As I have discussed before, I am quite fond of RPG Maker horror games. I also love slasher flicks and 16-bit nostalgia. So it seemed like Camp Sunshine was made just for me, a 16-bit RPG Maker horror game paying homage to classic summer camp slasher films. “What’s not to love?” I thought. Quite a lot, as it turns out.
The plot of Camp Sunshine will be pretty familiar to anyone who has seen a slasher film. You play as Jez, who has just been dropped off at the titular camp. Jez wakes up in the middle of his first night at camp to find that his roommate has disappeared. Upon leaving his cabin to look for his roommate, Jez finds that just about everyone in the camp has been murdered by a man wearing a bear mascot costume. Then through diaries that Jez finds, he starts to piece together the identity of the killer and what his connection to the camp is. This could be a perfectly serviceable plot in the hands of a decent writer. Unfortunately, here it is just dragged down by amateurish writing. The dialogue is just far too blunt and on-the-nose to be even kind of believable, it frequently mistakes making references to 80s franchises for making jokes, and ultimately hinges on some eye-roll-inducing stuff about American Indian magic. It almost feels like this is a first draft written for a high school creative writing course.
Camp Sunshine has some pretty solid 16-bit graphics. There’s a lot of character in some of the designs, especially the bear-masked killer. However, the game also suffers from some seriously repetitive visual design, especially when it comes to the cabins. It can be hard to tell if you’ve already been inside a building because many of them look very similar on the inside and the outside. And then there’s the problem with a lack of visual indicator to show where a door is when you’re inside of a building; it’s usually recessed by a tile or two, but if you’re in a building with two exits it can be a bit confusing trying to find the other one sometimes. Camp Sunshine also features a pretty cool lighting engine, but it feels very out of place in the otherwise pixelated game.
Whoever it was that decided that Camp Sunshine needed voice acting should probably be fired. It’s not that the voice acting is bad, it’s just so completely unnecessary, especially since there is so very little of it. Only like two or three characters get a voice, including one who is in exactly one cabin which takes less than three minutes to explore. The killer’s voice lines tell you when he’s near, but there’s also a sound effect to indicate that. The whole thing is just baffling. The music is okay. It’s obviously an attempt to throw back to 80s synthesizer-based scores, but it doesn’t quite succeed in that either.
Like with every other aspect of this game, the actual gameplay is just full of huge glaring flaws that detract from anything it does well. The camp is far bigger than it needs to be, and your sprint ability only lasts for about 5 seconds before taking another 20 seconds to recharge. It just kind of feels like the game uses that to artificially pad out its length. There are sticks that make noise and alert the killer when you step on them, but they’re generally so far off the main path that you’d have to be going out of your way to actually step on them. Then there’s the fact that the killer just randomly teleports around. He can even teleport into a narrow hallway and block you off from proceeding down it. The whole diary-pages-and-teleporting-monster thing just reeks of “Slender” anyhow.
Camp Sunshine has so much potential, but at every turn it just trips all over itself. It comes so close to being good despite its flaws but it just can’t ever seem to rise above any of them. But hey, at least its more fun than “Slender.”
