We’ve all had intrusive thoughts. An idea that just gets stuck in our head and won’t go away. Oftentimes it’s hard to pin down where it came from, but even so it can still take over your day. In Moldrise, a new game from developer Raffaele Picca, you immediately know the source of your strange intrusive thought.

You have a fungal infection in your foot, and it’s demanding that you go UP UP UP. It’s a strange game that feels like a combination of Look Outside’s messed up apartment and Outer Wilds’ learn-through-exploration game loop, but does so in a compact and smartly-scoped package.

Moldrise opens with a horrifically gross cutscene that’s a mix of FMV and surreal imagery, perfectly setting the tone for the game. After this weird dream, you exit your apartment with the goal of ascending to the rooftop at the request of your infection. While going up in a building sounds like a pretty simple task for a video game, it of course becomes complicated. Broken stairs, an out of order elevator, and locked doors all stand in our way, forcing you to interact with the bizarre and possibly dangerous tenants in order to progress higher.

A Brilliant Loop of Knowledge and Resource Management

To make matters more difficult, you’ll be constantly managing three different meters: hunger, thirst, and infection. As you explore, you’ll come across items that will help keep these all in check, but doing so while you are completing your neighbors’ odd requests is a balancing act that you will most certainly fail at. Every time you die, you’ll wake up from a strange dream, once again at your apartment, ready to try again. Since nothing in the game is randomized, each run you’ll retain your ideas, which are recorded in a handy little menu screen, that will allow you to skip previous tasks using the knowledge progression from previous runs.

It’s a clever loop that incentivizes experimentation, encouraging you to push your interactions into weirder and weird places. Even if it goes badly, you’ll still be able to essentially pick up where you left often, retaining the wisdom you gained from your mistakes.

The progression for the puzzles feels really natural, as you discover solutions organically through your interaction with neighbors. You’re pretty much always in the stairwell in this game, interacting with people through partially opened doors, but it still manages to build a ton of character for each person and the apartment as a whole. In order to get them to help you progress, they’ll send you around the building on fetch quests to deliver items or messages to other characters. While the puzzles don’t really come in the form of critical thinking as in a game like Lorelei and the Laser Eyes, you do end up having to do quite a bit of problem solving in the realm of resource management, as all this time spent walking around and interacting will cause you meters to rise.

An Apartment Building Full of Memorable Weirdos

There’s a very basic economy involved, but it makes every decision matter. Your limited money, which is either found on the ground or earned from residents, can be spent on healing items or rides on the elevator, once that’s operational. Many times I was trying to make the most out of my elevator trips by picking a floor and doing multiple tasks at once to make it worthwhile. The sense of desperation really heightened the atmosphere of the game, forcing me to try to find ways to optimize my runs to push myself closer and closer to my goal.

In addition to the promise of progression, each of these neighbors has their own little narrative associated with them, and discovering these is the majority of the pleasure of Moldrise. Your dialogue options are pretty desperate and out there, given your condition, but the varying levels of reactions from everyone only make the tone feel stranger. Many of them know more about your condition than you would expect, and it’s fun to watch the pieces of the larger world come together. As these stories unfold, it’s clear that the game has a dark sense of humor, and it feels right in line with the narrative it’s telling.

Enhancing the distinct mood is a uniformly excellent presentation that combines retro visual aesthetics, immersive sound design, and a killer score from Buckshot Roulette developer Mike Klubnika. Its pixelated textures swim eerily to make everything feel more dreamlike. As the meters fill up, your vision gets distorted, and you begin hearing unsettling whispers all around you, making you, the player, feel like the one who’s got the voice in your head telling you to climb. The soundtrack reacts to your actions perfectly with music that is pulsing in a way that feels tense and offputting, rather than exciting and motivating.

At certain milestones of progression, you’ll be dropped into strange hallucination sequences where you are ascending through other spaces. These were a nice way to break up the claustrophobic monotony that the rest of the game was striving for, but ultimately they felt a little repetitive. The first time I got them, it was a neat way to show the effects of the infection, but having to repeat them on later loops when I hit the same milestone felt unnecessary to me. There’s a bit of a payoff for it at the end, but overall they didn’t quite add as much and felt like distractions by the time I reached my successful run.

A Short Runtime That Leaves You Wanting More

Even after I completed the game, which I managed to do in one sitting lasting about an hour and a half, I was compelled to return to the game to hunt down more stories that I missed. Many of the interactions have a wealth of dialogue options, and some of them will end your run prematurely, in the most entertaining way possible. As you get higher up, you’ll find connections between residents, and fitting in back-and-forth visits to their various apartments can be tricky while you’re trying to complete the game, so going back and not caring about ‘success’ gives you the opportunity to see these stories to their end. While this doesn’t blow up the game to a 10-hour epic, it does add some replay value in the form of interesting narrative rather than meaningless collectibles, and I definitely think it’s worth doing.

Many people may balk at the idea of playing $12 for a ninety minute game, but I find its brevity to be its strength. After all, I didn’t have a problem spending that much on a ticket to see Obsession, which has a comparable runtime, but everyone assesses value in different ways, and I can’t blame them for that. For me, these types of games can be mentally taxing, and while that leads to a lot of satisfaction, it’s not something I can play all the time without wearing out my brain. To be able to capture that feeling in a single-sitting game is quite the feat. Rather than thinking of it as a “notebook game” where you have to keep pages of detailed notes in order to remember everything going on, think of it as a “scrap of paper game,” where all your notes can be kept to a tinier space.

As much as I enjoyed the brief nature, I do think that there’s more to be explored in such a rich setting with such a clever conceptual hook. The game has 30 floors, but many of those are empty, and it would have been satisfying to see a few more characters, especially since the ones we are presented with have such strong writing. Since it’s a bit of a notebook game, I also wished the puzzles were a little more complicated than the fetch quests that it sent me on. There were a couple ah-ha moments in the game where I was impressed that the solution was sitting in front of me the whole time, but those moments were few and far between. Moldrise was expanded from a game jam project, so I think it could have used a bit more expansion to make it fully satisfying, even if what’s here is a good time.

Moldrise may be short, but it’s a unique setup that packs an absolute ton of delightfully rancid vibes in its small package. I cherished every interaction with the apartment complex’s resident weirdos, relishing in the game’s dark sense of humor and commitment to the madness. Every door I knocked on was an oddball surprise that added to the overall picture of this building where I was somehow not the strangest person living there, despite my character’s condition.

The resource management does a great job of keeping things tense, while the sound design and music complement it by stressing you out. Even though the short runtime felt good, the game’s world felt like one that I wanted more of. That being said, I’d rather a game get out before it gets stale than overstay its welcome, so I definitely recommend checking out Moldrise for a movie-length gaming experience.

Review code provided by publisher. Moldrise is available now on PC via Steam and itch.io.