It has been a fair amount of time since I have purchased any horror titles due to my anxiety, but the new cosmic horror game Pneumata sounded like it was too good to pass up. So, it’s time to hop back on the incredibly spooky horse and explore Pneumata.
Pneumata follows private detective David Hernandez who’s looking for his wife Jamie. A mysterious video points to Milton, Missouri and a strange apartment complex known as Clover Hill. In Pneumata, players have to deal with fragmented memories, so unraveling a series of gruesome murders and other strange happenings is kind of challenging.
Everything about Clover Hill is a bit strange. Tenants have disappeared, screams echo through the halls, and blood stains the walls, so nobody is getting their security deposit back.
Pneumata was originally released last year for the PC through Steam. And now it brings its unique brand of cosmic horror to the Xbox Series X and PlayStation 5 consoles.
The entire story is also told in fragments due to Hernandez’s memory loss, which makes Pneumata even creepier. And this puts everything players experience in an even weirder light that perfectly mirrors the main character’s descent into madness. At different points in Pneumata, it becomes very easy to start questioning what is even real in that strange place.
But let’s start at the beginning. What hit me right off the bat was the incredible amount of detail in the environment. The environmental realism set the mood by making me feel isolated and claustrophobic. It reminded me of Condemned: Criminal Origins on steroids because I grew up enjoying its unique combat and the pseudo detective work involved in its story, and Pneumata seems to lift a lot of those elements.
The comparison between the two titles was reinforced when I was thrown into combat for the first time. First of all, the monster designs in Pneumata are top notch. Mutated humans with everything from leaking pustules to exposed bones would stalk me through the buildings, so the tension never dissipates. Your only choice is to fight them, which can be done using melee weapons that you find pretty early on and with firearms later. The firearms are more powerful of course, but ammo is limited.
The melee combat in Pneumata focuses on timely blocking and counterattacking, so you have to be pretty good at combat. If you are fast you can also get the first shot in, and depending on the weapon used and the enemy you are pummeling or cutting, that might be enough to end the fight. Melee fighting was nice, but eventually I found weapons such as a shotgun and pistol. They could easily kill, but in terms of ammo this is probably one of the stingiest titles I have ever played.
I had high hopes for this one, especially as I started playing and getting a feel for the unique setting that it offered. However, Pneumata was not able to maintain that high level of precision for the entire game. There were numerous times when the pathfinding AI went off the rails, with the monsters somehow magnetically attracted to you even though they get stuck in the environment.
The controls were also a bit sluggish, especially in later levels. I was playing on a PlayStation 5, so there is no excuse for the controls being borderline unresponsive at times. I get that the studio behind Pneumata, developer Deadbolt Interactive, is a small team. And honestly, for their size, they did a great job overall as it is very difficult to make a quality horror game. There is basically Resident Evil Village at the top of the pile and then everything else way down below that. Pneumata is never going to crest that hill but with a bit more tweaking and optimization work, it could eek over the line that separates the good from the great horror titles.
If you need a survival horror fix, Pneumata is a good choice for it. That said, if you have not played Resident Evil: Biohazard or Village yet, those should be your first stops. Pneumata is currently on sale on Steam for under $20 if you don’t want to get the console version, and that price is about right. Pneumata offers a pretty good if flawed experience that should delight horror fans looking for a scary and unique story to sink their teeth into.
Developers: Deadbolt Interactive
Platforms: PC, PlayStation 5, Steam, Xbox Series X