Galerians benefits from an interesting concept but is haunted by poor controls and a noticeable lack of direction.
In Galerians the player takes on the role of Rion, a boy who has undergone experiments to mold him into a walking psychic death machine. However, something went wrong in one of the experiments and he is set free, leaving him with no memories and explosive psychic abilities. CG cutscenes are used extensively throughout Galerians, resulting in the need for 4 discs and, by late Playstation standards, they are passable. However, the same cannot be said for the voice acting which, although has its highlights of quality, still manages to suffer from the common issue of poor acting that so many other horror games of its time showed. With a unique story, Galerians seems promising but, sadly, the gameplay is not as enjoyable.
The basics of gameplay for Galerians is familiar to those who have played survival horror games on the Playstation: the 3-D controls are applied to compensate for set camera angles and aiming is a little tricky to effectively learn. However, unlike other games of its time, learning to use weapons (psychic powers in this case) against enemies feels like much more of a chore than it should be. Mainly, the need to charge each attack does not work well with a 3-D control scheme and results in far more deaths than necessary. Gauging each enemy type's attacks takes quite some time (save for the scientists at the beginning) and the attack patterns of enemies with firearms are unfairly fast-paced, resulting in being attacked roughly 3-4 times before being able to score a significant hit if you don't take the target by surprise. In fact, simply bypassing the enemies altogether (when allowed) is a much smarter option and, at the very least, most enemies are easy enough to outrun. Other than controls, the pacing in Galerians also suffers from some issues.
In playing Galerians, it should be kept in mind that there will be an immense amount of backtracking to be done. Of course, such methods could be forgiven since many other fantastic games used backtracking in an enjoyable manner. However, backtracking in Galerians feels far too punishing, mainly due to the pseudo-time limit that is set in place. More specifically, the "time limit" is a bar that fills up gradually over time and, when attempting to use powers while its filled, will cause Rion to go berserk and slowly lose his health while shuffling along. To be fair, enemies are incredibly easy to defeat since even being near them in this mode will cause their heads to explode but the largest problem with the bar is that, due to lack of proper explanation, you will initially not know how to exit this mode. I myself died roughly eight times before I figured out there was an item in my inventory that completely depleted the bar, allowing me to return to normal. Even after figuring out the cure for the berserk mode, the bar still fill every 30-40 minutes. Couple the aforementioned issue with the high amount of backtracking as well as the amount of time it takes to solve its occasionally cryptic puzzles and its bound to cause nothing but misery.
By far, the most troubling issue with Galerians is that it lacks the "horror" element of "survival horror." Although the concept in itself is slightly creepy, Galerians refuses to properly utilize either jump scares or sufficient psychological elements. Instead, enemies can be, more often than not, spotted before they react to you and the overall design is not atmospheric, leaving Galerians to be more like a 3D adventure game with frustrating combat controls and far too much backtracking.
Overall, Galerians has a fairly interesting concept with characters that are interesting enough to keep select people roped in for its duration but the amount of gameplay issues detract far too much from the experience. Although plenty of patience is mandatory, imposing a time limit that results in severe consequences at a fairly high occurrence rate is unacceptable. For those who desire something different in a survival horror game and have played quite a few already, Galerians is slightly recommendable. However, for those who are fairly new to slightly seasoned in the survival horror genre: there are far better titles to be played.