Killing Time: Resurrected Review: This Is What Happens When You Ban Alcohol

The most memorable moment of my time with Killing Time: Resurrected came right after I spent a lot of time wandering through a maze shooting zombie gardeners. The maps in this game are huge and I needed to invite the mansion’s hideous butler in. I came across a wooded area, apparently quite empty. Then I heard the quacking. “Oh, it’s a duck, that’s nonsense,” I thought, noticing the familiar side profile of one of those green-headed, feathered tricks people like to break bread with. It was kind of big, but I’m playing an old 3DO game so I wasn’t expecting realistic fidelity. The duck didn’t seem aggressive like the zombies, so I passed. He saw me and started screaming.

It was as if someone had recorded a regular charlatan, stretched the effect in a video editor, and then repeated it a few times. After sacrificing a goat in his home office, of course. The screaming duck turned around and its eyes were red and glowing, its beak opened wide as it stared and screamed. His chest was also wide open, showing me a bulging ribcage and a mass of red duck goo that was barely staying in place. I stared at the thing silently as it stared at me and screamed, my brain needing time to process the absurd display. No nearby enemy seemed to be alerted, and the duck never attacked, only gave its miserable scream until I gave it a single bullet from my pistol. My next thought was, “that was weird.”

That’s exactly the kind of game Killing Time is. You might label it a “Boomer Shooter” and it certainly looks like one of the many DOOM-inspired first-person shooters from the 90s. This one came out on the ill-fated 3DO and is one of the titles that people who lived in that space refer to with affection. It’s a crazy mix of haunted house silliness, clumsy Egyptian mysticism, and prohibition-era American excess. It’s as if The Great Gatsby was a low-budget horror film that you’d find on one of those DVD sets that have about 30 films crammed onto two discs. The secondary gimmick both setting Killing Time apart from its peers and dating it as a 3DO set is its FMV assets, using live action footage and blue screen for most of the game’s human elements.

This is a doozy!

In Killing Time, you investigate a mansion owned by Tess Conway, a famous heiress who was suddenly abandoned in the early 1930s. It turns out that she stole an ancient Egyptian artifact in an effort to obtain immortality, and the plan backfires, as usually happens. She and her friends, family, and staff are trapped on the property, transformed into ghosts, zombies, or some combination of the two. You have to survive while searching for the missing artifact, and luckily there are enough weapons and ammunition on site to eliminate a small militia. It’s a shame that entering this anomaly broke your watch, but things could certainly be a lot worse.

I’ve been playing Killing Time because Nightdive, winner of the 2023 Do it for Shacknews award, chose it as a seasonal project to launch just in time for Halloween. While Killing Time isn’t exactly a serious horror outing, but rather an adventure vibe, there are still plenty of grotesque and undead characters to fit the bill. Some of the FMV characters are a little blurry and mundane, but as the game progresses you come across delights of B-movie character design, like a burly chef whose torso is full of butcher knives and sausages sticking out of… places . There are clowns and certain bosses that get even more creative as the game progresses, so while the initial zombies and mob goons don’t contribute much to Killing Time’s identity, ultimately there is a fun feel to this world and setting.

You’ve done it all before

The actual gameplay is quite simple if you are familiar with Boomer Shooters. Nightdive modified the controls to make this game feel like a contemporary shooter as much as possible, and one only needs to take a look at the user reviews of the original game on Steam to understand that this was a necessary update. Otherwise, the weapons you get feel pretty standard for the genre, and the heavy shooting feels exactly like something heavily inspired by DOOM. You’re here more for the visual tricks and new features of the setting than for the gameplay.

And speaking of visual tricks, the work Nightdive did with the FMV elements is truly impressive. Most of the characters you interact with are ghosts, and the Resurrected version starts by applying a sort of blue filter to all characters. This helps them look more obviously like ghosts, for one thing, but the filter also masks problems you’d expect to see in low-budget FMV footage being upscaled to a modern resolution. It’s easy to say, but one of the coolest parts of Killing Time: Resurrected is how Nightdive showcases its work.

Nightdive knows how to show its work

Hey, it’s time for my favorite part of a remaster-style review! Just like the Museum spaces in retro collections from companies like Capcom or Konami, Killing Time: Resurrection has its Vault menu. Here you will find a selection of elements taken from the game that the Nightdive team wanted to share with the public, to provide context on what this game was and what it is now, following their work on it. There is also some interesting historical content to simply give players more information about how games like this are made.

The best part is the inclusion of a sort of “meeting minutes” document, a transcript of the conclusions following a team meeting about a specific part of the game. It includes the conclusions the team reached, the reasoning behind their decisions, and some requests for additional work or things that would be cool if the relevant team members had the time. It’s really cool to see something like this included and it gives a sense of a non-technical discussion that players can read and understand.

There’s a lot of other cool stuff too, like unused assets, concept art, and even some weird leftovers from an old CES event. You can also view FMV animations from the original game and new ones, giving you the opportunity to watch all the cutscenes and see how Nightdive made adjustments without having to play the game multiple times. This type of material is a boon for remasters, respecting the original work without acting as if it had been replaced by the new version.

This is another one of those old-school remasters where part of the fun is simply trying it out if you haven’t already. You won’t see Killing Time on any “best of all time” list, because it simply isn’t that. It’s difficult, teetering on the bad side of schlocky, and the huge maps make finding your way tiring. But at the same time, being a 3DO game so fully committed to its era of FMV gimmicks and the weird vibes that only a ’90s shooter on obscure hardware can provide makes this the perfect subject for some serious digital archeology. Is Killing Time a banger? No, not really. But Killing Time: Resurrected sure is.

Killing Time: Resurrected is available on October 17, 2024 for PC, Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 4 and 5, and Xbox One and Series X|S. A PC code was provided by the publisher for this review.