You wake up from a cryogenic sleep with no memory. Stumbling through an underground base, you discover that an evil virus courses through your veins. You must find an antidote...soon. With help from a friendly robot and a mysterious woman, you must battle infected clones and uncover the secrets of the base. Survival is only half the battle - to prevail, you must defeat the mysterious scientist who controls your destiny.

Discussion
When Capcom unleashed Resident Evil onto an unsuspecting gaming crowd in the mid 90s, I don’t think they anticipated the new reality they were about to create. From that first day that RE1 hit store shelves, every game that would come after it that even remotely had a zombie or a weird camera angle would be compared to the Raccoon City masterpiece. While this is mostly unfair except to games directly copying off the source material, it’s the sad truth that the rest will never get their true moment in the sun, no matter how short that time may be.

OverBlood is developed by Riverhill Soft, a company who holds a very special place in my heart for reasons most of you will probably not recognize. They’re responsible for the LaserActive games Blue Chicago Blues and Manhattan Requiem – two of the most engrossing, well written, plot driven games ever created. Sadly those games were released on a $1200 Laserdisc player that needed another $300 module to play the $100 disc. You can understand why most have never heard of them. (Side note: I picked up the machine and most of the games for $400 years later. Ain’t no game item worth $1,000…)

With their PlayStation outing, the creative staff seemed stuck for an encore. OverBlood’s box copy reveals way more than it should, so I’ll try to dance around that to avoid spoilers. You wake up from a deep sleep, practically naked and in cold storage. Little by little, you’ll uncover bits of your past while meeting up with another mysterious figure and adorable robot buddy. The game’s cast is insanely small – if you remove nameless faces, you’re left with only 4 characters, and that’s including the various clones counting as 1 person…just copied and pasted.

Unlike Resident Evil, the game is in full 3D with no static backgrounds. Considering how early this was in the system’s life (1995 in Japan, it took almost a year to reach the US), this was fairly admirable. The graphics are plain, but clean and what few details that are there are sharp, especially in S-Video. Your dwellings get a bit more decorated once you reach the final hour or so of the game. It’s important to note that you have three camera angles in the game – close, free, and first person view. Free is usually the best choice, except in tight corners your camera will spin like crazy. The first person view is mandatory for using the pistol, or when trying to walk thin areas. Your character’s animations are pretty bad however – Raz always looks like he’s trying to hold imaginary six-shooters, and if you get stuck on a clipping issue, he looks like he’s trying to mime leaning against a wall.

If you’re a big audiophile, you’ll run screaming from the room with the game on. There’s only really music when needed for a moody scene, and the majority of the voice actors don’t quite nail it, but there is one bright spot; Frank Welker – the voice of Megatron and about 90 billion other characters, carries a role here as well. Oddly enough, Peepo, your eventual robot buddy, steals the show in each scene he’s in, and all he does is peep!

Now for the interesting part: the game is literally 3 and a half to 4 hours, tops. That’s not including replaying sections you already did but died without saving sooner. The length is easily faked to feel longer by the rather laid back approach to exploration. You really only fight 4 or so clones, the rest of the time you’re just trying to find your way out of the lab. Does this make the game worthless? Not at all – think of it like a movie. For $9 you can get a great 3-hour interactive B-Movie film wrapped up on a shiny black platter. It’s a great at-least-once kind of game…and this was the third time I went through it. If you like solving puzzles that involve anti-gravity units and laser knifes, you’ll get a decent chuckle out of OverBlood.
 

• OverBlood had a sequel in Japan and Europe, but was never released in America.
   
• The game has no Auto Save function, and the Continue option means to continue from a Save Game. Make sure you save often or you'll be repeating a LOT of covered ground.
   
• Two of the screenshots on the back of the game case are from pivotal moments in the game.
   
• There is a potential huge plot hole near the end of the game, which is due to the script writers not taking into account actual in-game inventory at that specific point and time. It's only a plot hole if you don't have any of a certain item left in your inventory.
   
• Despite the obvious (and unfair) comparisons to Resident Evil, Overblood is more a puzzle game than true survival horror. You'll only fight about 4 'creatures' in the entire game - the rest is simply trying to figure your way out of the lab.
   
• Game Play Tip: Possible spoiler, but only in terms of available weapons. When you are going to use the pistol, make sure you switch to the first person-view to aim and fire. For some reason, the game is particularly picky in where and when you can hurt someone during their animation cycle.
   
• I'm preparing you right now - unless you use a Cheat Device to gain Infinite Health (and for that matter, Infinite Ammo), be prepared for a long, long end boss fight. If you die, you will have to re-watch an impassable 10 minutes worth of FMV each time you continue, and it gets really old, really fast.
   
• There's a reason I used the word 'chuckle' in my review. The zombie / infected clones that you fight have the weirdest facial expression on them. They aren't angry, or scary, they look more like they are clowning around.
   
• Another flaw the game shows is the obvious priority the puzzle elements had over the 'in-game world' realities. For example, there is a section where you must deal with two shuttles in a subway-like area. Everything seems fine, until you realize there are no actual tunnels. The two tram cars are on a track the length of a really long drive-way, with a wall on either side. It would have been quicker for the characters to just walk the trail rather than do all the work the game requires you to do!