Since I first wrote about the demo for cosmic horror adventure game Desolatium all the way back in January 2022, I’ve been hired full time by PC Gamer, gotten Covid, adopted a dog, and traveled out of the country three times. You know what hasn’t changed? Desolatium still looks rad as hell. The Lovecraftian (literally set in the Cthulhu Mythos) point and click is finally available on Steam for a launch sale price of $13.
The thing that still most grips me about Desolatium is its presentation: you explore pre-rendered environments in first person, Myst-style, but rather than using 3D model work, the world is constructed out of real photography. That hyper-realism, combined with some gnarly gore and other supernatural effects, results in a really unique, surreal atmosphere that sets this game apart.
You can still check out the demo I played back in 2022 if you’re not sure about dropping 13 clams on Desolatium, but I also want to shout its free prologue. This chapter sees you playing as a bereft mother in some kind of prehistoric, almost biblical city under a sickly green sky, and the combination of various anachronisms, the alien sky, and primeval setting really dovetails with Deolatium’s photography-based environments. Its ancient drama also seems to have lasting implications for the main game’s story.
The demo proper, meanwhile, mostly takes place in an empty, sterile office building, which offers its own kind of horror atmosphere. The main game’s protagonist seems to be your Lovecraft classic: an academic in over their head trying to sample the secrets of some horrible, unknowable world beyond our own—I’m sure they’ll be fine. You have until April 12 to take advantage of Desolatium’s launch sale price of $13 on Steam, which I might just do myself.
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