If there’s one thing I love doing first thing in the morning, it’s launching myself into a festively atrocious trench network, where gasmasks glare from the offal like toppled gargoyles, and sea mines dangle overhead like enormous germ cells. Here be monsters. Here be dropped diary pages. Here be a tormenting combo of “handcrafted” characters and permadeath. Here be, er, minigames.
“A grimdark machine for martyrdom, fed by flesh and devotion,” is how In Hope Voiden describes itself. In this first-person survival horror, you are 12 people in succession, each laden with baggage of one kind or another, each trying to make sense of a rusty hellmouth that marries the grot of World War 1 to the grain of PS1. It’s the work of German team Stilbruch Games. Here’s a trailer.
The retro aesthetics might sound tedious on paper. There are a lot of PS1-style horror games. But this one grabs me both for the density and peculiarity of its setting – is that a stained glass window, deep in the catacombs? – and for the ensemble format. “Each individual has a personal mission, unique traits, and only one life,” the Steam page goes on. “Every action matters. Every failure lingers. When one life ends, another takes its place. The world remembers. The horror deepens.”
Aside from exploring the pasts and motivations of the character in hand, you will also “discover the truth of a place where war broke reality”. The blurb writing is perhaps a bit over-the-top in the non-World-War sense, though I absolutely don’t have the right to complain about this after penning that line about the germ cells. Hopefully the in-game lore is sparser and subtler. Let those gnashing textures speak for themselves, I say.
You might expect the minigames to be a refreshing distraction from all the misery, a touch of match-3 to cheer you up when you’re, I don’t know, picking ghost shrapnel from your thighs. Fool! The minigames are all part of the plan! They are the grimdarkest bits of all!
“Lighting a flare. Bandaging a wound. Forcing a door. Enemies don’t wait. Your mistakes cost you time. And time costs lives,” summarises the Steam page. There also appears to be combat, or at least, there is a brief glimpse in the trailer of somebody firing a gun at something ghastly, but I’m not expecting this to be any kind of shooter. That gun is probably going to fill you with undeserved confidence and get you gnawed and despoiled by mutant trench rats.
Parallel-wise, I guess this is the lumbering, corner-peeking lovechild of Amnesia: The Bunker and Saturnalia. It has no release date, only the ominous prediction that it is “coming soon”.
