Bendy And The Dark Revival - BioShock Inkfinite (Review)

Bendy And The Dark Revival

Released: November 15th, 2022 (PC), July 11th, 2025 (Switch)

Developer: Joey Drew Studios

Publisher: Joey Drew Studios

Systems: PC, PS4, PS5, Switch (reviewed), Xbox One, Xbox X/S

Bendy and the Ink Machine is hailed as a horror classic and I liked it well enough, so at least the series had a good game before presenting Bendy and the Dark Revival. It's one hell of a poor encore, a low quality BioShock fan game in disguise, as tedious as it is distinctly annoying. 

You take on the role of Audrey, a woman who gets sucked into the inky world of cartoonist Joey Drew or something. Having been changed into a curiously inksome person herself, she has to navigate an olde timey animation studio, now overseen by a comically creepy janitor man. 

Bendy steals the show, but it's not much of a heist.

Bendy is also present, obviously, and his cuteness is one of the more enjoyable aspects of an otherwise mediocre outing. His screentime is fairly limited, but those moments stand out as something far more interesting than whatever else is happening. 

Dark Revival calls itself a survival horror, but that feels a bit tenuous. It’s a first-person stealth action game with mild horror, and every component of this classification is remarkably weak. A rudimentary and archaic production, it’s stunning how a franchise that’s sold toys by the boatload couldn’t do even a little better. 

Did I mention this game is really annoying? 

Fuck everything about this crate.

One pivotal moment involves a conspicuous crate, preying upon the player’s natural inclination to open it. If you do so, you’ll be harassed for the entirety of the game by a shrieking jumpscare monster - it suddenly appears in your face and helps itself to a few hit points. It’s different from the other creature that does this to you regardless of choice. 

I’d say the miserable startle-prank ruins the game, but there’s another threat already doing the heavy lifting in that department. The Ink Demon is a true pain in the piss hole. 

You get used to it. Very, very used to it.

The marketable Ink Demon can randomly appear at almost any time and force you to abandon whatever you’re doing. As soon as the screen shakes and you receive a warning of its approach, you have several seconds to find a hiding place or you’re instantly dead.

Inky D doesn’t care if you’re far away from a hiding spot, climbing a ladder, or too near some aggro’d enemies to hide. You will just die within seconds, and unlike dying to regular enemies, you won’t respawn at a nearby ink pool. You’ll lose all unsaved progress instead. 

The Demon’s implementation is distinctly inelegant. It’s as if Dark Revival wants to have a threat in the vein of Alien: Isolation or Resident Evil’s Nemesis, but either couldn’t or didn’t design and develop it. You’re never actively stalked, nor is there even an illusion of such a scenario - you hide to prevent a cutscene from triggering, and it’s fucking blatant.

Fights can make most of the screen pitch black.

Those creatures you can fight aren’t much better. You batter gloopy mooks with a pipe and it’s such sloppy combat it makes The Elder Scrolls look like Street Fighter in comparison. No blocking, no charge attacks, no dodging, you just flailingly swing and exchange damage, barely able to see due to enemies crowding closely around you. 

Stealth is another option, and it’s a joke. Enemy AI is often so bloody dumb that the tossers obliviously walk past you in open space. Just crouch behind one, press a button, and you’ll instantly “banish” it for free health. If enemies see you, running far away or ducking into a vent makes them instantly forget you. Sometimes they’ll clairvoyantly hear you leaving a hiding place, but otherwise they’re rubbish. 

So stupid are enemies that if they walk into each other - a very common occurrence - they’ll play bumper cars, staggering back a bit before walking into each other over and over until they’re nudged enough to return to random pottering. I can’t remember the last time I encountered such pitiful AI. 

I am rubber, you are... more rubber.

Puzzles are the usual fare - arranging sequence orders, finding codes for locks, using Audrey’s rechargeable Flow dash to engage in awkward platforming, nothing grand. You’ll often have to look for sepia objects in the sepia environment, which really doesn’t work out very well.

Interactables at least glow when you’re looking directly at them… except one specific kind of collectible that’s purposefully excluded. Training a player to look for a visual cue before arbitrarily disabling it is a crude way of hiding something, and missing the first few as a result ensured I didn’t care about them at all. 

Enemies will obliviously walk past you.

For the most part, Dark Revival is too mundane to even be called horrible. As irritated as I am by its many flaws, it’s mostly a pedestrian routine. The writing is stuffed with worn tropes and tryhard dialogue from the Ink Demon, whose voice is like a cross between Dr. Claw and a drunken grandad. None of the horror comes anywhere close to scary, either.  

Is there anything good? That there is, chiefly in the audiovisual areas. As much as the sepia coloring gets in the way of navigation, it is striking in the same way its predecessor was. The artistic direction is pretty great in general, with nice environments and terrific character designs. Things are really nicely animated, especially when it comes to Bendy - he displays a lot of feeling despite his silence.

Right bloody past you!

Music isn’t a common part of Audrey’s adventure, but I really like what’s there, and while the Ink Demon sounds silly, I dig the rest of the voice acting. It’s a shame some of these performances are confined to poorly presented audio logs - they’re quiet, not subtitled at all, and the cassette effect muffles them. Tapes recorded by the monstrous Keepers are almost unintelligible due to their warped voices being filtered into oblivion. 

If you want the log transcripts, or to reread any collected notes, you’ll need to scroll down some increasingly long menu lists. The last piece of lore you picked up is always at the bottom of the list, and you can’t skip to it in any way. It’s just one issue with an overall rubbish set of menus.  

Enemies' gloopy death physics just look like glitches.

There are upgrades for your pipe, as well as canisters that boost Audrey’s health, stamina, and Flow cooldown. The pipe’s handful of uninteresting upgrade attacks can’t be used if they’re not charged at specific stations, and I didn't even see a difference in combat on the single occasion I bothered to try one. 

On that note, don’t bank on ever upgrading from the pipe, because it’s all you get. At one point I thought I might get a Tommy gun but an NPC picked it up instead. I can’t believe how much this game copies another while leaving almost all of that game’s combat on the table.

Is a man not entitled to the ink of his pen?

So yeah, we have to discuss the desperate aping of BioShock. Environmental details, various UI elements, and narrative beats zealously adhere to a notably familiar formula. Basic enemies are Splicer expies, respawning is done via a reskinned Vita-Chamber, and there are many more examples of variable egregiousness. 

By the time I reached a broken down private city I almost burst out laughing, but I was far less amused by a “twist” that came soon after, one so absurd in its toothless regurgitation that I audibly responded with “oh for fuck’s sake.” 

Behold, the bright and loud yet somehow sneaky stealth attack!

I’m all for games wearing their inspiration on their sleeves, and I’ll forgive a lot of derivative material if it’s done well, but there’s something especially shameless with Dark Revival. Its copycatting is so constant it lacks an identity of its own, being naught but a digital shrine to a videogame it’s too shallow to effectively emulate.

Plus of course, the endless allusions to BioShock reminds one they could be playing a far better game from the 2000s… like Haze. 

More like Stink Machine.

It would be great if Bendy and the Dark Revival was the BioShock-inspired horror production it wants to be, but that would require more than cheap jumpscares and thoroughly awful combat alongside equally impoverished stealth. It’s not just undercooked, it’s bloody raw.

5/10