Let’s face it, a lot of the games taking part in this October’s Steam Next Fest don’t give off the best first impression. Promo art suggests a cinematic adventure for the ages, the screenshots depict a few stick-like characters stuck in a graphical nightmare from the 1980s. There are some real gems to find, but there’s a lot of chaff. Is This Game Trying to Kill Me? stands out as a real highlight. A creepy blend of escape room realism and retro dungeon crawling. I might, in fact, be in love with what developer Stately Snail is offering here.
As with many of the Steam Next Fest demos, the teaser is brief (although a nice way to spend a good chunk of your lunch break), but after I’d completed it I did what this article series suggests and added it to my wishlist. So why did this game delight me so much? I guess I’m a bit of a sucker for games that aren’t quite as they seem – Pony Island, Inscryption, and the like. This one, though, feels more grounded, albeit with a heavy sprinkling of supernatural, otherworldly goings on.
Spoiling the whole demo would defeat the purpose of me trying to convince you to play it yourself, but the concept is a neat one: you find yourself in a cabin, there’s a skeleton on a bed, an odd clock in the corner, some bizarre items around the place, and a prompt asking you to interact with a computer that’s sat in the middle of the room – a computer that offers up a retro-styled dungeon adventure game. After a bit of poking around a gameshow host of sorts (imagine Bradley Walsh from Gladiators, but he’s a ghoul) gives you the lowdown of what’s going on and you start your adventure, both on the computer and also in the room itself.
Unlike some other games in the genre, there’s no trickery about what’s going on as such, although I expect things to become more unusual as the game progresses. From the very start, you know you are playing a game on a computer in a room and quickly learn that the room itself is part of the game, the two worlds interacting. While on the computer you can glance around the room (handy to scan for clues on how to solve the in-game-in-game puzzle) or get up and walk around freely. In one instance, a set of blocks placed in the cabin created a path to a collectible in the retro game – that kind of thing. Another puzzle saw each failure release a set of death spikes from the ceiling and it was Game Over.
The demo whizzed by, for sure, and I’d become well and truly sucked into the game world by the end of it. But I do have concerns about how the full game will keep things interesting. First impressions are absolutely fantastic, the game delivering the kind of standout moments that you’re desperate to tell friends about or offer sage advice on, hoping others don’t find the puzzle solutions so you can show off how smart you are. But is the rest going to feel gimmicky before too long? I honestly hope it doesn’t.