Reviews
[Review] ‘Mutant Year Zero: Road to Eden’ Mixes Stealth and Strategy Well, But Comes Up Short Elsewhere
Can The Bearded Ladies bring something new to the strategy table and still provide all that matters to genre fans? Find out in our Mutant Year Zero Road to Eden review.
The XCOM template is one worth replicating for any budding turn-based strategy game. It features a nice mix of action, tactics, and management if done right, but you simply do have to try and balance those three out and add something of your own to succeed (which some haven’t quite managed recently despite decent efforts). Developer The Bearded Ladies’ (great name) Mutant Year Zero: Road to Eden is the latest, and perhaps closest, game to attempt to update the formula.
Set in a future where most of humanity has been wiped out, the last remnants are holed up in rig-like structure, just trying to keep the flame of existence burning a while longer. The only things keeping them alive and safe is staying in their makeshift home and relying on the Stalkers, a team of mutant soldiers (human hybrids of a duck and a boar respectively, at least initially), to bring in supplies from the wasteland. We, the player, are tasked with controlling those Stalkers as they roam outside the safety of their rickety compound.
Mutant Year Zero is a turn-based game, but only for its combat. The rest of the time, you have manual control of your party and their movement around the wastes. This is because the predominant strategy element is stealth, and you’re able to walk the group around the enemies and set them up in real time for an ambush. Enemy vision is dictated by a large red circle that, if you step in it, will more than likely alert them to your presence and give them the upper hand in the ensuing turn-based combat.
Each of your party brings something different to the tabletop. Dux, for example, carries a crossbow, which means that you can quietly pick off a group one by one as long as you keep it out of the eye line of the survivors. That is, of course, if you pack enough firepower and the enemy isn’t too high a level. Others pack heavy artillery for firefights, and all come with upgradeable abilities to deal with ever-increasing threats. So far, so XCOM, even with the free-form stealth.
The stealth is a strange thing to get used to, but once you understand it and use it to nail a succession of strategic takedowns with minimum fuss, it’s a revelation. It genuinely adds something fresh to the turn-based squad strategy model. Any sequel and other turn-based squad games would be wise to try and implement some variant of it in future.
Perhaps the most fascinating departure is how it eschews a hub/mission structure for something closer to an RPG. You can move freely between areas, finding other missions, salvage, and enemies of varying difficulty. You need to manually trek back to the Ark for certain upgrades and equipment and smartly, the game ensures you have plenty of nooks and crannies to dig through as you wander back and forth. The world design is interesting enough that it tells its own story (and Mutant Year Zero is a visually impressive game for its chosen genre). There are traces of what came before the triple threat of apocalyptic events occurred (plague, global warming, and a nuclear war on top) and it’s a shame the story itself doesn’t do more to focus on the history that’s alluded to.
In fact just as the story seems to be going somewhere, it ends in a surprisingly swift and abrupt fashion. It’s almost a cliffhanger but feels like it comes way too early in the game to have been earned. Mutant Year Zero takes around 15 hours to finish and that’s a fine length for how it’s structured as a video game, so the narrative structure should follow suit. It’s unfortunate because the time spent with Dux and company is largely enjoyable and there’s so much more I’d like to know about the world and its history.
Also not helping the story is audio issues. The sound cuts out intermittently at the start of every cutscene and new area. A patch has smoothed some of this out since I finished the game, but unfortunately, it didn’t come quite soon enough. It’s still there on occasion, but it is at least much better now.
Mutant Year Zero: Road to Eden is a positive step in the right direction for the future of turn-based strategy on a mechanical level, but it finds itself lacking in the storytelling department. Hopefully, we get more from this world. A bigger, deeper sequel is a must at this point because there’s huge potential for Mutant Year Zero to be a frontrunner in the strategy arena.
Mutant Year Zero Road to Eden review code provided on PS4 by the publisher.
Mutant Year Zero: Road to Eden is out now on PS4, Xbox One and PC.
Movies
‘Recluse’ Review – Harrowing Haunted House Horror With Lots Of Skeletons In Its Closet [Tribeca 2026]
A haunted house story is tense, terrifying storytelling when it’s properly executed. There’s been a growing tendency in horror to blend together harrowing haunted house stories with traumatic homecomings. A family member’s illness or death triggers a return to something dark that was intentionally left behind. Recluse hits all the tropes that one expects to find in this type of horror film, yet it manages to push this story in a daring, disturbing new direction that uses sound as a superpower.
It’s a unique lens to experience a familiar story about family secrets, generational trauma, unresolved grief, and the importance of not just legacy, but preservation. It’s a hell of a directorial debut from Henry Chaisson that’s guaranteed to get under the audience’s skin as they’re dragged through this painful, toxic tale.
Recluse is a gothic haunted house story where an isolated audio engineer, Joan (Sasha Frolova), returns to her family’s estate to check in on her father after he suffers a terrible accident. Joan suddenly discovers something much more sinister that paints her family’s tragedies in a very different light. Chaisson’s debut functions as a fascinating companion piece to this year’s undertone, which does a lot of the same things.
These two films make for a fascinating case of parallel thinking that tackles comparable subject matter through a similar lens, albeit in a bigger, less claustrophobic story in Recluse’s case. In fact, it’s the perfect horror film for anyone who was let down by undertone and didn’t feel like it brought enough to the table. It’s a considerably more conventional horror film, but this isn’t meant to denigrate its high quality. Recluse may hit some familiar notes, but it’s a scary, well-crafted haunted house horror story that goes for the jugular.
A gripping mystery that involves the tragic, unresolved circumstances that surround Joan’s mother teases a chilling connection to the recent horrors that have afflicted her father. Joan desperately tries to put these pieces together and give her family some sense of grander peace before she’s pulled under and becomes another victim of this festering curse that’s systematically worked its way through the Wyatt family. By doing so, Recluse digs into some deeper commentary on collective trauma, a very literal look at the “sins of the father” adage, and how one selfish decision can ripple through generations and fracture off into different dilemmas. By the end, Recluse has brilliantly flipped the powerful concept of legacy on its head by illustrating the horrors and sense of entitlement that can be born out of this idea.
A legacy is just another name for a curse under the right context.
”Listen” is a simple but powerful command from Joan’s father that she briefly obsesses over. In a way, it becomes Recluse’s grander mission statement, whether it’s in response to Joan listening to the people in her life, the signals that her body and mind are telling her, or the world’s greater whims. It’s important to reconnect with these grounding pillars, especially when it feels like control is slipping away.
Recluse excels with how audio and soundscapes can create entire universes that are full of rich details that transport individuals to these environments. There’s also a level of objectivity when it comes to audio recordings and the evergreen permanence that they’re able to provide. Joan’s career as an audio engineer makes sense for someone who wants to cling to hard evidence and proof of existence. It provides great insight into Joan without ever getting lost in contrived exposition.
Joan’s entire life is built around audio engineering, and so it makes sense that Recluse features excellent sound design that really goes above and beyond with its production elements. All of the sound design is expertly handled and turns the film into something special. These auditory elements intuitively keep the audience on edge so that they’re more susceptible to the actual scares that eventually strike. The smallest sound effect gets turned into a crushing, cacophonous assault. It’s a really effective way to build terror. Writer/Director Chaisson also handles the film’s music, which achieves a sublime, unnerving dissonance that further heightens the free-floating anxiety.
The story at the center of Recluse is slightly generic in some respects, but the film’s visual language and tone make it feel distinctly memorable. It also doesn’t hurt that the home that Joan returns to is basically an eerie art studio that’s full of contorted paintings. Recluse never struggles to generate mounting dread and terror that pump through every scene. Powerful, thoughtful cinematography consistently reinforces the film’s themes. Joan is constantly reflected in different surfaces or viewed through mirrors. She’s also often confined to tight, constricting framing that all speaks to her refracted identity during this moment of loss and her attempts to regain agency and control by making sense of something that’s seemingly unexplainable.
Recluse is full of truly disturbing visuals that make it seem like Joan is lost in a dream that turns out to be an extended nightmare. It’s a surreal journey reminiscent of invasive psychological horror like Silent Hill, with a touch of Sinister and Hereditary thrown in for good measure. There are so many individual frames that could endlessly fuel urban legends and creepypastas.
It does a great job with how it presents Joan’s fragile state of mind, where chilling flashes of the past sneak up on her and unresolved trauma manifests into unsettling imagery. There are endless shots that are obscured in darkness, or shadow is creeping in from the corners of frames like a suffocating force of nature. It’s very rare that a scene is fully lit. It leads to a very lonely, isolating atmosphere that’s easy to get lost in.
Chaisson’s debut stands out from the many other high-minded haunted house horror films without succumbing to the same pretensions that often drag down these stories. It’s a grief-stricken character study that’s full of upsetting visuals that scratch at something visceral and raw. The horror elements connect, and the answers to its grander mystery provide an appropriate and believable sense of closure. Those who are looking for an atmospheric horror film that isn’t afraid to be different while still channeling something real will appreciate Recluse.
Recluse made its world premiere at Tribeca; release info TBD.
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