HIGH The sewer level.

LOW Exploring a tripwire-filled room with terrible controls.

WTF Why put such a cute dog in such an ugly game?

Bursting onto modern consoles all the way from an imagined 1996 in which Sony was much cooler about what it put out on the Playstation, Cannibal Abduction is here to test players’ sanity, both in the sense of a truly upsetting storyline and their ability to cope with intentionally awful controls.

The game wastes no time setting up its premise – the player’s car has broken down on a rural highway, and a friendly passerby offers to tow and repair the vehicle. Naturally, the offer is too good to be true, and the player quickly finds themselves locked in a farmhouse with a sickle-handed maniac.

With a low-poly world and fixed camera angles, Cannibal Abduction perfectly captures the feel of retro horror chase games. Clock Tower created this pursuit-focused subgenre almost 30 years ago, and ever since then the core elements have remained the same — the player has to hide from an unstoppable killer while gathering items to escape from a claustrophobically-small location. CA captures those vibes perfectly and offers a grimy, hostile experience to anyone brave enough to load it up.

A great deal of care has gone into building Cannibal Abduction‘s map. The farmhouse has two main floors, as well as a basement and attic, so there are plenty of places to flee when the killer is in pursuit. Crucially, the main and second floors (where most play is set) are built as loops, and since the player is faster than the killer, once all of the doors have been unlocked, it’s a relatively simple matter to ditch the maniac by sprinting away until there’s enough distance to safely duck into a closet and wait until he gets bored and wanders away.

Well, I say “simple” but CA‘s controls and camera are specifically designed to ensure that running through the world is as awkward as possible. The player moves forward, backwards, and turns their way through the world using classic ‘tank’ controls. They’re woefully imprecise, of course – making slight adjustments in direction can quickly lead to a character spinning out, making them easy prey for the killer. The camera actually does a great job of helping the player in this respect, offering tons of super-wide angles that show off entire rooms. I was never confused about where I was able to go, the only issue was getting there.

While Cannibal Abduction‘s story is interesting enough – a mysterious force drove a rural family to cannibalism and worshiping strange gods – progressing through it can be something of a chore.

The relatively small map size ensures that players won’t ever get lost, but it also limits how many goals there are to accomplish. The developers try to stretch things out by sending players from the top of the house to the bottom over and back again, as well as severely limiting their inventory to ensure they’ll be forced back to the starting room as much as possible. Unfortunately, with saves being limited via the player’s ability to track down videocassettes, and the killer capable of putting the player down with just a few swipes of his sickle, having to redo long stretches will be the norm, rather than the exception. It’s baked into its oldschool DNA, of course, but that doesn’t make it less frustrating.

In addition to the main campaign, Cannibal Abduction includes a free bonus title called Night of the Scissors, which is basically a dry run for CA. It feels more primitive thanks to the map’s layout being needlessly confusing and the camera angles seemingly chosen to make navigating it as difficult as possible. Even worse, the game’s killer is ridiculously fast, and combined with the lack of loops to exploit, he’s nearly impossible to escape if he spots the player. However, the one thing that Scissors does have over Cannibal Abduction is a checkpoint system which updates the player’s progress after every objective is completed or item found. There are some extremely frustrating stretches here, but I never lost more than a couple of minutes of progress, which was a nice change after Cannibal Abduction.

Those who’ve read this far probably know better than to expect a fair or balanced gameplay. The philosophy underpinning this entire genre is that the player should share the misery that their avatar is suffering, and since they can’t trap players inside the game, they make things as difficult to engage with as possible. Cannibal Abduction is aimed at a very niche audience, but anyone with a passion for this kind of masochistic experience will find a great example of it here.

Rating: 7 out of 10

Disclosures: This game is developed by selewi and published by Puppet Combo. It is currently available on PC,XBX/S,PS4/5, SW. This copy of the game was obtained via publisher and reviewed on the XBX. Approximately 3 hours of play was devoted to the single-player mode, and the game was completed.

Parents: This game was rated T by the ESRB, but I’m not sure how? There’s swearing, severed limbs, naked mutilated corpses, and notes describing hideous torture. Like… what did they show the ESRB to get this rating? I’m actually baffled, because this is thoroughly an M game through and through, even if it supposedly only contains Violence, Language, and Blood.

Colorblind Modes: There are no colorblind modes available.

Deaf & Hard of Hearing Gamers: The game is not accessible. While all dialogue is subtitled and there is a visual static cue to let players know when the killer is close, a vital piece of information is delivered solely via beeps in static on a radio, and the game cannot be completed without it.

Remappable Controls: No, the game’s controls are not remappable.

HIGH Bloody Mary and her sweetheart.

LOW The third chapter, boringly premised and absurdly presented.

WTF I defeated a spider by knocking it into a shallow hole? You know they crawl up walls, right?

Angie Weathers is dying of cancer and there is little mystery as to why, since she smokes every chance she gets. Too late to fight it by conventional means, she takes one last job in hopes of fulfilling her dead husband’s travel dreams. Instead, she finds herself in Burnhouse Lane, a purgatory for the dying that offers her a slim hope of living on.

Burnhouse Lane primarily plays like a 2D anthology-style adventure game, albeit one bedecked with horror themes and tons of gore. In order to save herself, Angie must complete tasks that lead her into horrific experiences in the real world, while simultaneously dodging the terrors residing in the purgatorial dream world of Burnhouse Lane.

It must be said that both spheres of action are intensely gory, to such an extent that I don’t think anyone would enjoy Burnhouse Lane other than gore enthusiasts, or those like myself who are generally unbothered by blood and guts.

The chapters are mostly atomistic, with new villains and scenarios in each one, mainly threaded together by Angie herself. Unfortunately, this has the effect of denying the game a throughline. Rather than juxtaposing some horrific force with Angie’s illness, Burnhouse Lane casts about, trying different things without really making them connect with what’s gone wrong in Angie’s life.

The horror elements of Burnhouse Lane lean heavily on combat and fatal outcomes that result from missteps in solving its often-brittle puzzles. If a save point is missed or passed up, an unexpected death (or glitch) can lead to a long slog of repeated gameplay. In a nice touch, the save points are ashtrays — so like Angie, the player will often be dying for a cigarette.

Burnhouse Lane’s only consistently-repeated motif is the imprisonment of women, which is either implicitly or explicitly part of almost every one of its seven chapters. Of course, cancer is the world’s most extensively analogized disease and doubtless someone has compared it to a prison. To me, though, this doesn’t seem intended as a metaphor for her disease or her personal problems, and would be an inapt one if it were.

Some of the individual chapters do hit the mark, though. In “The Valley of Many Noises”, Angie’s body betrays her and she must make use of outwardly-perfect wax bodies that mask rotting, putrid flesh. This plays nicely against another character’s accusation that Angie is faking her cancer (as she has opted not to do chemotherapy).

Another standout chapter is “Bloody Mary”, about a reclusive old woman who spoils her pet pig terribly. Its premise feels original, and pushes the line of absurdity without toppling over it into full camp. The violence of the chapter surfaces in ways that at least obliquely recall Angie’s malady, and the villain, despite the brevity of her appearance, is intensely memorable.

Unfortunately, the lack of a continuous narrative thread costs the game in the end. Some chapters feel like they lean too much on lazy horror tropes like serial killers and demonizing fatness, ideas that likely would have fallen by the wayside had things been built around a more centralized horror concept. Worse, the finale arrives with a whimper and the ‘climactic’ boss feels like an afterthought, although there are some satisfying callbacks for players who manage to preserve their friendships (and friends).

Narrative aside, Burnhouse Lane has little to recommend it mechanically. Its inventory system is surprisingly awkward for an adventure title, and movement through the world frequently feels sluggish. Combat with guns feels perfunctory, lacking any real aiming system, while the primary melee weapon (an axe) had wonky and frustrating attack timing. The thankfully rare platforming is unpleasantly floaty.

Having the freedom of an anthology format allows Burnhouse Lane to play with multiple horror ideas, with some notable successes. While I wish it had more of a throughline and fewer overdone horror tropes, Burnhouse Lane does contain a few fresh ideas for lovers of gore. For everyone else? I doubt it’s worth the struggle.

Rating: 6 out of 10

Disclosures: This game is developed and published by Harvester Games. It is currently available on PC, PS4/5, XBO/X/S and Switch. This copy of the game was obtained via publisher and reviewed on the PS5. Approximately 10 hours of play were devoted to the single-player mode, and the game was completed. There are no multiplayer modes.

Parents: According to the ESRB, this game is rated M and contains Blood and Gore, Intense Violence, Partial Nudity, Sexual Themes, Strong Language, and Use of Drugs. A particular warning: the first scene of the game is of a woman attempting suicide. Aside from that, multiple characters are murdered or mutilated on screen, characters are shown in various states of dismemberment, partially nude women are tortured and killed, and a woman literally suffocates in a mound of excrement. Kids do not belong here.

Colorblind Modes: There are no colorblind modes available.

Deaf & Hard of Hearing Gamers: This game offers subtitles. They can be repositioned (to either float above characters’ heads or stay at the bottom of the screen) but otherwise cannot be altered. There is at least one essential sound cue in the game’s third chapter. While the segment where the sound cue appears is potentially survivable without using it, the difficulty is enormously increased. As such, this game is not fully accessible.

Remappable Controls: No, on PS5 this game’s controls are not remappable. No controller diagram is available in-game. In general the left stick is used for movement and the face buttons are used for action or opening the inventory. The left trigger readies a weapon and the right trigger attacks with it. Certain movements (jumps, dodges) require simultaneously holding a face button and using the right bumper.

HIGH A captivating opening movie exquisitely sets the mood.

LOW Every part of combat.

WTF Why does this town even have guards if they’re not going to kill the wolves that are chasing me around?

I was a decent Mortal Kombat 2 player in the arcades. I could hold my own as long as I used Baraka, and I had no trouble beating the game on a single credit. Then the arcade updated the cabinet’s code — new finishing moves were added, and supposedly the AI had been altered to be smarter and more challenging. The extra challenge was a disappointment, though — it decided that the optimal way to win fights was to constantly walk towards the player, blocking any attacks and throwing the moment they were in range to do so. No jumping, no special moves, and every character exactly the same — just walking forward and throwing.

Eventually we learned the tricks to defeat this strategy and the next update reset the enemies back to their previous state, but seeing that in MK2 taught me something about game design. Smart AI isn’t necessarily interesting AI, and challenging foes aren’t always satisfying to fight.

M.E.A.T. is an RPG set on the Canadian frontier in the 19th century. Players control Culligan, a rich widower who owns the local mine and has to investigate a series of increasingly-strange happenings delaying production. This includes understandably hostile natives, vicious animals and supernatural threats. The game features a ton of real-time combat, and it’s all terrible. So terrible, in fact, that it forced me to give up entirely after a dozen hours.

Where to begin? Equipping items is a chore, with the player forced to unequip items to add them to the utility bar. This is an absolute necessity since the game doesn’t pause when the inventory is up, so attempting to swap weapons during combat is a shortcut to death. Sometimes the weapon swapping doesn’t work, however, with items suddenly disappearing from the bar for no reason. Players also need to equip ammo for ranged weapons and it doesn’t automatically swap when they change weapons, so going from a pistol to a shotgun is pointless since I won’t be able to fire the shotgun because my pouch is still full of pistol rounds. It’s slow, awkward, and remarkably difficult.

The combat is sadistic. Anything but the lowest-level trash enemies were capable of killing me in just two or three hits, and eventually the prospect of constant death and reloading — one of M.E.A.T.‘s good points is that it allows for anytime saving outside of combat — wore me down to the point that I set the combat to ‘easy’. Suddenly it took enemies 5 hits to kill me instead of 2-3.

I looked for ways to advance, but was stymied at every turn. Low-level enemies rarely drop anything that can be sold for profit, and despite the fact that my character is canonically the richest man in town, I had no money to buy better weapons and armor. The only option was to spend hours grinding enemies until I was a high enough level to tank the damage and kill more difficult foes who actually dropped some useful items.

This grinding was made more frustrating by the AI quirks similar to those that I alluded to with MKII — foes will always make the smartest possible move in combat. Melee enemies will strike wildly until they’re at 10% health, then they’ll always flee and force the player to chase them — not an easy task, since M.E.A.T. uses grid-based movement, and players must be standing still to strike. It’s easy for enemies to move out of the player’s one-tile range and make a quick getaway. Unless players get lucky and the monster runs into a corner, most melee foes must be finished off with a ranged weapon, wasting a precious round of ammo on a critically-injured foe. Eventually I learned attack spells that do surprisingly little damage, but at least it was enough to save a bullet.

Ranged enemies are even worse, as they all take a single shot from the absolute maximum attack range, then back away before the player can return fire. Move towards them and they flee until they’re back at maximum range and the process starts over. The only technique that worked was equipping a gun, standing still, and waiting for them to get into range. Generally I would get one hit in for every two I took. Unsurprisingly, these gunslinging foes don’t have any weapons that can be looted on their death, although if I was extremely lucky, there was a chance I might get back half the ammo it took to kill them!

The final straw came when I was given an assignment to kill three bandits hiding in a cave next to a fort that criminals were using as a hideout. This meant that killing three target enemies required also killing a dozen more powerful foes first. I spent two hours grinding levels and collecting healing items before taking on the gang, and after killing two of the targets I couldn’t find the set of stairs leading to the third. As I went back to search for it, I discovered that every enemy I had struggled to kill on my way to the goal area had respawned the moment I left the screen. Stuck there, unable to go forward or backwards, I had to give up entirely.

While I’ve been extremely critical of M.E.A.T.‘s combat system, it’s possible that this torturously-bad fighting is intentional. The opening movie is a long pan across scenes of carnage where demons and beasts brutalize people, and everything about the game’s aesthetic reinforces the idea that this is a vicious, fallen world. In fact, the first quest in the game has the main character bribing a sheriff to release his prisoners to work as slaves in the player’s mine, and it only gets more bleak from there.

So, is M.E.A.T. a terrible game, or is it exactly the game the developers want it be? Is its frustrating gameplay a way of telling the player that they don’t belong on the frontier, and that everything wants to kill them because the white man’s presence in the West is anathema? If that was the developers’ intention, I applaud the bold decision to deliver a repellent experience in order to make a historical point. However, even if this is all by design, it doesn’t make the game any more playable, nor can I find any reason to recommend this agonizing gameplay.

Disclosures: This game is developed and published by Tripping Bears. It is currently available on PC. This copy of the game was obtained via publisher and reviewed on the PC. Approximately 10 hours of play were devoted to the single-player mode, and the game was not completed.

Parents: This game was not rated by the ESRB, but it features Violence, Strong Language, and Use of Alcohol. It’s a gory horror game about brutality in the American west. Children absolutely should not be playing this. Consider it a strong T or light M, rating-wise.

Colorblind Modes: There are no colorblind modes available.

Deaf & Hard of Hearing Gamers: I played most of the game without audio and encountered no difficulties. All vital information is given through text. Fonts cannot be resized. Fun fact – the game literally had NO SOUND until six weeks after its release!

Remappable Controls: No, the game’s controls are not remappable. The game is controlled with a mouse and keyboard. Players can move with directional keys or mouse clicks. All attacking and inventory management is done with mouse clicks and keyboard hotkeys.

It’s impossible to be certain exactly what Heironymous Bosch (the painter, not the cop) was trying to convey with his famous depictions of hell. He left no writings explaining his method, and the 15th century wasn’t a popular time for biographers to document the lives of artists.

The visions he put on canvas, packed to the brim full of naked sinners being tortured by black-skinned demons, are in line with the Catholic Church’s medieval doctrine of hell being a place of eternal torment of the condemned. The details, though, are captivating in their strangeness — one painting focuses on people being transformed into musical instruments. Another depicts people being tormented by tools of food production.

The images are so odd and iconoclastic that one is forced to wonder not just where the inspiration was coming from, but what Bosch intended the audience to get from them. Is there some connection between the man making out with a mermaid in his fantasy version of paradise and the platypus-man ice-skating in hell? Why is gambling the only sin being specifically and explicitly called out? Why does that giraffe in the Garden of Eden have an erection?

Succubus offers a less fantastical version of hell, but I suspect it will be the subject of just as much interpretation by its audience.

A first-person melee-focused horror-action game, Succubus casts players as the titular type of demon — in this case, a beautiful goat-woman who slaughters her way through a torture mountain for reasons that go completely unexplained by the essentially plotless demo I played. The game offers no window into its anti-heroine’s personality beyond a few quips about how much she enjoys killing people; a shadowy figure who pops up a couple of times is too busy making jokes about DOOM to bother offering any exposition.

While not particularly groundbreaking, Succubus‘ vision does offer one interesting innovation — Hell is the place where nothing grows. It’s a barren, rocky hellscape populated by damned souls, and decorated with flesh and bone. Everywhere the player turns they’ll find cages and torture devices built from the bodies of the dead. Armor and weapons are crafted from human bones, restraints from intestines, and blood flows everywhere like water.

Also worth investigation is the game’s conception of just who ends up in hell. The netherworld contains demons — all of which seem to hate and prey on one another — but the vast majority of enemies are human ‘warriors’. These are men who died in combat, and upon arriving in hell want nothing more than to continue being at war.

In Succubus‘ conception of morality, war itself is a sin, and all those who participate in it are destined for perdition’s flame. Each new generation arrives, fashions weaponry from the bodies of those who came before, and keep right on fighting, each imagining themselves to be the hero who will conquer hell. Of course, all of them die with just one or two swipes of a sword.

Beyond a few extreme instances of torture, however, the demo’s depiction of hell’s denizens is almost entirely male, possibly suggesting the stereotypical masculine drive towards conflict can only lead to destruction and damnation? I’d worry that I was reading too much into it if the game didn’t offer an interesting twist on the origin of the main character’s species.

Succubi are considered to be a relatively ‘new’ kind of demon, dating back just 4000 years. The script posits that during King Nimrod’s famous war against God, he sought the aid of demons and regularly sacrificed people to them. During one sacrifice, a demon took pity on a woman who was being raped by her torturers and tore her soul out while she was still alive, bringing it to hell and transforming it into a weapon to be used for tormenting men by using their lust against them. In the demo’s second most upsetting sequence, this literally occurs as a male torture victim finds himself aroused by the main character even as she tears into him and he winds up… unmanned… for his indiscretion. It’s strange, then, given the game’s cynical point of view on the inextricable link between masculinity and sexual violence, that the single most upsetting scene in the game involves a female victim.

Succubus‘ unique ‘health pack’ is a pregnant woman — a tutorial encourages the player to brutally beat this ‘sinner’ to regain health, but the gameplay conflicts with the game’s text. The focus is on doing as much damage as possible to the fetus contained in her uterus. It glows with a red light — the same visual language the game uses to indicate that an enemy is ready to be executed — and all of the player’s attacks are aimed at it, culminating in the moment when the succubus tears the fetus out of the woman and drinks its blood. It’s almost as if the original concept of the scene was built around the idea of the succubus gaining power by killing and devouring an ‘innocent’, with a fetus being the only possible innocent in hell. As unpleasant an idea as that is, it would have at least made narrative sense, rather than feeling like provocation for its own sake.

Now, a word about the gameplay — it’s a little rough at the moment.

While fundamentally functional since all of the attacks and spells work fine, the health system is pretty much broken. Other than the aforementioned torture scene, the only way to regain health is to perform finishing moves on weakened enemies. This proves surprisingly difficult to accomplish for a few reasons.

First — enemies flash red to indicate that they’re ready to be killed, but the lighting effect isn’t flashy enough to draw the player’s eye to the opportunity. This is a hell lit by torches and lava — everything is flashing red all the time.

More importantly, the player has to get incredibly close to perform the finishers, rather than leaping to the enemy as the Doomslayer would. Enemies swarm the player constantly, so the moment an enemy is staggered, there are at least three more foes lunging in with weapons and damaging the player so much that the health they gain from an execution isn’t worth the trouble.

I’ll be interested to see the finished version of Succubus when it’s released later this year — will the game’s ideas form a coherent statement about sin and punishment, or will it wind up offering nothing but blood and gore with no redeeming qualities? Will it have an interesting philosophy, or am I a fool for seeking meditations on morality in a game which features a scene in which a demoness bathes herself by using mutant hell lobsters as sponges to spread blood all over her body?

Either way, I’ll to find out.