PERSEPHONE (2024)

This is a game of paying attention and haste, of timing and strategy. Don't go into this expecting your hand to be held. I've made a guide for the first 2 levels that required some to have more patience than they did. Otherwise, it's a constant jump scare and each level has a distinct way of making that happen. The story unfolds through the errors and events, but especially the ending. I also like how what's available for the game gives insight into how to play it. The dev really made it for thinking people. The enemies have patterns and timing. Learn them and make progress. It's a surreal and terrifying experience; a real work of art.

This is a short but terrifying sensory experience (and there are 2 additional difficulty levels available once completed) that's especially ideal for speed running. Its visual art is minimalist surrealist and portrays the concept of a virtual space sufficiently, in my opinion. Controls are smooth (including gamepad support) and the entities are varied, each one sure to give jump scares and raise some hairs behind the neck. Be sure to read the briefings and decipher them the best of your ability. I would also recommend reading the "Company Manual" as well as any other descriptions as the developer has seemed to make the reading of said materials part and parcel to the overall experience of PERSEPHONE. Highly recommended.

Grab orange boxes while praying that a cloud of particles doesn't teleport on top of you while you're in a house and kill you. That's it. That's the game. Try to outmaneuver it? Good luck, it's too big to evade inside a building. Bull rush it? You'll die before you get all the way through. Drop a radio? It'll just run you over anyway. Hide in the bathtub? Now you're cooked because it'll camp that tub until you stop holding the crouch button and die. Pause and AFK? You'll come back dead. There are 24 of these cubes according to the achievements, and it only takes six of them to ramp the difficulty to the point of cartoonishness and unplayability. There are no checkpoints or saves and the cubes are randomly placed, so every death will completely wipe your progress. The game will also blast an escalating mosquito tone through your speakers at random intervals, with your only relief being to go into a house and hope you don't get telefragged by the entity chasing you. All in all, it feels more like a rage game than survival horror.