Horror Game Review: Tenebris Somnia (by Andrés Borghi, Tobías Rusjan & Saibot Studios)

Posted on October 19, 2026 by Arleigh

“What if they aren’t just nightmares…” — Tenebris Somnia

A breakup can leave plenty of unfinished business, but fighting monsters in your ex’s apartment is a pretty extreme way to deal with it. That’s the uncomfortable territory Tenebris Somnia explores, turning lingering concern and shared history into the foundations of a supernatural nightmare. Developed by Andrés Borghi, Tobías Rusjan, and Saibot Studios, this indie horror game pairs retro 8-bit-style gameplay with live-action sequences. The combination gives it an immediately recognizable identity, but the relationship underneath keeps it from feeling like a technical experiment. Its strongest idea is that leaving somebody behind doesn’t necessarily mean escaping the life you built together.

Julia, a filmmaker, returns to her ex-boyfriend Ivan’s apartment after recurring nightmares show him being attacked by horrific creatures. Checking on him seems reasonable enough, even if revisiting their former home already promises an awkward conversation. Unfortunately, Ivan’s involvement with a mysterious cult has made the situation considerably worse than Julia expects. She becomes caught in spaces distorted by memory and supernatural forces, where their shared past is no longer something she can keep at a comfortable distance. Concern gets her through the door, but understanding what’s happening requires confronting more than the immediate danger.

Their background in filmmaking makes that history more interesting than a generic troubled romance. Creative collaboration has become tangled up with affection, ambition, and resentment, leaving Julia and Ivan’s personal disappointments difficult to separate from their artistic ones. Revisiting the relationship means questioning what they wanted from each other and how those expectations changed. Julia also has her own convictions, which keeps her from becoming a passive visitor inside Ivan’s breakdown. She has an emotional stake in the memories being uncovered, and the story benefits from treating their history as something both characters experienced rather than something only he gets to define.

That tension between recognition and discomfort carries into the presentation. During gameplay, the retro 8-bit-style pixel art reduces rooms, characters, and monsters to relatively simple forms. It’s a deliberate choice, but not one everyone will enjoy. Players accustomed to hyper-realistic CG graphics may find the chunky sprites and limited detail more distancing than frightening, especially if visual realism is central to their enjoyment of horror. The game asks you to let your imagination finish the picture. If that aesthetic leaves you cold, the live-action footage won’t necessarily make the playable sections more appealing.

For players willing to embrace it, though, the contrast does more than provide a novelty. A creature that looked unpleasant in pixel form suddenly has texture, weight, and a disturbingly physical presence. Recognizable details connect the two styles, making the filmed sequences feel like a closer view of the same nightmare. Careful framing and expressive performances help maintain that connection, with Clara Kovacic giving Julia a human presence beyond her small playable sprite. The practical and digital effects also benefit from relatively clear footage. Without artificial VHS damage constantly obscuring the image, the monsters have nowhere to hide—and neither do you.

Between those sequences, Tenebris Somnia follows a familiar survival-horror routine of searching rooms, collecting objects, solving puzzles, and managing limited supplies. The sound design reinforces the uncertainty through harsh effects and recognizable monster noises, making danger a concern before it necessarily appears on-screen. Puzzles encourage you to understand the environment rather than simply move through it. Strange connections suit a setting distorted by memory, provided the clues establish enough logic. Progress becomes less satisfying when an easily overlooked item or interaction point sends you circling the same room. Careful investigation builds atmosphere; repeatedly checking everything because one detail barely registers tends to drain it.

Combat is less assured, largely because its survival-horror intentions are more convincing than its execution. Melee attacks, firearms, and evasive movement give Julia options, while limited ammunition makes fighting a decision rather than a reflex. Removing an enemy might make exploration safer, but those bullets could be more valuable later. That’s an effective source of tension when encounters cooperate with it. The problem is that stiffness can shift your attention away from resource management and toward the basic difficulty of carrying out your plan. Instead of worrying about whether an attack is worth attempting, you can end up worrying about whether it will behave as expected.

Cramped spaces make that friction more noticeable because there’s less room to recover when an attack or evasive movement goes wrong. Horror benefits from making a protagonist vulnerable, but vulnerability still needs consistent rules. Otherwise, the fear of getting hurt gives way to irritation about how the damage happened. Boss encounters expose those weaknesses more clearly. Their designs make a strong first impression, but some fights demand more precision and repetition than the mechanics comfortably support. Checkpoints soften failure without making every retry engaging. The creatures are often more compelling as disturbing presences than as opponents you have to repeatedly bring down.

Those shortcomings keep Tenebris Somnia from being an effortless recommendation, particularly for players who need polished combat or dislike retro graphics. Still, its relationship drama, filmmaking background, and mixed-media presentation reinforce one another in a way that gives the experience genuine personality. The monsters aren’t the only reason Julia’s return feels uncomfortable; they make an already complicated reunion physically dangerous. For horror fans drawn to atmosphere and unsettling imagery, that combination has plenty of appeal. The visit begins with concern for someone Julia once loved, then becomes a reminder that caring about a person and understanding what they’ve become are very different things.

Clive Barker’s Hellraiser: Revival (by Saber Interactive) Horror Game Review

Posted on October 17, 2026 by Arleigh

“Your suffering has only just begun, we have such sights to show you.” — Pinhead

Hell is not supposed to be inviting, but Clive Barker’s Hellraiser: Revival understands that the most dangerous doors are the ones that look like they might lead somewhere extraordinary. Developed and published by Saber Interactive and released in October 2026 for PC, PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X/S, and Nintendo Switch 2, this first-person survival-horror action game is a new chapter in the franchise rather than a direct adaptation of any single film. It was written in collaboration with Clive Barker himself, and that involvement gives it a stronger artistic identity than most licensed horror games manage. Revival understands that Hellraiser is not merely about monsters, chains, and gore. It is about desire, pain, ritual, bodily transformation, and the unsettling possibility that suffering can feel like a doorway to something greater.

The setup is classic Hellraiser. Aidan Lynch gets pulled into a nightmare involving Cenobites, cultists, and Pinhead after his girlfriend opens the Genesis Configuration, a puzzle box that is absolutely not the sort of thing you should mess with if you value having a normal weekend. From there, Aidan has to survive, fight, sneak, solve puzzles, and eventually try to rescue her from hell. It is a simple premise, but it gives the game room to lean into the franchise’s central themes. This is not just “monster chases person through dark hallway.” It is about obsession, temptation, the body as a site of horror, and the dangerous seduction of giving yourself over to something that promises transcendence and delivers a very bad time. The story has its clumsy moments, but the relationship between Aidan and the nightmare world around him gives the campaign more emotional weight than your average survival-horror rescue plot.

Visually, Revival is often spectacular in the most upsetting possible way. The game understands that Hellraiser is not merely about gore; it is about elaborate, almost ceremonial ugliness. Flesh is sculpted rather than simply splattered. The Cenobites look like religious icons that have been left in a butcher shop for a century. Pinhead, unsurprisingly, looks fantastic, and the game clearly understands that his presence needs to feel less like a slasher villain and more like an elegant, patient force of cosmic punishment. The detailed character models, cadaver-laden environments, and Escher-like spaces are major strengths. There are rooms in this game that feel like they were designed by someone who looked at a cathedral, a medical museum, and a bad acid trip, then asked, “What if all three had a baby?”

The sound design deserves just as much credit. Chains rattle, flesh tears, distant voices groan, and the whole soundscape keeps you uneasy even when nothing is actively trying to remove your skin. That matters because Hellraiser: Revival is less interested in constant jump scares than in maintaining a low, persistent sense of dread. It wants you to feel like you have wandered somewhere you were never meant to be, and that the walls are not just walls. The atmosphere is the game’s best weapon. Even when the mechanics get repetitive or the combat turns sloppy, the world itself keeps pulling you forward.

Gameplay-wise, Revival is a first-person blend of survival horror and action, and its closest comparison is probably the classic first-person horror game Condemned: Criminal Origins rather than the usual over-the-shoulder formula associated with most Resident Evil games. You control Aidan as he explores hostile environments, manages limited resources, crafts healing supplies and ammunition, solves puzzles, uses stealth, and fights both hostile humans and demonic Cenobites. Like Condemned, it puts you directly behind the character’s eyes, emphasizes close-quarters violence and environmental unease, and makes combat feel messy, desperate, and physical rather than clean and cinematic. That said, Resident Evil has dabbled in first-person horror too, most notably with Resident Evil Village, so Revival is not operating in a completely unfamiliar space. It simply leans harder into the grimy, immediate, first-person brutality of something like Condemned than into the more polished action-horror rhythm of modern Resident Evil.

The Genesis Configuration is the game’s best original mechanic. It is not just a puzzle box you manipulate during quiet exploration; it can also become a combat and traversal tool, giving Aidan supernatural abilities that help distinguish the game from other first-person horror titles. When the game lets you use the box in clever ways, Revival feels like it has found its own identity. The problem is that those moments are not consistent enough. Too often, the game retreats into standard survival-horror routines: find key, open door, craft item, shoot monster, repeat. The environments are so memorable that you forgive some of this, but you still notice it.

Combat is where the game is at its weakest. At its best, it is merely average; at its worst, it is outright clunky. The unreliable hitboxes are a persistent problem, with melee swings and gunfire sometimes failing to connect in ways that feel unfair rather than intentionally punishing. Resource management does not help matters, because the game can make ammunition, healing items, and breakable equipment feel scarce without always giving you a satisfying reason for that scarcity. If you have played Resident Evil Village or MachineGames’ Indiana Jones game, the difference in feel will be obvious. Those games can make first-person combat tense, responsive, and physically convincing. Revival, by comparison, can feel like a slog: enemies absorb hits inconsistently, weapons lack satisfying feedback, and encounters that should be frightening instead become tedious exercises in whiffing attacks and managing a stubborn inventory. The combat is not broken, but it often lacks the weight and precision that make great horror action feel rewarding.

The game’s length, however, hits a pretty comfortable Goldilocks range. If you are mainly playing through the story on Normal difficulty without hunting down every Easter egg, collectible, or optional side quest, you can likely finish it in around ten to fifteen hours. Completionists who want to see everything the game has to offer can probably stretch that to somewhere between twenty and thirty-five hours. That feels right for this kind of experience. Hellraiser: Revival is not trying to be Elden Ring or Skyrim, and thank goodness for that. It is a contained, atmospheric horror campaign rather than an open-world time sink, and its runtime gives the story enough room to breathe without wearing out its welcome.

The ending also gives the story a little extra replay value without turning the game into a sprawling choice-driven epic. Near the conclusion, Aidan faces one major decision, and the choice you make determines which of the game’s two endings you receive. I will not spoil what those outcomes are, but the decision feels appropriately Hellraiser: it is less about picking the obviously heroic option and more about deciding what Aidan is willing to sacrifice, accept, or become in order to reach the end of his nightmare. It is a smart way to close a story built around temptation, and it gives players a reason to consider how differently the final chapter might unfold under another choice.

The enemy design helps compensate for the rougher combat. Cenobites are inherently terrifying, and the game uses them well in chase sequences and moments where you feel trapped rather than empowered. There are sections where the game pushes you to run, hide, or simply survive long enough to reach safety, and those are among its most effective sequences. The best horror games understand that the player should not always feel like an action hero, and Revival understands that better than it understands, say, melee hit registration. When a Cenobite is bearing down on you and the soundtrack turns into a wall of industrial dread, the game absolutely works.

The content warnings are not decorative. This is an extremely graphic game, with intense violence, dismemberment, nudity, sexual content, drugs, and body horror that goes well beyond standard AAA horror fare. Some players will find that excessive. Others will argue, fairly, that Hellraiser has always been about transgression, and that a sanitized version would feel dishonest. I mostly land in the second camp, though the game does occasionally mistake intensity for depth. There are moments where the shock value feels purposeful and thematically connected, and other moments where it feels like the game is shouting, “Look how extreme we are!” The strongest Hellraiser material has always had a strange philosophical seriousness underneath the flesh and chains. Revival captures that sometimes, but not always.

So where does that leave Clive Barker’s Hellraiser: Revival? I think it is a flawed but genuinely worthwhile horror game, especially for people who already love the franchise. It is not a masterpiece on the level of the best modern Resident Evil entries, and it does not fully escape the feeling of being a very well-dressed genre pastiche. But it has something many horror games lack: a real artistic identity. It is ugly in a deliberate, expressive way. It is uncomfortable on purpose. It treats hell not as a generic demon dimension but as a place shaped by appetite, pain, ritual, and desire. The Genesis Configuration gives it a few moments of genuine originality, the two-ending finale gives its themes a fitting final test, and the atmosphere carries it through stretches where the gameplay repeats itself.

If you are sensitive to extreme gore or sexual content, this is an easy skip. If you want polished, mechanically innovative survival horror above all else, you may come away disappointed. But if you have ever watched the first two Hellraiser films and wished a game could capture that specific blend of gothic elegance and bodily nightmare, Revival is absolutely worth enduring its rough edges. It is a game that occasionally hurts to play, though not always in the way it intends. Still, for a franchise that has spent decades exploring the thin line between pleasure and suffering, that feels weirdly appropriate.

Review: Balatro

Posted on August 1, 2026 by Arleigh

It is incredibly rare to find a game that completely takes over your brain in the way that Balatro has. Developed by a solo creator going by the name LocalThunk and published by Playstack, this little indie game dropped out of nowhere and quickly became one of the most talked-about releases of the year. On the surface, it looks like a pretty standard digital poker game. You have a deck of cards, you get dealt a hand, and you try to make the best poker hand possible. But spend about five minutes with it, and you will quickly realize that Balatro is not actually a poker game at all. It is a brilliantly disguised roguelike deck-builder that uses the universal language of poker hands as its foundation to create one of the most addicting gameplay loops I have ever experienced.

The core mechanics start off simple enough to teach anyone, even if you have never played a card game in your life. You are trying to beat a certain score threshold, known as a blind, by playing poker hands. A pair gives you a base amount of chips and a small multiplier. A flush gives you more chips, and a straight flush gives you even more. You play through a series of antes, and the score requirements get higher and higher as you progress. If you fail to reach the score limit with the hands you are dealt, your run is over and you have to start from scratch. It sounds like standard video poker, but the magic of Balatro lies in what happens between these hands.

This is where the deck-building and roguelike elements come crashing in to completely warp your perspective on playing cards. After every blind, you visit a shop where you can spend your hard-earned money on various upgrades. The most important of these are Jokers. You can have up to five Jokers at a time, and each one fundamentally breaks the rules of poker in wildly different ways. One Joker might give you a massive multiplier every time you play a pair. Another might destroy a card in your hand and give you extra chips for each card destroyed. Another might only activate if you play a hand that contains a spade. Suddenly, you are no longer trying to play the statistically best poker hand. You are trying to play the hand that best satisfies the chaotic rules of your specific Jokers.

The deck-building goes even deeper when you factor in the other items you can buy in the shop. Planet cards permanently level up specific poker hands, meaning your flushes will naturally score more points without needing a Joker to boost them. Tarot cards let you literally alter your deck by changing the suit of a card, turning a card into a wild card, or destroying cards outright to thin your deck and increase your chances of drawing the cards you actually need. Spectral cards offer high-risk, high-reward effects that can either make your run legendary or immediately ruin it. If you have ever played a game like Slay the Spire or Monster Train, you will feel right at home with how these systems interlock, but Balatro manages to feel entirely fresh because of its playing card aesthetic.

As a roguelike, the game structure demands that you adapt to what the game gives you. You cannot force a flush-focused build if the shop only gives you Jokers that synergize with pairs and high cards. You have to pivot your strategy on the fly, which leads to these beautifully chaotic runs where you end up winning through sheer absurdity. To keep you on your toes, every eighth blind is a Boss Blind. These bosses apply a universal handicap to your run, like disabling the effect of all face cards, or making it so playing a straight actually deducts points. Beating a Boss Blind requires you to either build an incredibly versatile deck or find a specific Joker that completely ignores the boss’s rules, which is immensely satisfying when you pull it off.

The real triumph of Balatro, however, is just how unbelievably addicting its game loop is, and how that addiction directly feeds into the creation of utterly insane deck combos. Because the game constantly drip-feeds you new jokers and upgrades after every single round, you are always chasing that next layer of synergy. This creates a compulsion loop where you just want to see how far the math can go. What starts as a humble run trying to scrape together a few thousand points with a basic pair suddenly spirals completely out of control. You might pick up a Joker that gives you an x3 multiplier for every face card discarded, then find a planet card that buffs your straight, and then grab another Joker that doubles your entire score if you have exactly four cards left in your hand. Before you know it, the addictive nature of wanting to complete that puzzle pushes your scoring into the absolute stratosphere. You will find yourself playing a single pair of twos and watching the score ticker fly into the millions, then the billions, and occasionally even the trillions. The game loop tricks your brain into treating poker hands like puzzle pieces, and the ultimate reward for solving that puzzle is seeing numbers climb to absurd, astronomical heights that make no logical sense for a standard 52-card deck.

It also helps that the presentation is absolutely spot-on for this type of experience. The user interface is clean and easy to read, which is crucial when you have fifteen different modifiers happening at once and your score is rocketing into the billions. The visual style has a retro, slightly gritty CRT vibe to it that feels mysterious and cool. But the real standout is the sound design. The tactile thwack of the cards hitting the table, the escalating, hypnotic hum of the music as your score multiplier climbs higher and higher, and the incredibly satisfying sound of a massive score being calculated all tie the experience together perfectly. It is a game that feels incredible to just interact with on a moment-to-moment basis.

In a modern gaming landscape that is increasingly obsessed with massive scale, Balatro feels like a beautiful breath of fresh air. The game doesn’t rely on hyperrealistic graphics using the latest game engines with all the bells and whistles that has made game development as expensive, if not even moreso, than the biggest Hollywood blockbusters, but also made their development years in the making. Instead, it leans entirely into the simplicity of its look paired with incredibly complex mechanics under the hood. This brilliant design choice has made it incredibly easy to release on pretty much every platform from every game console, PC and mobile platform. You don’t need a pricey rig to run it; you just need a screen and a functioning brain to appreciate the sheer depth of its systems.

Balatro is a masterclass in game design. LocalThunk took something as simple and universally understood as a deck of playing cards and turned it into a sprawling, deeply strategic, and infinitely replayable roguelike. It takes the best parts of deck-builders and marries them to the instantly recognizable framework of poker, resulting in a game that is easy to learn but nearly impossible to put down. Playstack has an absolute monster hit on their hands here, and I can confidently say that if you have even a passing interest in card games, strategy games, or just games with incredibly tight gameplay loops, you owe it to yourself to play Balatro. Just make sure you do not have anything important to do for the next few days, because once this game gets its hooks in you, it will not let go.