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I started throwing things at the watchers, trying to recreate the exploit from Skyrim where you could blind shopkeepers to your thievery by putting baskets over their heads. But that fear soon turns to familiarity and - when you're scratching your head over an obtuse item puzzle - annoyance. The fear lies partly with how the spectres turn Those Who Remain's shortage of actual character animations into an advantage, and partly with the sense that they are still there when the lights are on - that you are walking through them, kept from their blades by a single parameter in a game where objects occasionally glitch themselves invisible. One dependable source of heeby-jeebies is reaching around a door frame to flip a light switch, inches from death. And the spectres are eerie enough to begin with, especially when encountered inside. It fills me with nostalgia for those perversely specific lock-and-key puzzles in older Silent Hills. There's something loveable about this unwillingness to spoil the game's core concept. But he soon loses the lighter and declines to replace it, even as the game's tedious psychodrama drags you to malls, toolsheds and police stations filled with, at the very least, burning chair-legs and candles.

The immediate question is: why not carry a light source with you? And Edward does - for the first few minutes, brandishing a cigarette lighter as he hurries after his car. Turn on a light and the spectres vanish, rendering the area safe for traversal. As the curtain goes up, he's driven to a motel to break off a torrid affair, only for somebody (Wake?) to steal his car and maroon him outside Dormont - a spookily abandoned, predictably metaphysical town whose shadows are filled with knife-wielding spectres, their eyes flickering in the depths of closets and cornfields. Leading man Edward is drinking and monologuing himself into an early grave over the loss of his family, as leading men in horror games often do.

The premise is Silent Hill as rewritten by an Alan Wake who has run out of coffee, and possibly self-respect. Those Who Remain does have some neat ideas, but all of them are squashed beneath a great steaming heap of mediocrity. Let me tell you: I wish I'd stopped at the lions.

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But I came back the next morning and beat the area, thanks partly to bloody-mindedness and partly (I speculate) to a developer update that prevents the monster from chasing you endlessly once alerted. After my eighth try I decided that life was too short. These burdens create tension, of course, but only for the few seconds it takes you to realise that you're playing a mandatory-stealth McGuffin-fetching puzzle with instadeath. The main character has no means of defending himself, so you must take winding routes to those plinths while lugging chunks of Umbrella Mansion Surplus stoneware that prevent you from sprinting, block the view and have a habit of jumping out of your hands.

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Availability: Out now on PS4, Xbox One and PC.There's a lot of that kind of thing in Those Who Remain - accusing messages on walls, silver-masked demons chortling about sin and forgiveness - but for the most part, the emotions you're repressing are boredom and frustration. The problem is that there's a monster in your path, an oily personification of buried guilt and suffering.

The idea is to carry the statues to candlelit plinths. One such puzzle is a labyrinth dotted with lion statues. A first-person blunderfest for horror obsessives only, the game's setting is split between a menacing night-time reality and a weed-choked, oceanic otherworld in which objects float and the puzzles are more, well, videogamey. I almost gave up on Those Who Remain halfway through. A couple of nifty concepts can't save this uninspired genre piece from its shortage of character or fear.

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