Upstairs review

• Reviews by Sam Amiotte-Beaulieu
• Published:

Compact, retro-styled adventure has its up and downs but is a solidly constructed dark comic adventure

There’s something about high-rise apartments that lends itself well to horror. A crashing and scampering from the floor above that you tell yourself is the cat running around at midnight, only to find the neighbor upstairs lives alone. A scream from a room whose direction you can’t quite place, or the boom of an explosion below that sounds a bit too real to be a movie with the volume cranked to max. In most cases, the source of such a disturbance ends up being mundane and unexciting. In Karellen Games’s debut adventure game Upstairs, however, all of the bumps in the night are worst case scenarios – whether it’s a serial killing kidnapper or a crazed cult worshipping a deity of unholy dark power. A few design issues prevent it from reaching the full height of its potential, but it’s all played for jet black comedy and works in some fun puzzles to keep things engaging.

You play a nameless child who was abducted by a deranged old woman who has been trapping children and locking them in cages hidden away in her apartment for decades. Finally, five years after snatching you, the woman makes a mistake that inadvertently frees you of your confinement. Nearby are the skeletons of less fortunate captives, and in the woman’s bathroom is a bloody tub filled with acid and more bones of her victims. It’s not clear why she does this, other than being completely insane. (She is obsessed with a pop star named Britney, with all of her non-murdery household items being Britney-themed.) What is clear is that you have to escape – starting with getting the heck out of the crazy lady’s apartment.

Exploring the building reveals that it’s not just your kidnapper that’s a bit weird here: a strange old man on the bottom floor speaks in riddles at a locked gate standing between you and your freedom, and a jumpy conspiracy theorist obsesses over deep state dangers. In order to help the nameless boy break out, you will have to explore every floor of the complex and use your wits – and perseverance – to find a way to freedom.

Upstairs is a side-scrolling point-and-click adventure with a sort of slimmed-down SCUMM-styled interface. Everything is controlled with the mouse, with the playable area occupying the top half of the screen and your inventory and actions (consisting of “Pick up,” “Use,” “Look at” and “Talk to”) visible at the bottom at all times. Mousing over interactive hotspots in the background will pop up a text descriptor for them in the middle space just above your inventory. Right clicks will perform whatever default action is most commonly associated with the hotspot your cursor is hovering over – typically “Look at” when clicking on background objects or “Talk to” when clicking on a character.

Character sprites and retro pixel art backgrounds are nicely detailed and full of meticulously crafted elements in both design and animation. The top floor, guarded by a red-robed cultist, is decorated with unsettling paintings and a demonic effigy lit by red candles, while the apartment of a man wearing massive glasses is filled with nerdy figurines of movie monsters lining the sides of bookshelves jam-packed with hundreds of movies ready for viewing.

Everyone you meet has little quirks in their movements that make them feel distinct: another cultist whips out a flask and takes a swig every once in a while when no one’s looking, and your pop-star-obsessed kidnapper taps her leg with one hand while watching a Britney documentary the boy says she has watched countless times. You may be limited in the locations and people you meet, but that helps ensure that no two areas or encounters feel the same.

While traversing this high-rise of horrors, the tone is less terror and more twisted humor. Early on you can find a severed head and the ability to show it to random folks leads to some hilarious interactions. (Even the boy isn’t entirely sure why he decided to pick it up.) Cultists attempting to summon a dark god groove to club music being played out of a massive pipe organ, and while looking at a spooky painting the boy remarks that it “looks like a Dark Souls boss.” It’s a dire situation that gets darker the higher you climb in the complex, but it’s always with a playful element that keeps things from feeling depressing.

Upstairs

Genre:	Thriller
Presentation:	2D or 2.5D
Theme:	Escape, Abduction
Perspective:	Third-Person
Graphic Style:	Pixel art
Gameplay:	Puzzle, Quest
Control:	Point-and-click
Game Length:	Short (1-5 hours)
Difficulty:	Medium

The apartment building is a pretty small area to traverse overall, but you will comb through the entire structure numerous times before reaching the ending. The elevator is out of order when you first start exploring so that leads to a lot of stair climbing, even after you solve a puzzle to get it functioning again, as it only travels between the top and bottom floors. Some items gathered higher up are needed for puzzles lower in the building, so progress can feel a bit aimless at times. Your ultimate goal is to leave through the front door on the bottom floor, but in order to do so you’ll have to make your way up to the rooftop that hides a dark secret (and then make your way down, and up, and down again to keep using newfound items with rooms you’ve seen numerous times before).

The young protagonist’s chuckle-worthy descriptions for many of the objects and environments you encounter is welcome, as a large amount of your time will be spent mousing over everything on-screen in search of something that can be picked up or a way to progress the game. There is no hotspot highlighter, and even with the description labels that pop up, there are so many possibilities that it’s hard to determine what might be required, and some of them are very little. The worst culprit is a small torn piece of wallpaper that you need to interact with, but you cannot pick up the piece and instead must use it with another item in a rather unintuitive way.

This brings me to my biggest problem with Upstairs, which only emerges after you identify points of apparent interest. Every location you explore is filled with objects that would be key pieces of a puzzle in many other adventures, but the boy has an endless list of excuses as to why he doesn’t want to pick them up. A broom in one room, an empty bottle in another – I’ve played lots of inventory-based games where these types of things are crucial to progress, but here I was frequently frustrated by the number of objects the boy said he didn’t want or need. This is doubly irritating when the boy convinces himself to pick up the aforementioned severed head, when so many more practical items are just there as environmental background.

As a result, the game begins to feel less like a quest-based scavenger hunt and more like checking off boxes of what random items you’ve tried to pick up already on the off chance it will be needed for one of the puzzles. I would have preferred significantly fewer hotspots if most of them are just going to be relegated to extraneous detail. If a vacuum cleaner or a hanger is going to be interactive but can’t be picked up for use, I would rather they not be highlighted at all to avoid confusion with all the other environmental details.

Thankfully, solutions to the inventory puzzles themselves are enjoyable to unravel once you start figuring out what items can actually be used. Puzzles generally follow standard adventure game logic, but with a slight underlying deviousness that gives this game its unique identity. Having to put together a disguise to infiltrate a cult living in a big city apartment building after promising a conspiracy theorist to help turn down the volume on their pipe organ is a specifically Upstairs experience. And when it works, it’s a good time (even if the game’s story deals with some pretty bleak imagery).

There is no voice acting but throughout the game you are accompanied by a phenomenal chiptune soundtrack reminiscent of SEGA Genesis soundfonts (with some sound effects lifted directly from Genesis games). There is a deep bass that plays as you are sneaking around your kidnapper’s apartment, which is then drowned out by an upbeat pop tune blasting from the TV broadcasting a Britney documentary special as you walk past. The ending cutscene and credits have a full vocal track that absolutely blew me away, and is easily my favorite tune in the game.

Final Verdict

It can be frustrating to sift through a jumble of background objects that have no impact whatsoever, but otherwise Upstairs is an enjoyable adventure through one of the world’s weirdest apartment buildings. Clocking in at under two hours, it’s a short but fairly sweet experience that serves as a fun evening of puzzle solving and spooky exploration featuring some twisted imagery that is less scary and more jet-black comedy. While there aren’t a ton of characters to interact with, the weirdos who populate the complex are all a treat to talk with, and the boy’s ongoing commentary about the alarming situation he’s in is consistently funny. Child abduction is no laughing matter, of course, but with neighbors like these, turning the tables proves to be a pleasantly uplifting experience. 

Sam played Upstairs on PC using a review code provided by the game's publisher.