Reviews
[Review] ‘Conarium’ is a Respectable Take on a Classic Lovecraft Tale, But Lacks a Sense of Danger
Experience isolation and fear in the Antarctic. Bloody Disgusting gets lost in the snow for its Conarium review on PS4.
It’s easy to see why more and more modern horror games lean into H.P. Lovecraft‘s work for inspiration. It features a healthy checklist of cool and otherworldly things to stuff into a video game and let’s face it, Lovecraft’s work is in the public eye more than ever.
Take Conarium. It’s heavily inspired by Lovecraft’s In the Mountains of Madness. Set in the Antarctic at a research station, some sinister experiments have led to some equally sinister results. You play as what appears to be the only surviving research team member, trying to unravel the dark mystery of what happened to the rest of your crew. What follows is a mix of simple puzzles and note reading, with the occasional visual aid to help the story along.
Being based on a Lovecraft story, things obviously head into the realm of horror. Unfortunately, Conarium could do with remembering that a little more often.
This is a game that appears to be trying to drip-feed suspense and dread, and as such, it takes you along at a sedate pace. Thankfully, the visuals are worth taking in. Venturing out of the darkened cabins of the research station for the first time, you’re thrust into the cold windswept night, where a snowstorm reduced the already low visibility. It’s an arresting sight, and shows Conarium nails the atmosphere it’s aiming for, one of isolation and quiet dread. Its problem is that it doesn’t maintain it.
You see, Conarium almost never makes you feel like you’re actually any real peril. Sure, you feel like you’re alone and that something could happen, but rarely does anything happen that really delivers on the dread feel. In fact, the more Conarium gets in your face with a perceived threat, the less it works.
The upside is you’re free to dig into the story and the myriad puzzles without too much distraction and Conarium does tell a good story. Note reading may not be everyone’s cup of tea, but in a game like this, it’s enjoyable to get lost in the words and soak up the atmosphere, regardless of any shortcomings. This is a relatively small world, but the developer has filled it with a rich recent history.
Reading is fine and well in a video game, but you have to have something meaningful to back that up, otherwise, it’s pushing the limits of what constitutes being called a game. The wandering between places in this snowbound isolation is certainly an effective part of that. It’s difficult to emphasize how well Conarium evokes that feeling of solitude. There’s an unnerving peacefulness to the constant gloom of the station and the howling winds, and while the attempts at horror fall flat elsewhere, it’s here where it comes closest, and it’s hard to imagine anything but a video game capturing that in quite the same way. When the locale changes into something more Lovecraftian over time, it loses a little of that, but the visual design remains strong nonetheless.
When it comes to the more interactive side, the puzzles, in this case, Conarium feels like a bit of a letdown. There’s nothing truly bad about them, they just aren’t particularly inventive or challenging. This does keep the storytelling flow going smoothly, but if you trust your audience to be able to read copious amounts of text, you can probably trust them to solve a slightly complex puzzle now and again,
Remarkably then, even through disappointing attempts at horror and puzzling, Conarium is just about compelling enough to warrant seeing through to the end. It’s not particularly mind-blowing from a narrative perspective, but it is engrossing and satisfying. If only it pushed harder for a sense of dread and terror, or even simply provided more of a challenge, then we’d be talking about something that truly stands out as a thoughtful, engaging horror game.
Conarium review code for PS4 provided by the publisher
Conarium is out now on PS4, PC, and Xbox One
Reviews
‘Her Private Hell’ Review: Nicolas Winding Refn Returns With a Hypnotic, Inscrutable Neon Fever Dream
Nicolas Winding Refn considers his first feature film in ten years, Her Private Hell, a resurrection. At the Cannes Film Festival earlier this year, the filmmaker revealed that his return was inspired, in large part, by his own mortality. His need to create art kicked into overdrive after beating death in 2023, when his heart stopped for 25 minutes.
Her Private Hell is pure art, too, bearing the filmmaker’s neon and synth signatures, as well as a deep disinterest in scrutable storytelling. Much like The Neon Demon, Refn’s latest demands you bend to its wavelength: an expressionistic vision more interested in the artistic process than the narrative.
That’s not to say that Her Private Hell lacks plot; this sci-fi horror noir features two central overlapping plots. At the forefront is actress Elle (Sophie Thatcher), who lives in the penthouse suite overlooking a hazy neon metropolis with her father, Johnny Thunders (Dougray Scott), and young stepmom Dominique (Havana Rose Liu), who happens to be Elle’s former best friend before marriage got in the way.
To say that Elle has daddy issues would be an understatement, made worse by insecurities, the arrival of a new acting ingenue (Kristine Froseth), and a vicious killer prowling the city: the Leather Man.
The secondary plot follows the enigmatic Private K (Charles Melton), an American soldier in Japan with resolute vengeance on his mind. Whereas Elle’s world exists in a space of glamour and opulence, Private K pummels his way bare-knuckled through the sweaty backstreets ruled by local crime syndicates down below.
Refn, who co-writes with Esti Giordani, manages to corral a variety of seemingly disparate genres and influences into a clinically cold and cryptic whole. The filmmaker infuses his signature style with everything from ’60s sci-fi to Golden Age Hollywood melodrama to Japanese folklore, hung on the framework of a Dario Argento-style Giallo. There’s a prominent psychosexual edge to both Elle and Private K’s separate journeys, one that dials up to zany excess when it comes to the former character.
There’s an overarching sense of mystic mythmaking to Her Private Hell, with elusive seamstresses, played by Shioli Kutsuna and Aoi Yamada, dipping in and out like folkloric, omnipotent kitsune as they seemingly preside over the increasing chaos that entails brutal knife fights, Freudian melodrama, and a supernatural killer that brutally rips his victims apart. All of it told with Refn’s detached, sterile style.
It’s less a conventional movie and more a stream of consciousness, a collection of inspirations and personal thoughts and themes. Nothing is really explained in this nonsensical fairy tale fever dream. Thatcher gives herself fully to the spoiled Elle, whose affluent privilege makes her a bundle of raw, primal emotions that erodes her sense of identity and reality. It makes her the tonal and visual opposite of the elusive Private K., and much credit goes to Refn, Melton, and Thatcher for wringing compelling performances out of such nebulous, vague characters.
As with most of Refn’s work, you’re either on his frequency or not. Her Private Hell is wholly uninterested in explanation or convention. It’s also heavily disjointed and unhurried in its eclectic, sparse amalgamation of genre inspirations. Still, it’s tough not to fall sway to the magnetic allure of its exquisite, pulse-pounding sights and sounds, complete with an incredible score by legendary composer Pino Donaggio.
While it never fully pulls you into its tangled web of artistic musings, there’s a lot to admire in a technically stunning feature this fearless in its incomprehensibility and ambition.
Her Private Hell releases in theaters on July 24.
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