I Saw Black Clouds (2021) - Interactive horror movie review with pros and cons

I do not know where to place this. Movies or gaming?
Because this is both.

Wales Interactive is focusing on releasing interactive, live action movies. They usually release one or two such productions, which are mostly around the thriller genre with more or less success. The recently released I Saw Black Clouds is similar, but with ghosts and supernatural horror, and it is not bad. Moreover it may surprise you, because compared to other movies from the genre, the story can be also driven in a really radical way to other directions.

Image source: steamstatic.com.

The main character of the game (or rather movie) is Kristina, and one of her best girlfriends die in suspicious circumstances. The initial mourning will soon turn into scary misteries. Because it turns out that maybe a ghost convinced her to commit suicide. The main character finds a diary, which she reads, and she find herself in more darker and scarier events. She speak with suspicious people in the town, and then she do not even know what to think, and wherever she look after answers, it is almost sure that a ghost will behind her, or even try to kill her...

The ISBC (this is not a name of a bank, just the abbreviation of the game for effectiveness) basically works the same way as the other live action, interactive movies, even the Late Shift, The Complex or other productions. But there are some important differences. First of all we can decide the story at much more points: we often have to make decisions with only a few seconds differences, even deciding every answer in a complete discussion. The other thing, which surprised me is the freedom, on how to move away from the starting point. In the first play, I said that I watched a psyhological horror, but at the second play, I watched an entire new "movie".

It is almost like as if getting two movies in one.

I do not want to write spoilers, but after certain decisions, we get a traditional, killing thriller, instead of the supernatural ghost related horror, where the threat is not a scary looking ghost, but a masked killer with a hammer - entire scenes were filmed with different actors, moreover unique characters are appearing in the two versions.

I always felt and knew that there is more in this genre to what we saw so far, and the ISBC is finally showing something from this. It is more both in playing time and in contents than the movies so far. More with many more places, scenes and characters, which are giving an entirely new highlight to the story. The ending is of course always similar, but there are still four types of endings, and a bunch of secret parts, which cannot be found in one or two walkthroughs, we have so much decision making opportunities. Additional surprise is the "streamer mode", which stops the movie at the decisions, so we can even talk about the decision with the audience during live streaming.

In addition to the decisions, you can set many things (for example the look and the size of the subtitles).

Unfortunately there are also disadvantages to this big freedom, both in dramaturgy and technical meaning.

It is obvious that a movie with so much possibilities will not work as good as a dedicated cinema movie, and no one should expect horror revolution. The scenes sometimes not completely logically following each other, the acting is middle class. But the scary scenes are effective: I had goosebumps during the movie - I do not bear well the ghost stories anyway. Horror fans will not see new things in it, but the things created by the makers of the movie are working good.

The technical problems however ruins the experience better, which mostly related to the sound. There is a skipping between the video and the sound, but what is worse is that the sounds and the music stops at every cut. This is destroying the experience, looks as if the movie would constantly lagging, mainly between the quick, few seconds snits. Even the picture quality is not perfect. No matter the HD, at certain scenes, it looks as if we would watch a very compressed YouTube video, the smooth details are not visible. Even the photography does not helps this, at some points, the (mostly scared) faces of the actors are lighted with too strong light, while at other parts it is barely visible something in the darkness.

To solve these technical problems, the releaser promised an update, which will be released soon, which will fix the Xbox version. But even with these things, I have a good opinion about this "game". The I Saw Black Clouds is finally a movie brave enough to overpass the traditional interactive movies, and with more decision making possibilities, more contents, and more diverse story adds weigh to these decisions. A game worth really to walkthrough multiple times, plus look for the additional possibilities within it, search the places, which was not searched first, because compared to the chances, there are expressly many extra scenes in it.

This movie can be obviously recommended to those, who do not get scared of a horror, or a tensed killer thriller, like the goosebumps, and they would even share this with others.

Pros:
A good horror-thriller story with proper playing time.
More than average decision making points.
The story can be driven to very different directions.
Well working, tense, scary, creepy, eery moments.

Cons:
The picture quality is not perfect.
Sound errors.
Here and there logical errors between the scenes.

7/10.

The I Saw Black Clouds is available for PC, PlayStation, Xbox, and Nintendo Switch.