Review of Killing Time: Resurrected: This is what happens when you ban alcohol

The most memorable moment of my time with Killing Time: Resurrected came shortly after I spent a lot of time stumbling through a hedge maze and shooting zombie gardeners. The cards in this game are huge and I had to give the hideous butler in the mansion an invitation to come in. I came across a wooded area that appeared to be fairly empty. Then I heard the croaking. “Oh, that’s a duck, that’s silly,” I thought, noticing the familiar side profile of one of those green-haired, feathered gimmicks you like to share bread with. It was pretty big, but I’m playing an old 3DO game, so I wasn’t expecting realistic fidelity. The duck didn’t seem as aggressive as the zombies, so I walked past. It saw me and started screaming.

It was as if someone had recorded a regular quack, stretched the effect in a video editor, and then looped it over itself a few times. After sacrificing a goat in their home office, of course. The squawking duck turned around, its eyes bright red, its beak wide open as it stared and screamed. His chest was also wide open, showing me a protruding ribcage and a mass of red duck pulp that barely stayed in place. I stared at this thing calmly as it stared at me and screamed. My brain needed time to process the absurd depiction. No nearby enemies seemed alarmed, and the duck never attacked, only screaming until I gave it a single bullet from my pistol. My next thought was, “That was weird.”

Killing Time is exactly such a game. You could call it a “boomer shooter,” and it certainly looks like one of the many DOOM-inspired first-person shooters of the 90s. This appeared on the ill-fated 3DO and is one of the titles fondly remembered by the people who lived in that space. It’s a crazy mix of haunted house silliness, schlocky Egyptian mysticism, and Prohibition-era American excess. It’s as if The Great Gatsby were a small-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 that simultaneously sets Killing Time apart from its competitors and classifies it as a 3DO joint is its FMV assets, which utilize bluescreen live-action footage for most of the game’s human elements.

That’s a doozy!

In Killing Time you investigate a mansion belonging to Tess Conway, a famous heiress, which was suddenly abandoned in the early 1930s. It turned out that she had stolen an ancient Egyptian artifact to gain immortality, and things backfired as usual. She and her friends, family, and co-workers are all trapped on the property and have turned into ghosts, zombies, or a combination of both. You must survive while searching for the missing artifact, and luckily there are enough weapons and ammunition on the site to drive off a small militia. It’s a shame your watch broke when you ran into this anomaly, but it could certainly be a lot worse.

I’m playing Killing Time because Nightdive, the winner of our 2023 Do it for Shacknews award, selected it as a seasonal project to be released in time for Halloween. While Killing Time isn’t necessarily a serious horror film, more of an adventure film, there are still plenty of grotesque, undead characters that will suit your needs. Some of the FMV characters are a little blurry and bland, but as the game progresses you come across delights of B-movie character design, such as a portly chef whose torso is covered in butcher knives and sausages spilling out of… There are clowns and certain boss characters that become even more creative as the game progresses. While the initial zombies and mafia gangsters don’t add much to Killing Time’s identity, it ends up creating an entertaining feel for this world and setting.

You’ve done it all before

The actual gameplay is pretty simple if you’re familiar with Boomer Shooters. Nightdive changed the controls to make the game feel as much like a modern shooter as possible. One look at the user reviews of the original game on Steam is enough to understand that it was a necessary update. Otherwise, the weapons you get feel pretty standard for the genre, and the intense gunplay feels exactly like something heavily inspired by DOOM. You’re here more for the visual gimmicks and setting novelties than the gameplay.

Speaking of visual gimmicks, the work Nightdive has done with the FMV elements is truly impressive. Most of the characters you interact with are ghosts, and the Resurrected version initially applies a sort of blue filter to all characters. This not only makes them look more obviously ghost-like, but also hides problems that you would expect when low-budget FMV footage is enlarged to modern resolution. It’s easy to say, but one of the coolest parts of Killing Time: Resurrected is the way Nightdive showcases his work.

Nightdive knows how to show off their work

Hey, it’s time for my favorite part of a remaster style review! Similar to the museum rooms in retro collections from companies like Capcom or Konami, Killing Time: Resurrection features a Vault menu. Here is a selection of elements from the game that the Nightdive team would like to share with audiences to provide context for what this game was and what it is now after working on it. There’s also some nice historical content to simply give players further insight into how such games were made.

The best part is the inclusion of a sort of “meeting minutes,” a transcription of the findings after a team meeting on a specific part of the game. It includes the conclusions the team came to, the reasons for their decisions, and some requests for additional work or things that would be cool if the relevant team members had time. It’s super nice to see something like this and gives insight into 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 check out the original game’s FMV animations and the new animations. This gives you the opportunity to watch all the cutscenes and see how Nightdive made adjustments without having to play through the game multiple times. This type of material is a boon for remasters as it pays respect to the original work without seeming like it has been replaced by the new version.

This is another one of those old-school remasters where part of the fun is just experiencing it if you haven’t already. You won’t see “Killing Time” on any best-of-all-time lists, because it simply isn’t. It’s rough around the edges, teetering on the schlocky end, and the huge maps make it tiring to navigate. But at the same time, it’s a perfect subject of serious digital archeology, being a 3DO game so fully committed to its era of FMV gimmicks and the overall weird vibe that only a ’90s shooter could deliver obscure hardware can offer. Is “Killing Time” a banger? No not really. But Killing Time: Resurrected definitely is.

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