Is This Game Trying to Kill Me? review

• Reviews by Beau
• Published:

You’ll die in plenty of amusing ways in this short 2D/3D puzzler, but have to live with a wonky camera and ill-fated timed sequences

Yes, this game killed me early and often, and perhaps my greatest disappointment is that it doesn’t keep a death counter. I earned those deaths! All fifty of them! (At least.)

Is This Game Trying to Kill Me?, by indie developer Stately Snail, explores what it would be like if what happens to you inside a video game also happened to you back in the real world. While this concept could be interesting as an epic drama, here it is simply a good excuse for some uniquely clever puzzles that require you to manipulate two different game worlds to save yourself. And although a few unexpected action-oriented and time-based sections muck things up a bit, this short but entertaining game offers a lot of dastardly brainteasers for adventurers who enjoy logic puzzles.

The game opens in a first-person 3-D environment that looks like a generic home or cabin, where you wake up next to a skeleton in your bed, from which you quickly abscond. You then find yourself in a single room with no exits and what can only be described as various and sundry items. There’s an owl clock on the wall, a random button sitting on a crate, and a locked chest. Also, in the middle is a desktop computer. After finding nothing apparent to do, a horrifying skeletal figure appears in the window and threatens to cause your first untimely death before challenging you to escape the room on your own. Following his departure, the computer has power and invites you to play “Castle Serpentshtain,” with the goal of finding the rumored treasures an evil wizard has hidden within.

The game within a game here features an overhead 2D sprite-based environment reminiscent of the 16-bit graphic era. You control a nondescript man in a dungeon who must manipulate his surroundings to unlock doors and defuse traps to advance to each subsequent room. The first puzzle has you activate a device that projects some symbols onto the wall back in the real world. These symbols (written in blood) correlate to symbols on various shields back in the desktop game, and it’s up to you to decipher the connection and how to manipulate the shields to open the door. Once that’s out of the way, the next room presents real danger with a set of spikes you must cross by solving a similar logic puzzle. And if you step on the spikes in the desktop game, back in the real world a set of spikes force their way out of the monitor and summarily impale you, leading to a game over screen that mocks you before sending you back to try again.

Play continues as such, with dangers in Castle Serpentshtain putting your life on the line as well. Soon you’ll open a chest in the computer game that is surprisingly empty, only to realize the mysterious chest in the real world is now open. That random button on a crate will also have a use that soon becomes apparent. Solving puzzles in the castle will open up new rooms in the real world, and vice versa. Dozens of lateral logic puzzles await, with the difficulty of each one varying based on how your brain works. While I found a couple of puzzles stretched the bounds of logic a bit, the desktop computer has graduated hints (in the form of pictures) for every puzzle and usually includes the final answer if you’re truly stuck. I rarely had to use the final hint and generally found the game satisfying for the three hours or so it took to reach the ending.

Unfortunately, on a few occasions there are timed sequences that require dexterity and rely less on logic than they do on luck or enemy pattern recognition. One ridiculous section I don’t mind spoiling entails a leprechaun you meet in the castle game threatening to kill you unless you win a game of hide-and-seek with him in the real world. What transpires next is a frantic race against the clock as you pixel hunt around the house trying to locate him five times. Should you die (which I did at least ten times), you have to start the sequence all over again. Probably one-tenth of my total game time was wasted on this irrelevant and frustrating child’s game.

There are also a few boss battles, some which take place in the 2D environment, some in the real world. While they’re not overly complex, they’re generally not fun. While in the castle, your character gets placed on a grid of tiles and will have to avoid attacks coming at him. One attack is what appears to be a bunch of scythes lined up to slice you open, so you have to quickly move to a safe row before they fly across the room. Another variation includes most tiles lighting up with a bright red X, and in less than a few seconds you have to find an empty tile lest a bomb fall on you. When there’s a break in the action, you need to quickly touch one of several icons that represents the boss’s weakness, which takes very little deduction.

Is This Game Trying to Kill Me?

Genre:	Horror
Presentation:	Realtime 3D
Theme:	Escape, Paranormal
Perspective:	First-Person
Gameplay:	Puzzle
Game Length:	Short (1-5 hours)
Difficulty:	Medium
Graphic Style:	Simulated realism

The 3D real-world boss battles are similar in style except more difficult. As they’re happening, it’s hard to know when to look up or look down for danger, and I was killed many times during an excruciatingly long and tedious battle. At least when you do die (and you will!), you will be restored right before the boss battle begins. While you never have to redo any puzzle you’ve already solved, the boss battles are long enough that dying is no longer fun. For those not quick with their hands, the bosses are a major roadblock, and for those who are, it all seems rather pointless.

Both keyboard/mouse and gamepad layouts are available and both are equally fine options, especially since outside of moving around and using the interact button, the only other thing you can do is jump and it’s almost never used anyway. The necessary setting on the camera sensitivity slider for conducive gameplay is wildly different based on the method you choose, however, so if you want to switch between methods while playing, you’ll want to note that.

My biggest gripe with Is This Game Trying to Kill Me? (and this may be unique to me), sadly, is the camera itself. In the 3D environment, whenever you stop moving laterally, the camera has to quickly swivel about ten degrees back to its resting position, and let me tell you I had to take frequent breaks because of how dizzy I was getting. I’m an old man, sure, but that’s never happened to me while playing a game before. I’m not exaggerating when I say it began to sap most of the joy out of the game for me.

When the camera isn’t making your head spin in nauseating fashion, the graphic style is fun. The colorful 3D environment is no more detailed than a game from 25 years ago, and when the game is going for whimsy (such as the vending machine behind a barred gate in the dining room) it works well. However, when the game is going for scares (such as in the boss battles) it seems too basic and silly to set the mood effectively. The 2D sprites are crisp and pleasant to look at with some occasional slick lighting effects. Both environments have sparse but effective animations, such as a sink filling with blood, spiders coming at your face, or tiles sinking beneath the surface of the water.

There’s a general haunting synth melody ever-present in the background, with some up-tempo changes when you’re in danger (such as the hide and seek game). Since it’s always there, though, it eventually ceases to be haunting, and I turned the volume lower so I wasn’t distracted by it. There are simple and effective sound effects for basic actions such as pushing buttons, pulling levers, and running water. The best effects are saved for the kill shots: whether you’re being skewered by spikes, punctured by arrows, or mauled by a spider, you’ll be sure to squirm a bit in your seat.

There are three endings, all reachable during the game’s final moments: one bad, one neutral, and one good, though each ending is just a one-page denouement with a still photo. Given that there’s no emotional investment in the player character, there’s no inclination to find them all other than completionism or the desire to play a bit longer. As the game auto-saves over the same slot each time, those who want to see all three endings without starting over should intentionally shoot for what they think is the bad ending first. The neutral ending requires solving a couple of more puzzles (which locks you out of the bad ending) and the good ending requires solving a couple more after that.

Final Verdict

Your enjoyment of Is This Game Trying to Kill Me? will surely be dependent on how much the puzzles tickle your brain. For a rough guide as to their general difficulty, I would say it’s a bit more challenging than the Professor Layton series but not nearly as mentally taxing as Braid or The Witness. If that hits the sweet spot for you, and you aren’t bothered by the occasional action-oriented challenge and a slightly wonky camera, then I would recommend picking this one up and allowing yourself the privilege of unremitting death. 

Beau played Is This Game Trying to Kill Me? on PC using a review code provided by the game's publisher.

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