashback review
Sometimes the old ones are the best, but in the case of horror games it could be argued that the genre has made major leaps forward in terms of quality, quantity and sheer scariness over the past two decades. The development of faster processors and graphics cards, along with the increased amounts of memory on offer, has resulted in far more realistic and therefore (perhaps) far scarier games than could have been dreamed of back in the 2000s.
At the time of writing this review it has been just short of two decades since the 2007 release of Scratches: Director’s Cut, although the original game had at least been in development since 2004. Adventure Gamers reviewed the first version entitled just Scratches back in March 2006 and said that the two-man development team, Nucleosys, had succeeded in creating a ‘chilling, eerie experience’ and that the end result was ‘memorably creepy’. Further to this, our addendum review of the Director’s Cut itself in May 2008 stated that ‘the new release does indeed deliver on its claims of enhancing the experience’ of an ‘already impressive original’.
Quite how Nucleosys (a great name, by the way!) improved upon their original release of Scratches with the Director’s Cut is not up for discussion here as I have not played the original. What we’re interested in is how this definitive version stands up today as a horror adventure game playing experience, and if what was considered ‘chilling’ in the mid-2000s is still scary and compelling today.
Scratches: Director’s Cut (hereon referred to only as Scratches) starts promisingly, with a slick introductory sequence involving a lingering shot of a string of old photographs, and a small car pulling up at the wrought iron gates of a foreboding gothic mansion. Credits for the voice actors and developers fade in and out to pensive orchestral music reminiscent of a mystery drama, really recreating the feeling of a film or television title sequence. At this point it’s easy to forget you are not watching a show, but when the title sequence ends, abruptly things shift into ‘game mode’. Now you’re in control and the previously grey sky has become an unpleasant orange colour, tippy-tappy footsteps can be heard as your character shifts about and someone has turned the floor texture dial up to maximum. You have parked and exited your car but if you get back in it, you can parp the horn in a bleakly comic way.
At the time of the game’s initial release, it was still normal for cutscenes to be visually distinct from gameplay sequences. Today these transitions tend to be more smoothly handled, not least because gameplay graphics have become more and more movie-like over the years. To be fair to Scratches, these cutscene transitions are not common during the game, but they are one of a handful of anachronisms that plant us firmly back in the territory of vintage adventure gaming.
Another indicator of how this game has aged is the control system. Badly implemented controls can make or break an otherwise great game, at least until an update is delivered, and Scratches has a fairly dated control system with some issues. Each room has several first-person pre-rendered 360° viewpoints which you can jump between to (in effect) walk around the room. As you move the mouse, your view spins around a central point as if your eyeballs are fixed in your head – a method I found disconcerting at best and slightly nauseating at worst. The hand-shaped pointer is also fixed to the centre of the screen, so if you want to examine anything you have to swivel your whole body around until the pointer is over the object. There is an alternative control method whereby the pointer will move around independently on screen until it gets near an edge and then the viewpoint will rotate. However, with either mode the movement was too fast on my computer, even with the Windows mouse pointer speed on its slowest setting. There is also a ‘slideshow’ control mode where the view remains static which apparently makes it easier to examine rooms for objects, but I found this too cumbersome.
I promise we will get to the positive points soon, but we’re not quite done with control quirks yet! To move to a different room you have to find a door handle, click on it, wait while the view gradually reorients itself and the door slowly opens, then walk across the threshold. Every door creaks in the house, and they cannot be left open, which adds up to an awful lot of clicking, creaking and waiting as you move between rooms.
As you learn to adapt to the slightly awkward control and viewpoint system, and your eyes adjust to the rather rudimentary textures, something else starts to become very much apparent. In spite of everything so far, the abandoned house you now find yourself in is actually a very creepy place, and not in a funny or ironic way. It is genuinely unpleasant, with an atmosphere of existential dread seemingly drawn from the pages of an H. P. Lovecraft tale (albeit one set in England) and you suddenly realise how isolated your character is.
The character you play is called Michael Arthate, a fairly successful although currently struggling writer of thrillers. You have purchased this small mansion in the English countryside through your literary agent, a jolly fellow called Jerry. Thankfully you are still able to get through to him on the telephone because apart from the loudly ticking grandfather clock it seems to be just about the only thing in the entire place that still functions. You have both agreed that working in this sinister place could be the perfect solution towards helping you write the concluding chapters of your current novel. You have brought nothing but a change of clothes and a portable typewriter with you for your first visit, and you find yourself surrounded by possessions left by the former occupants, the Blackwood family.
Your first task is to find candles, so where are they, if anywhere? The only option is to search the place from top to bottom, but of course until you find a light source you’re forced to blunder about in the half-light rummaging through long-forgotten drawers and boxes. The game is set in the 1970s so there are no phone torches or rechargeable LED flashlights to hand. To make matters worse the walls are covered in dark patterned wallpaper, replete with framed prints of famous works of art which seem to have been chosen with the express purpose of unnerving you even further. The manic gaze of ‘Saturn Devouring His Son’ by Goya certainly won’t help you to settle in and feel at home anyway.
There is from the outset an unpleasant inevitability that unfolds along with the story. I don’t think it’s too much of a spoiler to reveal that it turns out to not be possible to find even a single candle during your search. Although there is an oil lamp it is empty and you can’t find any oil either. Unforeseen problems continue to arise, time ticks away, darkness approaches and before long it becomes abundantly clear that you’re going to have to get through at least one night in this strange house, alone and ill-prepared in the darkness.
At a certain point during a restless night, you are awakened by mysterious scratching and thumping noises coming from somewhere in the supposedly empty house. There are several rooms in Blackwood Manor where your sense of unease seems to be magnified, and all the more so at night. So, naturally these are rooms to which you must head after dark, trying to figure out what is going on. These are the most intense scenes in the game and there are one or two jump scares to get through. Although I’m not generally a fan of jump scares, I have to say I found the ones in Scratches pretty effective.
Having survived the ordeal at night, the next day you begin to discover more about the family that used to live in the manor. James Blackwood and his wife, and also their son, all seem to have died under mysterious circumstances several years earlier and – as a thriller writer – you cannot help yourself and your preoccupation shifts from finishing the latest novel to getting to the bottom of the mystery of what happened to the family. In fact, as you start to uncover clues to their history, you notice that you may even become slightly obsessed with them.
The majority of the gameplay involves seeking out this information to piece together the events leading up to the downfall of the Blackwood family, all the while trying to cope with your current predicament in the house. You can do this research over the telephone and also by reading the diaries which have been left rather conveniently around the place (although sometimes they are inside locked drawers), or through contemporary newspapers that have been kept in the attic, and by looking at old photographs or letters.
The story and puzzles flow in a fairly logical manner as you get to know the house and its grounds, even allowing for an element of nonlinearity, and the puzzle trail that you follow suits the grim atmosphere in whichever order you approach tasks. All in all, the story has held up very well indeed due to the quality of the dialogue and the written materials you encounter. There is absolutely no reason to expect a less than effective narrative here, as the writers did a very good job.
The inventory items you will find are the stuff of classic adventure games: keys, knives, matches, hammers, etc. As your range of travel is limited only to the manor house itself and a few outbuildings in the grounds, when you find an object you tend to immediately have a good idea where it might be implemented, so the solutions seem to come naturally.
Not to say that this is a particularly easy game, as much of your time will be spent wondering just where to look next for information. There are also a handful of fairly tricky logic-based puzzles, which require lateral thinking. My favourite of these comes at a time when you realise that actually there might be more to the house than you concluded after your first period of exploration – there are architectural plans to be found and then some structural detective work to do. These logic puzzles in particular serve the story well and in certain cases add to the creepiness of it all.
On occasion you can resolve a puzzling impasse with a simple telephone call to your agent Jerry or your secretary, the multi-talented Barbara, who will suggest you try things or take a particular course of action. Just a minor point: many online walkthroughs advise telephoning the same character twice in a row – calling, speaking, hanging up, then immediately calling back. If you do this the characters won’t acknowledge your behaviour with an “Oh, it’s you again!” or words to that effect, which makes for slightly unrealistic progression through what is otherwise well-written dialogue. There is no real reason to do this double-calling beyond expediency though.
I have already referred to certain aspects of the graphical textures, and despite exhibiting the unsurprisingly dated characteristics inherent to a decades-old 3D engine, the graphics remain passable in most instances. Everything looks a bit drab, although that does suit the mood, and I think the graphics were probably relatively simplistic even for their time. The atmosphere they convey is impressively chilling, though. The lighting is static but well-judged, if not always consistent. The solid details such as the nicely designed pieces of furniture, the lamps and other items on display, all coalesce to present a believable setting for a former family home. Frame rates will be good even on an ancient and poorly specced PC like mine.
Other aesthetics are similarly ‘of their time’ but remain satisfactory today, such as the infrequent but usually effective sounds and the repetitive piano music that starts and stops depending upon where you are in the house. In specific rooms the subtle change in the mood of the music is a clear warning that just maybe you should be preparing yourself for… something. But then at times the music builds to a crescendo, only to die down again when you realise nothing is going to happen yet. If you venture outside there is an ever-present whistling noise – a bit like wind, but not quite. Overall, the sound design can be a little uneven.
All the spoken dialogue in the game is delivered during telephone conversations, and the sound quality of the voices coming through the 1970s receiver is spot on. The English-speaking actors do a very good job indeed, give or take some oddly mangled phrases. For example, Barbara at one point says “I’ve been studying tongues during my spare time” – a strangely antiquated way of saying she has been learning new languages. Michael himself can be a bit grumbly at odd moments too. For instance, he’ll complain about having to carry a relatively short length of rope, but has no such quibbles with lugging a crowbar and a spade around. Of course, these quirks are so common in adventure games that, if anything, they add just the merest touch of light humor to the otherwise relentlessly dark proceedings.
Often the most important concern when establishing if an older adventure game is worth the time and money today is the question of whether it still has the intended emotional effect on the player. Games usually deal in emotions or feelings of some kind: excitement, sadness, humour, or whatever. If a game can still elicit the relevant emotional response from a player in spite of possible age-related technical shortcomings, then it could well remain a worthy candidate for playing.
In the case of Scratches: Director's Cut we have a 2007 game that looks and sounds passably good in 2025 and which (reservations about the control and viewpoint system aside) is still quite playable too. In terms of the atmosphere delivered by the game’s central features though – the grim story, the supremely eerie setting, the desperation in the words and voices of the main characters – we have a title that still has the power to deliver upon its original emotional kick and the premise of actually being scary. And it is really quite frightening at certain points too – shocking even. It is a dark game with few moments of humour apart from one or two lines of witty dialogue, so you have been warned!
The revelations at the climax of the game will come as no surprise to some players after investigations have unearthed significant family secrets, but this is definitely a case of the journey itself being more important than the final destination. However, for those who aren’t quite satisfied with the first ending, there is a short bonus quest in which you can revisit the house, playing as a different character from a slightly later date.
By way of an ending here, I wanted to mention that this was the first commercial adventure game to come out of Argentina. Unfortunately Nucleosys went out of business a few years after the release of the Director’s Cut version, although as of 2014 the lead designer has been publishing games as Senscape, with a new horror title slated for release in 2025. It is, however, a shame that there is no version of Scratches currently available commercially from any of the usual online vendors. Your choice is to buy an original boxed copy of the game from an auction site (they are not usually expensive but not commonly seen either) or to search one of the abandonware sites. Either way, the developers will not see any money for their efforts for a game that is still very much recommended in 2025.
Our Verdict:
For a game approaching its 20th birthday, and despite showing its age graphically, Scratches: Director’s Cut will probably still manage, at times, to reduce anyone looking for vintage gothic horror thrills to a quivering wreck.
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