Witch House

Title: Witch House
Link: https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1997522619
Author: ThePaleOne
Survivors: L4D2
Notes: This is more of an experimental campaign than a traditional campaign.

Witch House is a short, single-map campaign that is a fair attempt at making an escape room, a sort of haunted house of sorts, complete with a basement dungeon. The goal here is simply to escape. There are no infected to speak of, and in reality no actual enemies either, at least none that I found. However, the map does use themes and enemies (such as witches and common infected) as NPCs.

At the start there are three difficulties to choose from. These difficulties give you time limits to figure your way out. Chances are, if you aren’t so godly good at puzzles that can immediately predict a puzzle’s solution with 100% accuracy, you’re probably going to want to choose Easy because that bypasses the time limit entirely. Then maybe you can return to figure it out under an actual time limit. If you do choose a time limit, then you periodically take poison damage, and when time's up, everybody dies. I do feel though that there’s enough here to explore the different areas at a leisurely pace above 15 minutes, so I don't see the time limit as anything other than an additional challenge when you've figured it out once, unless you really enjoy puzzle challenges.

Some of the gameplay elements used in this campaign are interesting. For instance, once you use certain melee weapons to break open pieces of furniture, they'll break, leaving you with no weapon. It seems that there's a script that the campaign uses whereby it eliminates your secondary weapon slot. I think maybe only one other custom campaign leaves you without any weapons whatsoever, and it's not a feature frequently seen in mutations. Luckily, there are no enemies and eventually you will find weapons later on anyway, so it's nothing to worry about.

The campaign is dark as you would expect, and very heavy on the puzzle elements. It's not really all that difficult to figure out what to do, as usually the objects needed to progress are highlighted when you approach them. However, there are things like false walls, hidden objects, props to search through that aren't highlighted, and furniture that needs to be broken with specific objects, so if that's not your cup of tea, you can probably already predict if this is something you'll want to try out. Also, reading the information regarding this campaign, it seems that there are additional rooms with locked doors that I wasn't able to figure out how to open, so there are definitely bonus secret areas that are harder to figure out than others. 

This is definitely more fun with friends, and I can anticipate this one being really dull and frustrating played solo if you don't like puzzles or you're not good at them. The parts of the map that might frustrate people are things that need to be interacted with, which the game instructor doesn’t mention.

Difficulty: The difficulty in this is based entirely on the puzzle-solving. If you opt to go with a time limit by choosing any difficulty other than Easy, you'll probably find it at least somewhat challenging to get out of the escape room before you die, although it's probably not impossible to do on Normal if you have a full group of players. The difficulty chosen in the lobby shouldn't matter at all.

Final Verdict: Overall I liked the look of this and I liked the variety in the rooms, but figuring out where to go occasionally devolved into trial and error, and pressing “use” on everything. There are no infected here so it’s not really a challenge in the traditional sense of L4D2, but it can be good to play once for a change of pace. And everything worked, so at least it’s beatable. Decent for a one-off.

Rating: 3/5.