Ever since Amnesia: The Dark Descent heralded an explosion of creepy, first-person horror adventure games back in 2009, the Steam market has been flooded with games from developers looking to take advantage of its success. Most fail to capture that magic — including the game’s sequel, Amnesia: A Machine for Pigs — while some attempts, like Outlast, have been far more successful. They often consist of a simple narrative, often told through collecting notes, and simple mechanics — no weapons or combat.

While a few developers have manage to find an audience for their games, a great many of the games in this popular new subgenre stumble when it comes to their narrative, atmosphere, or mechanics. The openness of the Steam Marketplace certainly doesn’t help, as it only enables more aspiring game makers to put in the minimum effort in order to make the next The Eight Pages.

It’s no one’s fault, really, but the deluge of too-similar-looking horror games shows that many indie devs don’t understand what it takes to make a “the next big hit.”

I was prepared to be disappointed in Doorways: The Underworld. The first two episodes were largely unremarkable, so reviewing the third and final chapter in this trilogy, which follows a private eye who’s tasked with tracking down a sadistic killer, didn’t immediately capture my interest.

The first two chapters weren’t aggressively bad; they just didn’t have much to offer the player or the genre. Collecting notes as an plot device has become trite, and puzzles that revolve around scouring every pixel of the environment to put together devices felt like work and wasn’t especially scary. The second chapter improved on the first, but it was still plagued by tedious puzzles.

As a follow-up to two moderately frustrating games, The Underworld is pleasantly surprising.

Not only does it fix some of the glaring issues that made the first two chapters a difficult slog, it introduces new features that improve on the atmosphere and gameplay. Though it now more closely resembles a few other benchmarks in the genre — most notably Outlast — it is a convincing testament to what the team at Saibot Studios is capable of.

In Doorways, players step into the shoes of Thomas Foster, tracking down a deranged and vicious killer through a series of abandoned, morbid-looking environments, just like before. The game begins in a labyrinthine underground dungeon, of sorts, with a series of lock-and-key puzzles preventing you from being able to proceed.

This is the predominant aspect of the series, and though I came in expecting the same monotonous trek through darkened hallways, I was happy to discover the puzzles less tedious and intentionally difficult, so the game seemed to move along at a more generous pace.

The element of the macabre scavenger hunt still exists, but they’re less challenging this time around now that the items are hidden in locations that actually fit their purpose. For example, in the first chapters, a brightly lit room may be bereft of any items, while the pitch black room next to it will have exactly what you need. No one wants to spend twenty minutes searching for the last item in a puzzle, only to find it in the corner of a room you thought you had searched a dozen times before.

Similarly, the puzzles are tiered in a way to boost the player’s sense of how to solve them, a total departure from the past. A more complex variation of an earlier puzzle may present itself later on, so the player has an idea of how to solve it, without the game doing all the work. This cohesion, puzzle-wise, makes Underworld feel more complete and satisfying experience.

Overall, Underworld looks better, and not just because of the textures. The overall level design is better, and the world is more populated with items, creating a more authentic space. Not only that, but each room or area appears to serve more of a purpose. There are fewer dead-end places that exist just because, and the game is far more effectively horrifying for it. For God’s sake, there’s even a map at one point.

In other words, in terms of how it’s been designed, Underworld is a significant improvement.

It seems like the team listened to criticisms of the first release and improved upon the design to make the game simpler, more straightforward, and dramatically more tense and frightening. Even though the same sort of item hunt exists, the team has employed some neat tricks in order to heighten tension.

Environments have an added threat — which I won’t spoil — that makes the game infinitely more unnerving. It isn’t just about walking around in the dark, collecting items, which was what scuttled the first two chapters. It doesn’t rely solely on dark rooms and jump scares for a horror effect, and the result is something that rivals other, similar entries into this particular subgenre.

Underworld doesn’t compare unfavorably to Outlast, at certain points, even if it is a much less high-profile release. Some of the gameplay elements, like the monster encounters, are much closer to that game than they are not, which is so bizarre considering how little like Outlast the first two chapters were.

While the first chapters were primarily about puzzle solving under the auspices of exploration, this game is really, truly a horror title first. The sense of space feels decidedly more authentic, and then on top of that is the layer of the outside threat, the monster. I don’t know if the team was simply trying something new this time around, but it definitely works a hell of a lot better.

There aren’t many monsters, but they make up for their lack of numbers by being vicious. I won’t talk in specifics, but the game approaches its scares from multiple different perspectives, and it’s really quite effective. There are chase sequences, jump scares, environmental scares, and just general dread. I’m not even a jump-and-shriek kind of person, but one moment in particular made me yelp louder than I have in a really long time.

There are some clunky elements to Underworld, but a great many of them (like the platforming) are holdovers from previous entries in the series. The biggest problem I had still relates to the tedium the game engenders with overlong puzzle sequences. The idea that solving the same kind of puzzle several times in a row is not appealing, especially when the game should be trimming the fat to make the climax more suspenseful.

It has a very strong second act, and though the third act puzzles are probably the most clever of the series, the back end suffers due to an uneven sense of pacing. It’s as though the three parts were completed separately and then spliced together to create a whole game.

Even worse, some of the design decisions actually feel like they are meant to prolong the experience rather than enhance it, which becomes very problematic. Sometimes the game mistakes tedium for tension, and that is a dramatic miscalculation as to why people play horror games.

Ultimately, I’m interested to see what this developer does next. Underworld is an interesting concept that could be expanded to continue the series or be rolled up into a much larger game. There are still some lacking elements, but this chapter of the game shows the series’ potential. The team learned to use the limited mechanics at their disposal to great effect, resulting in a game that delivers a steady stream of quality scares.

I may be awarding some bonus points here due to the comparison to the first two chapters, but the game I played this time around is way more interesting, tense, and game-like than the previous entries. If you’re looking for something to scratch the Outlast / Amnesia itch, then you won’t be disappointed with Doorways: Underworld

The Final Word: It’s clear developer Saibot learned a lot while making the first two episodes in this trilogy, and because of this, Doorways: The Underworld is far superior to its predecessors.