Psychopomp
Thought the original demo was neat, decided to buy the full version that recently came out. Figured this thread fits pretty well to talk about it.
Psychopomp was originally a short free game by artist and solo dev Karbonicc which found breakout success in the indie scene, leading to a paid extended version called Psychopomp Gold being made. The original came out in late January and the full version came out last month, a pretty impressive turnaround time given the flakiness of most indie devs (See:
Friday Night Funkin,
Geometry Dash).
Gameplay
To get the A-Logging out of the way, it's a walking simulator. You do almost nothing in the game besides walk around and look at things. The main gimmick in terms of gameplay is the basic dungeon-crawler movement you're stuck with, meaning all of your movement is confined to grid squares and 90-degree turns. It's different from the usual indie horror first-person controls where you can freely move and look around, but it's not a good different. It felt jarring and awkward at the start of the game, and it became a major annoyance later on when the stages started to get bigger and I had no choice but to awkwardly sprint-shamble through them.
There is a small amount of combat, but with little to no depth. Almost all encounters with enemies involve simply walking backwards and hitting them with your hammer until they die. There is a small amount of variety in enemy behavior introduced in the late game, but it's not enough to move the needle towards engaging gameplay.
There's also a major problem with secret hunting: Once you finish a level, it is no longer accessible, meaning that if you miss a secret there is no way to go back and get it besides replaying the entire game from the start. For a game that advertises its secret hunting in its
Steam description, this is a major oversight that goes directly against the whole concept.
Art & Aesthetics
Dare I say, I liked the game's artstyle. Even though it is objectively low-poly pixelslop, it feels like it works with that as an artistic limitation instead of relying on le retro nostalgia to carry it. What a world of difference adding normal maps to your low-poly models can make! The main dev behind this is a pretty good artist as evidenced by the hand-drawn stuff, and the character and enemy design is also a strong point. I'd go as far as to say it's a major reason for the game's success, since character design is extremely heavily favored in today's indie vidya market.
Environmental design was pretty good, and the atmosphere was on point the whole time. Surrealist horror is incredibly hard to nail down, especially when "it's not boring and deliberately meaningless, it's surreal!" is such a common thing. I think Expressionist is a good term for this game's aesthetic, where things aren't meant to make sense as much as they're meant to make you feel certain things. It's kinda like Aeon Flux in that way.
Music and sound design was fine. Nothing to write home about, but it does its job. It's one of those things where if it's good, you tend to notice it less.
As I got near the end, I was dreading some sort of big reveal that the game was all a metaphor for trooning out and "the body horror of gender dysphoria," but was pleasantly surprised to find out that was not the case. The game's style could easily be described as trannycore (especially from looking at the other games in this thread) and there will probably be at least one YouTube video essayist trying to argue for the stinkditch allegory, but I myself don't see it. All things considered, this game could probably be approved by one of those "DEI Detected" Steam groups.
Overall, it's not a game as much as it is an interactive art piece. It's fine to appreciate its looks, but for the most part it feels like the game is wasting your time, as is characteristic of the walking simulator genre. You will have a better experience just going on YouTube, looking up
Psychopomp Full Playthrough No Commentary, and letting it run in another tab than actually playing the game.
Verdict: Fun to look at, not to play
dumbest nigger alive award
