Killing Time: Resurrected review: 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 bunch of time bumbling around a hedge maze shooting zombie gardeners. This game’s maps are huge, and I needed to give the ghastly butler at the mansion an invitation to get in. I came across a woodsy area, seemingly pretty empty. Then I heard the quacking. “Oh, it’s a duck, that’s silly,” I thought, noticing the familiar side profile of one of those green-headed, feathery gimmicks people like to share bread with. It was kind of big, but I’m playing an old 3DO game so I didn’t expect realistic fidelity. The duck didn’t seem aggressive like the zombies, so I walked by. It saw me, and started screeching.

It was like someone recorded a normal quack, stretched the effect out in a video editor then looped it over itself a few times. After sacrificing a goat in their home office, of course. The screeching duck turned and its eyes were bright red, beak wide open as it stared and screamed. Its chest was also wide open, showing me a protruded ribcage and a mass of red duck goop barely staying in place. I stared at this thing quietly as it stared at me and screamed, my brain needing time to process the absurd display. No nearby enemies seemed to be alerted, and the duck never attacked, just screamed its miserable scream until I fed it a single bullet from my pistol. My next thought was, “that was weird.”

That’s just the kind of game Killing Time is. You can label it as a “Boomer Shooter,” and it certainly looks like one of many DOOM-inspired first-person shooters of the 90s. This one came out on the ill-fated 3DO, and it is one of the titles people who lived in that space refer back to fondly. It’s a wacky mixture of haunted house tomfoolery, schlocky Egyptian mysticism, and prohibition-era American excess. It’s like if The Great Gatsby was a shoestring budget horror flick you’d find in one of those DVD sets that has like 30 movies crammed onto two discs. The secondary gimmick simultaneously setting Killing Time apart from its peers and dating it as a 3DO joint is its FMV assets, using live action, blue-screened footage for most of the game’s human elements.

This one's a doozy!

In Killing Time, you’re investigating a mansion owned by Tess Conway, a famous heiress that was suddenly abandoned in the early 1930s. Turns out she stole an ancient Egyptian artifact in an effort to obtain immortality, and things backfired as they tend to do. She and her friends, family, and staff are all trapped on the property, transformed into ghosts, zombies, or some combination of the two. You have to survive as you search for the missing artifact, and thankfully there’s enough guns and ammo on the premises to clear out a small militia. It’s a shame stepping into this anomaly broke your watch, but things could certainly be a lot worse.

I’ve been playing Killing Time because Nightdive, the winner of our 2023 Do it for Shacknews award, chose it as a seasonal project to release just in time for Halloween. While Killing Time isn’t exactly a serious horror outing, more of an adventure vibe really, there are still plenty of grotesque, undead characters to fit the bill. Some of the FMV characters are a little blurry and mundane, but as the game goes further you run into delights of B-movie character design, such as a portly chef whose torso is full of butcher knives and sausages spilling out from… places. There are clowns and certain boss characters who get even more creative as the game goes on, so while the initial zombies and mafia goons don’t contribute much to Killing Time’s identity, by the end there’s a fun sense of this world and setting.

You've done this all before

The actual gameplay is fairly straightforward if you’re familiar with Boomer Shooters. Nightdive did modify the controls to make this game feel like a contemporary shooter as much as possible, and all it takes is a look at the original game’s user reviews on Steam to understand this was a necessary update. Otherwise the weapons you get feel fairly boilerplate for the genre, and the strafing-heavy gunplay feels exactly like something heavily inspired by DOOM. You’re more here for the visual gimmicks and setting novelties than the gameplay.

And speaking of visual gimmicks, the work Nightdive did with the FMV elements is actually really impressive. Most of the characters you interact with are ghosts, and the Resurrected version starts by applying a sort of blue filter to all the characters. This helps them look more obviously like ghosts for one thing, but the filter also masks issues you’d expect to see from low-budget FMV footage getting blown up to modern resolution. It’s easy to just say that, but one of the coolest parts of Killing Time: Resurrected is how Nightdive shows its work.

Nightdive knows how to show its work

Hey, it’s time for my favorite part of a remaster-style review! Much like the Museum spaces in retro collections from the likes of Capcom or Konami, Killing Time: Resurrection has its Vault menu. Here you’ll find a selection of elements ripped from the game the team at Nightdive wants to share with the audience, to provide context for what this game was and what it is now after their work on it. There’s also some neat historical content in place to simply give players further insight into how games like this are made.

The best part is the inclusion of a sort of “meeting minutes” document, a transcription of the takeaways after a team meeting on a specific part of the game. It includes the conclusions the team came to, the reasoning behind their decisions, and a few requests for additional work or things that would be cool if the relevant team members had time. It’s super neat to see something like this included, and gives insight into a non-technical discussion players can read and understand.

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

This is another one of those old school remasters with which part of the fun is simply experiencing it if you haven't already. You won't be seeing Killing Time in any "best of all time" lists, because it simply isn't that. It's rough around the edges, teetering on the bad end of schlocky, and the huge maps make finding your way around exhausting. But at the same time, being a 3DO game so fully committed to its era of FMV gimmicks and the overall strange vibes only a 90s shooter on obscure hardware can provide makes this the perfect subject of earnest digital archaeology. Is Killing Time a banger? Nah, not really. But Killing Time: Resurrected absolutely is.

Killing Time: Resurrected is available on October 17, 2024 for the 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.

Lucas White

Contributing Editor

Lucas plays a lot of videogames. Sometimes he enjoys one. His favorites include Dragon Quest, SaGa, and Mystery Dungeon. He's far too rattled with ADHD to care about world-building lore but will get lost for days in essays about themes and characters. Holds a journalism degree, which makes conversations about Oxford Commas awkward to say the least. Not a trophy hunter but platinumed Sifu out of sheer spite and got 100 percent in Rondo of Blood because it rules. You can find him on Twitter @HokutoNoLucas being curmudgeonly about Square Enix discourse and occasionally saying positive things about Konami.