When it comes to indie horror in the eShop, as I’ve pointed out many times before, the results have been wildly varied at best. Dominated mostly by cheap jump scares and what too often feel like walking simulators dressed up for Halloween, while there have been some solid titles most have been pretty weak. The Coma series, while not necessarily perfect, has at least been consistently interesting, letting its strong art design help to drive the tension, while having enough lore to show an investment by the developer in some actual world building. In theory, Bloodlines is then the culmination of those efforts paying off, but oddly enough its attempts to raise the normal bar may have backfired a bit.

Even as someone who has played the other games in the series, I’ll admit that the whirlwind of the early narrative scenes in the game were a bit overwhelming. Trying to quickly get you up to speed with where the series has been and where this installment is starting out, bringing together threads from the earlier games, I’m not sure whether someone new to the franchise would be able to start from this point without feeling a bit lost. Part of the reason for doing this is that rather than sticking with just one protagonist through this foray you’ll be moving between 3 of them, necessitating bringing everything together, but it’s also leaning pretty heavily on people already being acquainted with the series to make sense of it.

That leads into how the gameplay has shifted a little bit, moving from being steadily focused on slower and careful exploration, some puzzle solving, and knowing when to run and hide. Here, depending on the character you’re working with, you’ll even have the opportunity to do some fighting back, but given how awkwardly these fights end up playing out it’s hardly the exciting change you’d hope for. It also feels like some additional effort was put into making some of the puzzles a little more challenging, but since that’s not always in ways that feel fair, they also sometimes tended just to be more aggravating than rewarding. Weirdly enough, while there’s no question that this is the most ambitious Coma title to date, it also feels the most uneven, replacing known but effective play with some new elements that had potential but could have been better executed.