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.

Horror Game Review: MADiSON (by Bloodious Games)

Posted on October 9, 2026 by Arleigh

“At the moment of first contact, it is already too late.” — Father Thomas

MADiSON has a knack for making you dread the next room while giving you just enough reason to step inside anyway. Released in 2022 by Bloodious Games, this first-person nightmare puts a camera in your hands and sends you into a house where practically everything seems determined to ruin your evening. It isn’t especially interested in reinventing supernatural horror, and some of its puzzles make being trapped with a demon seem less annoying than being trapped without clear instructions. Still, when its atmosphere, sound, and scares come together, MADiSON delivers something genuinely unsettling: a haunted-house experience that understands how vulnerable curiosity can make you.

You play as Luca, a young man caught in a horrifying situation involving his family, a demonic presence, and a serial killer whose influence hasn’t ended with her death. The opening establishes distress before offering much explanation, which suits a game built around uncertainty. Rather than giving you a comfortable overview of the situation, MADiSON makes understanding what happened part of the ordeal. Its story develops through exploration, recordings, and disturbing discoveries, with the supernatural mystery pulling you farther into danger instead of toward reassurance. The setup works because investigating the house and participating in something sinister gradually start to feel uncomfortably similar.

Veteran gamers will recognize the camera-centered premise, especially anyone familiar with the Fatal Frame series from the early 2000s. Like those games, MADiSON leans heavily on a camera as your means of interacting with the supernatural. But that is where the similarities end. Here, the instant camera drives investigation and puzzle-solving, revealing information that isn’t otherwise visible and triggering changes in the environment. That gives an ordinary action an unpleasant double meaning: you need the camera to make progress, but using it can also bring you closer to something you would rather leave alone. You’re not just asking what might appear in the picture; you’re wondering what taking the picture might have done to the room around you.

That relationship between looking and provoking is where the game finds its strongest identity. Plenty of horror games make players inspect threatening spaces, but MADiSON gives that inspection a tangible ritual. Raise the camera, choose the shot, and discover whether your curiosity has paid off or made things worse. Its photographs connect the supernatural material to the actual puzzle-solving rather than leaving the camera as a decorative gimmick. The result is a useful tension between wanting answers and fearing the process of obtaining them. Even when the surrounding horror imagery feels familiar, the camera helps make engaging with it feel more personal and less passive.

The house itself does a lot of the heavy lifting. MADiSON belongs to the strain of horror associated with P.T. and Visage, where domestic spaces become threatening through repetition, uncertainty, and the feeling that familiar surroundings can no longer be trusted. Its confined layout gives you plenty of opportunities to revisit places that have already made you uncomfortable. At its best, that familiarity becomes a weapon: recognizing a room doesn’t necessarily mean feeling safe inside it. At its worst, however, the same compact environment becomes a source of tedious navigation. There’s a fine line between dreading another trip down a corridor and simply wishing the game would let you get there faster.

The audiovisual presentation generally keeps that line from collapsing entirely. Detailed horror imagery, tense sound, and aggressive scares give the environment a nasty sense of presence. The game knows that an unseen threat can make an otherwise uneventful walk feel loaded with possibility. It also knows how to puncture that anticipation with a sudden shock. The jump scares are a major part of the experience, so anyone hoping for an entirely restrained, slow-burning approach should adjust their expectations. MADiSON wants to get a physical reaction, not just inspire thoughtful unease. Fortunately, its stronger shocks have an oppressive atmosphere supporting them rather than existing as isolated bursts of noise.

Still, the game’s enthusiasm for frightening you can become excessive. There’s a difference between keeping someone on edge and constantly reminding them that the next loud interruption is coming. Its more aggressive audiovisual choices risk making the horror feel pushy, particularly when exaggerated camera movement and awkward interactions are already demanding attention. The problem isn’t that jump scares are automatically cheap; a well-timed one can be hugely effective. It’s that tension needs room to develop, and mechanical irritation can interrupt that development. When the player starts thinking about getting the cursor into exactly the right position, the supernatural threat temporarily loses control of the scene.

Puzzle-solving is the other major ingredient, and it produces the game’s biggest split between satisfaction and frustration. MADiSON uses an old-school structure in which objects, clues, and obstacles may appear well before their purpose becomes clear. That can make the house feel interconnected and reward attention to details encountered earlier. The camera also gives some puzzles a distinctive supernatural twist. But the distinction between an intriguing mystery and an arbitrary roadblock isn’t always maintained. A good puzzle makes you reconsider the evidence; a weaker one makes you reconsider whether you’ve missed an interaction prompt. Too often, the game risks replacing productive uncertainty with aimless experimentation.

That matters especially in horror because confusion has a short shelf life. Initially, not knowing what to do can intensify the feeling of helplessness. After enough unsuccessful attempts, though, fear starts giving way to impatience. Slow movement, repeated routes, and unclear solutions compound one another, making stretches of MADiSON feel less like an escalating nightmare and more like a haunted escape room with uneven instructions. Interestingly, that awkwardness can occasionally work in its favor by making events harder to predict. But unpredictability is more effective when it feels deliberately controlled. The game doesn’t always convince you that its friction serves the horror rather than simply getting in its way.

Narratively, MADiSON benefits from committing to its demonic material. It doesn’t need to transform every frightening image into an elaborate psychological metaphor to justify itself. There’s an appeal to its relatively straightforward interest in possession, occult rituals, and malignant forces. The story provides a reason to keep investigating without becoming the sole attraction, while its familiar genre ingredients give the camera and environmental design something immediately understandable to work against. The downside is that familiarity limits the sense of discovery. Horror veterans will recognize much of its vocabulary, even if the game can still arrange those recognizable pieces into some effective, unpleasant situations.

Ultimately, MADiSON is a strong horror experience wrapped around a sometimes aggravating adventure game. Its camera mechanic gives the fear an interactive foundation, its house sustains an oppressive mood, and its best scares have real bite. The puzzles, pacing, and interaction issues prevent it from feeling consistently assured, however. It’s easiest to recommend to players who enjoy supernatural horror enough to tolerate a little fumbling between the memorable moments. Anyone who needs elegant signposting or dislikes aggressive jump scares will have a rougher time. For everyone else, there’s a compelling nightmare here—one that repeatedly makes finding the next clue feel like opening a door you already know you shouldn’t.

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.

Review: Dredge

Posted on July 29, 2026 by Arleigh

When you boot up Dredge, you might think you are getting a relaxing, Stardew Valley-style fishing experience where you just kick back, cast a line, and listen to lo-fi beats. But developer Black Salt Games and publisher Team17 had something much weirder and far more sinister in store. You play as a nameless fisherman who arrives in a strangely secluded archipelago called the Marrows, and right from the jump, things feel incredibly off. You are given a rundown boat and told to catch fish to make money, but the game slowly peels back its layers to reveal something deeply unsettling lurking beneath the waves. It is a game that takes the most mundane aspects of the fishing sim genre and twists them into a brilliant, unforgettable blend of survival, horror, and puzzle mechanics.

Let’s talk about the actual fishing mechanics because they are surprisingly robust and satisfying. You are not just mashing a button to reel in a generic fish. As you progress through the game, you unlock different rods, crab pots, and trawling nets, each requiring a slightly different approach to use effectively. There is a simple but engaging timing-based mini-game for reeling that varies depending on the size and rarity of the catch, keeping you on your toes. Catching common fish like mackerel or cod is a breeze, but when you hook something aberrant or otherworldly, the mini-game gets incredibly frantic. The game does a fantastic job of making you feel like a competent angler while constantly introducing new species and equipment to keep the core gameplay loop from going stale.

But the real genius of Dredge lies in its inventory management, which essentially turns your boat into a spatial puzzle game. Your catch does not just magically go into a bottomless bag; you have to physically slot fish into a grid on your boat’s deck. Different fish take up different amounts of space, shaped like Tetris blocks. A small anchovy takes up one square, while a massive shark might take up four or five. As your boat gets bigger, so does the grid, but you also have to fit engine upgrades, tighter nets, and refrigerated storage on that exact same grid. You are constantly playing a game of spatial Tetris while out on the water, deciding if you have room for that highly valuable abyssal fish or if you need to toss out some common junk to make space.

This is where the survival mechanics start to bleed into the gameplay, and it is also exactly where the horror starts to creep in. During the day, Dredge feels almost peaceful. The pixel art is gorgeous, the water looks serene, and the locals at the docks are quirky but polite. But once the sun goes down, the entire vibe of the game shifts dramatically. A thick, suffocating fog rolls in, your visibility drops to almost nothing, and the soundtrack changes to something deeply oppressive. You start to hear strange noises in the water, and if you linger out in the dark too long, your screen starts to warp and distort as your character’s mind begins to fracture.

This introduces the panic meter, which is easily one of the most stressful survival mechanics I have played with in a long time. If you stay in the dark or get too close to the rogue eldritch horrors swimming around the islands, your panic goes up. If it maxes out, you crash your boat and wake up having lost a chunk of your hard-earned catch and inventory space. You also have to manage your hull integrity, because ramming into rocks or getting smacked by a sea monster costs you money and risks sinking your only means of survival. Add in the need to manage your fuel to get back to port and your sleep meter to avoid passing out, and you suddenly realize you are not playing a cozy fishing game anymore. You are playing a tense resource management game where one wrong decision in the dark can completely ruin your entire run.

The way Dredge mashes up these seemingly incompatible genres is incredibly seamless. It takes the soothing, methodical loop of a game like Moonglow Bay or Animal Crossing and injects it directly with the survival anxiety of Don’t Starve and the creeping cosmic dread of a game like Call of Cthulhu. You want to push your luck and stay out late to catch that one rare nocturnal fish, but the survival mechanics punish you harshly for being greedy. The horror elements do not just serve as cheap jump scares, either; they are baked directly into the fishing mechanics. Some rare fish can only be caught during a blood moon or in the darkest parts of the ocean, forcing you to navigate through pitch-black waters filled with terrifying rock formations and unseen monsters just to fill out your encyclopedia.

Exploring the world is a joy in itself, even when it is scaring the pants off you. The archipelago is divided into distinct biomes, each with its own unique fish, hidden secrets, and terrified residents. As you complete quests for the locals—fetching specific fish, finding lost items, or hunting down dangerous aberrations—you unlock new parts of the map and new abilities for your boat. The overarching narrative is mysterious and vague in a way that works perfectly for the genre. You do not need a massive lore dump to understand that something went terribly wrong in this place a long time ago; the environment tells the story brilliantly through ruined ships, mutated wildlife, and the paranoid ramblings of the islanders.

By the time you reach the late game, your little dinghy has been transformed into a high-tech seafaring vessel, but the waters feel just as dangerous, if not more so. Dredge is an absolute masterclass in taking familiar gaming mechanics and twisting them into something completely unique. It respects your time as a player, offering a tight, well-paced experience that never feels like it is padding its runtime. Whether you are happily organizing your latest haul in the warm glow of the daytime sun or frantically paddling for your life through a foggy nightmare, the game constantly keeps you engaged. If you have even a passing interest in fishing games, survival mechanics, or Lovecraftian horror, you owe it to yourself to drop a line into Dredge. Just do not forget to head back to port before dark.