Necrophosis review

Cosmic horror’s stunning presentation and weighty philosophical ideas are held back by a lifeless gameplay cycle

Necrophosis definitely deserves to be regarded as a deeply ambitious game. A first glance shows it to be a story set in an H.R. Giger-influenced environment, with all its skeletal frames and ribbed machinery. A little research shows the work of Zdzislaw Beksinski is at play, too, with its desert environments and mutant forms. However, this is from the developers of The Shore, a game that took Lovecraft and rendered his undersea gods and awesome cosmic horrors like no other game has so far. Necrophosis, unsurprisingly then, goes beyond simply providing striking appearances to provide a tale that brings in mythology and religion on a truly universal scale. It's a marriage of great ideas and impressive aesthetics, so it’s a shame that the impressive appearance of horror doesn't involve feeling any terror or even much awe. The experience of being in such an imaginative world ends up being a little numbing at points, which is at odds with its ambitions and big metaphysical questions.

The story begins with you awakening in the striking titular sandy wasteland. It's a place of looming, inert bodies and seemingly rock-carved tower blocks – some sort of graveyard on the edge of existence. It's not quite clear who you are or where you've come from, but a look down at your body shows a skeletal frame and dead flesh. In any case, you soon find yourself in an encounter with Lovecraftian elder gods who start you on your path out of Necrophosis. Your purpose for being here is left unclear, but it seems that the only way clear is to help other tortured souls along the way. The narrative journey is deeply surprising and works because of the ideas it sparks about the nature of the universe itself; lofty storytelling that benefits from your curiosity as it unfolds before you.

It certainly begins in compelling fashion, given that you're thrust into a gameworld with enormous spectacle but little in the way of guidance. The start of Necrophosis largely involves roaming around a circular environment, peeking in nooks and crannies, and interacting with grotesque, warped creatures of all shapes and sizes. Indeed, there are plenty of surprising variations of scale, both to be observed and even to participate in. One moment has you take control of a behemoth and drag its enormous feet across the landscape, while another puts you at ground level in the form of a scuttling spider-like creature. You’re rarely directly told what items you should be seeking, and many of them are hard to find in the nearly monochromatic desert landscape, but at first the mixture of bewilderment and wonder holds at bay any concerns with the more plodding scavenger-hunting tasks.

This delicate balance holds long enough for adventuring to meet up with major metaphysical ideas. The opening is a prelude to a conceptually much wider world, with weighty, meaningful, and appropriately unsettling questions about purpose brought to the fore. It's debatable whether you're at the end of the universe, the beginning of a new one, and whether you're a person at all. It's a story that deserves much thematic analysis, given that metaphysics aren't the typical milieu of most games. Much of these ideas are expressed through a cast of characters who are well-voiced and impressively written, so that the great cosmic drama – which even includes portentous poetry – is given the gravitas it needs. An hour of playing Necrophosis won't necessarily yield much progress, but promises a unique experience of style and intelligence.  

Players will quickly encounter moments that evoke Scorn, a game with a similar aesthetic but much greater brutality. Necrophosis offers body horror but eschews extreme gore. It is also a little friendlier to the player when it comes to the challenges of its world. There are no enemies to be fought, for one, but the puzzles are also less likely to induce frustration. In the game's early stages this feels like a satisfying blend, allowing you to soak in the world without scratching your head or feeling under much pressure. Indeed, the gameplay feels something like a not-unwelcome throwback to the days of multimedia CD-ROM, being an experience as much as a game.

In time, however, the lack of challenge is exacerbated by boring puzzles. A couple of hours in it becomes clear that Necrophosis is really a series of closed-off arenas, except dedicated to fetching items rather than furious combat. The design isn't even like a walking simulator that drives players through a number of cleverly masked corridors. Puzzle solving mostly involves running around and scouring big "rooms." At points you’ll find yourself all the way in the far reaches of the cosmos, and yet still you're stuck in a room being a busybody. You might be putting a different object in a different slot with different ramifications, yet the largely challenge-devoid gameplay loop remains a matter of running around looking for the right unspecified items to collect or interact with.

Necrophosis

Genre:	Horror
Presentation:	Realtime 3D
Theme:	Psychological, Surreal
Perspective:	First-Person
Graphic Style:	Photorealism
Gameplay:	Puzzle, Exploration
Control:	Direct Control
Game Length:	Short (1-5 hours)
Difficulty:	Medium

Terror might be implied by the game's themes and aesthetics, but the gameplay is one of the things that stops the story from getting shudder-inducingly under your skin. It's hard to feel fear when you know without doubt what you’ll end up doing. But the lore itself also undermines the fear, given that it similarly acts to disconnect you from really being in the world of Necrophosis. It's all just a poetic metaphor, perhaps best described as being about surviving the inevitability of entropy. And it really is all metaphor; as fascinating as they look, characters don't seem to have any clear history or goals beyond being archetypes like Death. The focus on theme above plot and of atmosphere above tight gameplay results in a jarring experience. Character warnings of absolute terror to come feel a little silly and almost wearying in how unbelievable they prove to be.

Wonder becomes increasingly difficult to come by, too, because of the game's pacing. It feels overstuffed, with the combination of regular awesome sights and constant treasure hunting. It shouldn't feel so predictable, given that there are dramatic tableaus of great despair and the tremendous vastness of all creation to be seen. Another key issue is that none of these sights are really grounded at all in human experience; it’s a world away from The Shore and its contrast of a rocky, earthly island with the enormity of Lovecraft's creations. A lack of restraint means that sights that should be mind-blowing quickly become pedestrian, even if still admirable in their artistry.

The experience is well-served, though, by stunning visuals powered by Unreal and brought to life with careful creature design. It is with impressive consistency that new horrors are offered up to support the cosmic scale of the story. This can be, amongst a great variety of sights, a towering, Egyptian mummy-esque creature; a ravenous, mad-eyed devourer trapped in stone; or skeletal wanderers heading ominously in your direction. These designs would be better if they were even more shocking, however, as the lack of blood, gore, and true disgust offered by such a supposedly hellish landscape undermines how torturous this world is meant to be. Indeed, the sanitized nature of the sights on offer helps to lend the tale the feeling of a fantasy or fable, rather than a true descent into the grotesqueries of life.

Similar feeling is evoked by the sound design. It can be impressive, with prayers, moans, and growls echoing around the landscape. There isn't much of a score, though, and what does play is a little underpowered. There's only one moment where I was particularly conscious of it, when I passed spindly legged humanoid creatures roaming the environment whilst on the way towards my final goal. Some rare music accompanies this calm before the storm, with drawn-out, almost wind-like string notes, but what should have been a powerful moment would have been elevated by a more unusual, ethereal score. Perhaps something discordant or electronic; something to induce wonder rather than contribute to a predictable, almost dull grandeur. So here too, the full potential of the game is held back by what feels like a lack of serious thought about the player's experience.

And yet as flawed as Necrophosis is in many ways, it has such a bold overarching narrative that I was compelled to tell my non-gaming mum about it after the astounding end. I still have some compulsion to revisit the game, despite having finished it with mixed feelings about my three-hour playthrough. This desire to replay is not because of a few minor objectives that I missed, given that I'm little interested in getting every single achievement. It's not because of any story beats I may have skipped over, either, as anyone who is not trying to speedrun the experience will stumble across all the narrative they need. Instead, although I might not have been fully satisfied by Necrophosis as an adventure or walking sim, I was still left buoyed by its ideas. The real world is full of tedium and moral failure, but the grand scale of this game acts a lingering reminder that existing, even in a morass of failure, is the most important thing above all else.

Final Verdict

Few other video games I've experienced have touched on big philosophical ideas like eternal recurrence, or left me reevaluating the way I make my way through the trenches of daily life like Necrophosis. Few others also have anything approaching its grotesquely gorgeous aesthetic, which not only successfully blends the influence of iconic horror artists but, in its scale, brings cosmic horror to life in a way previously little seen beyond the mind's eye. The conundrum here for anyone contemplating playing, of course, is that the game has clearly failed to reach its full potential, struggling to provide a compelling moment-to-moment experience. That cannot be overlooked, but I would still encourage anyone with any sort of philosophical inclination to ignore those concerns, and to trade an imperfect experience for a uniquely meaningful piece of art.

Ceridwen played Necrophosis on PC using a review code provided by the game's publisher.