It Sleeps Below the Haar

That was a really nice weird game. I liked it very much, will definitely replay. The grainy visuals and the eerie sounds really added to it. The end is... well Not what I expected but interesting in it's own way. Very good game!

I loved this game to bits. I played the previous game (a much shorter cosmic horror game called “Black Iris” and fell in love with the storytelling, style and atmosphere, so buying this was a given. But my god, I did not expect that this game would be so creepy, fascinating and filled with secrets. You have a whole island to discover and there are so many little things you’d miss if you only went for the main mission. There’s side quests, quirky characters and just creepy things all over the place. It says 1-2 hours on the game page but I spent over 3 hours gleefully exploring.

Duration: ~3 hour(s) Cosmic horror? In my “cosmic storm zone”? It Sleeps Below The Haar is a short indie horror game with minimal (none?) jump scares, choosing unsettling atmosphere instead. It’s also Scottish. There’s a Doric dictionary right inside the game. The story follows a geologist coming in to study some interesting rocks in a small Scottish village. You’re basically stuck there for a few days as the Haar (fog) is too thick to leave, but you have work to do anyway. Drilling, diving, spelunking. You know, normal geologist stuff. Oh, but don’t walk into the cosmic storm zone. Honestly, there’s a lot of lore in the game, which is nice for people who want to dive into the atmosphere. I read a good amount of it, but the errant typos can make the Scottish accent hard to read. Might just be me, though. I wish there was more to do in the game. There’s a lot, but I feel like there was more to do in the world. More to explore. This is more me telling the dev we like it and want more, though. As it is, you walk around to explore, but there don’t seem to be any real “quests” aside from a couple of side quests and then the main story. There’s a lot of people to talk to, but…

This is pretty buggy. You can lose a lot of time just by interacting with something that's known to crash the game. There are many bug reports on this game that are seemingly still waiting for updates. I would maybe wait on playing this one until they're resolved. It's incredibly frustrating redoing the starting area of the game after a crash over and over.

So interesting and atmospheric, in a wonderfully unsettling setting.

Like Arboreta Games' other works, you're dropped in with basic instructions on what to do and little else. All you know is that something WEIRD is going on. And I don't want to spoil it, but there is SO MUCH going on in this game that I couldn't even see half of it on my first playthrough. My computer is a potato, so the game was chugging bad enough that I focused on just the main content, but even what I got there was a LOT! And I don't think the ending will be much more intelligible if I hunted down all the secrets. But for those of you who like to EXPLORE, this is the ideal entry into the Arboreta Games catalog. You'll get the same atmospheric storytelling, the haunting music and visuals, and find yourself wondering, with delight and horror, "what is going on?!"