Necrophosis |

Publisher: Ares Dragonis

Developer: Dragonis Ares

Release Date: 04/25/2025

Available Exclusively On

Surreal horror games are becoming more popular, but outside of the retro PS1 style graphic-type games, there’s not much. Bio/biomechanical horror is something I really love, and my two favorite artists of all time are H.R. Giger and Zdzisław Beksiński. Their worlds and art are unlike any other. The surreal, dreamlike atmosphere invokes feelings of sadness, regret, melancholy, hopelessness, and many feelings of anguish and misery. While Giger has more of a focus on characters, Beksiński focuses on entire worlds. Vast landscapes that seem to go on forever and scenery that feels like it would invoke the darkest fears you could possibly imagine. The striking lines of Beksiński’s art with vertical and horizontal latticing of flesh and frozen faces of agony and torment are stunning and hard to look away from. This type of art has only really been done in more modern games, with those being Scorn and The Medium. Sadly, there’s also some sort of curse with these games having stunning soundscapes, art, and ideas but just not being the greatest in terms of gameplay.

Necrophosis is what Scorn should have. No first-person gunplay; just puzzles and walking around and soaking in this insane world. There’s clear influence from Scorn in Necrophosis, from the main character’s design to the aforementioned art direction. You wander around incredibly detailed landscapes and will just pause and look at every strange mountain face and object before solving the mundane puzzles and object hunting. Mountains are literal faces, countless giant bodies frozen in scenes of torture and dread. Closer up there will be smaller scenes of deathlike people or creatures depicting the moment of death or representing their current state of endless torture. Some creatures are stuck inside of objects, twisted and gnarled into globs of flesh and eyeballs with just a mouth. Some will plead to you to end their suffering. This is usually done by adding them to your inventory (yes, entire bodies) and using them to solve puzzles. You will carry this fleshling around with you with their frozen face staring at you. There might be another creature who needs divination, so you feed them something, and out comes a key to advance a puzzle.

It’s not the puzzles themselves that are fascinating. Quite the opposite. These are very simple in form. There is usually a small area, and you will see different spots to place objects represented by floating gold dust. It’s a matter of interacting with everything, gathering objects, sticking them in the right spot, getting new objects, or manipulating certain items. Manipulation is just as disturbing as talking to the inhabitants of this world. You pull your brain out of your skull and stick it inside of another being (sometimes interlocked with other beings) to do things like using a skull spider to climb up onto a fifty-foot fleshy creature sitting in a flesh chair and just scooting their legs backwards so the throne-like object blocks the view of another creature so you can walk past. That sounds insane when reading, but words can’t do this game world justice. It needs to be experienced to understand what’s going on.

With this being an indie game developed by a few people, there is some mechanical jank here. Walking is rather slow, animations are a little stiff and animatronic-like, controls feel slightly sluggish, and the game is insanely linear to a fault. Clearly the main focus was the art direction, and everything else was an afterthought to make it a game. Thankfully, the devs aren’t doing anything that feels bad, such as combat. Some creatures can hurt you, but it’s as simple as walking around them or solving a puzzle to get past them. There’s no stealth or anything like that either. This is a pure walking simulator, and it helps ease the jank of the gameplay to make it tolerable.

Overall, I can’t stress enough how much this game needs to be experienced. It’s one of the most visually striking games I have played since Scorn. It’s something you will talk to your friends about. This type of horror is the true stuff of nightmares. No jumpscares, no eerie soundtrack. Just straight-up horrifying visuals, and you are surrounded by them. Your entire world is just that. I also have to mention the haunting voices of some of these creatures that are just booming noises of bass and sounds. It’s unnerving and something I have never heard in any game before. I just wish there was more to the gameplay side.