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
With all the hullabaloo surrounding Kane Parsons’ big screen adaptation of/sequel to his Backrooms web-series, it’s easy to forget that the Backrooms phenomenon itself actually began years ago. Since 2019, countless creators have tried to leave their own unique mark on this memorable piece of collaborative fiction, with game developers being especially interested in exploring the architectural nightmare of the rooms in virtual environments.
However, now that this once-niche creepypasta has escaped the online bubble and permeated all of popular culture, several of these developers have decided to rework and rerelease some of their old titles in order to reach a new audience. Puppet Combo did this with their interpretation of The Backrooms last month (originally released in 2019 as Day Seven), and now Cortez Productions is doing the same with the console release of The Backrooms: Lost Tape.
However, Lost Tape is more than just a cleverly timed rerelease, with Vini Cortez having taken the time to completely overhaul the 2022 game’s graphics and transfer the project over to Unreal Engine 5.6 – complete with bug fixes, exclusive new content, and a brand new visual style that’s a little too impressive when compared to what the original version of the game was trying to do. In fact, I’d argue that this is more of a remake than anything else, though it’s still built over the skeleton of that original game.
In the updated title, which is presented as a found footage anthology where each “tape” tells a self-contained story, players initially take control of a movie theater usher named Josh as he no-clips into the titular Backrooms and tries to find his way out of a liminal labyrinth. The second (and final) tape follows Josh’s brother Nikolas as he attempts to track down the missing usher and ends up embarking on his own journey through infinite hallways and not-so-empty pools.
What follows is a highly atmospheric first-person walking simulator with the occasional light puzzle and a handful of thrilling chase sequences. While the liminal environment is obviously the star of the show here, the rooms are actually populated by monsters in this game, and our characters have plenty to say about the situation they find themselves in.
Unlike Parsons’ more introspective take on the Backrooms mythology, Cortez has decided to incorporate the multiple levels of the Backrooms wiki as well as several crossovers with the SCP “franchise”. While I personally don’t mind this inclusion due to the creepypasta’s collective origins, die-hard fans might be bothered by the fact that you can run into SCP-173 (affectionately referred to as Peanut by some fans) while wandering around the yellow hallways.
However, the real problem here is the fact that the game is simply presenting imagery and ideas made by other people without adding anything new to these familiar elements. There is an undeniable novelty to exploring these beautiful renditions of classic liminal environments, but Lost Tape offers little in the way of originality in both narrative and presentation. This extends to the unfortunate use of generative AI in some of the new textures and audio files – issues that weren’t present in the 2022 version of the title.
Though Cortez has promised that he’s working on bringing back the VHS filter that made the original experience so grungy and atmospheric, the glossy new visuals make the game feel a lot less scary while also consuming way more computing power than can be reasonably expected from an indie title. Sure, the game is pretty in a “tech-demo” sort of way, but there’s no reason for it to be hogging resources like a blockbuster AAA title.
This is made even more frustrating by the fact that this found footage anthology is technically still incomplete. The two existing tapes only scratch the surface of the setting’s narrative potential, and Cortez has announced that the next ones will only be available as (likely paid) DLC. Josh and Nikolas’ tapes are self-contained yarns that’ll each get you about a feature film’s worth of entertainment, though a lot of that runtime is taken up by very slowly walking from one point to another. But it’s a shame that there isn’t a concrete promise of more content to come.
At the end of the day, Backrooms: Lost Tape isn’t a bad game. Cortez really nails the liminal atmosphere and even breathes new life into tired SCP tropes, and the upcoming VHS filter will likely resolve most of my gripes with the revamped visuals. That being said, I find it hard to recommend a project that took a completely functional experience and spoiled it with AI-generated assets and poorly-optimized “upgrades” that no one was really asking for – especially since it doesn’t give existing owners the chance to roll back to a previous version of the game.
So, if you’re looking for more Backrooms-related thrills after enjoying the A24 adaptation, Lost Tape isn’t necessarily a bad place to start, but there are certainly better and more original options out there.
Backrooms: Lost Tape is available now on Steam and PS5.
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