True Virus spreads to Xbox, with PC and PlayStation to follow
Port of dark hand-drawn mystery originally released on Switch now available on the Xbox store
Imagine you woke up one day in the midst of a deadly pandemic. Wait, no, we’ve already done that. Okay, imagine you woke up one day in an insane asylum in the middle of an even deadlier pandemic, and you’ve got the basic idea behind True Virus, the appropriately named dark mystery adventure from indie Polish developers Farmind Studio and 100 GAMES.
As if that setup wasn’t grim enough, when you regain consciousness in the mental institution, you seem to have no idea who you are. And you may just be the only one left alive – at least, alive as we know it. There are bloody signs of violence everywhere, along with the seemingly undead zombie-like remnants of what once must have been the hospital staff and patients. Unless, of course, it’s all in your head? You are in a psychiatric ward, after all. To discover the truth behind what happened here, you’ll need to escape the building into the similarly abandoned city outside, gradually uncovering “secrets that hide in the darkness, revealing layer after layer of the disturbing story unfolding before you.”
True Virus is a stylish if disturbingly hand-drawn point-and-click adventure with a haunting soundtrack intended to evoke a “sense of anxiety and trepidation.” As you explore the 2D environments, there will be a variety of puzzles to solve, including clue-based codes and other cryptic challenges, some of which will require a “creative approach” to overcome. To progress you must “delve into the lives of forgotten patients and hospital staff,” and over the course of a projected 4-5 hours of play time, gradually you will begin “piecing together their stories and their connection to the mysterious pandemic.”
Originally released in early September exclusively for Nintendo Switch, ports of True Virus are now beginning to trickle out. The first to arrive is for Xbox One and Series X|S, with a PlayStation 4|5 version and PC release on Steam still to come, due out sometime “in the next few months.”
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