Is This Game Trying to Kill Me? Review (Xbox Series X|S & PlayStation 5)

Is This Game Trying to Kill Me? Absolutely — and there’s nothing I can do about it. I’ve died several times, in fact — but perhaps that just boils down to my own incompetence. Maybe, with a little luck, you will fare a lot better in this decrepit world of psychological torment and unnecessary suffering.

I’d be lying to you if I said that this game won’t be trying to kill you once you remove the veil from its portal. In fact, it will make it so abundantly obvious that, just as soon as you pull back the curtain on the rustic yet seemingly barbaric woodland cabin, things won’t be as homely as they might first appear.

Oh, the boogeyman behind this doorway is real, as are the threats that alternate between reality and an old micorospic MS-DOS system. And not just the general threat of having a deadly, almost unspeakable whisper whittling its way into your subconscious, but a sinister presence controlling, sabotaging, and manipulating your surroundings. But this isn’t your cabin — it’s his, and you aren’t in any position to bend the rules to boost your chances of fleeing from the coup, so to speak.

To leave this world, you must make a simple choice: wager your blood, sweat, and tears for the chance of scoring big in a ritualistic puzzler, or sit aside and wait for the inevitable outcome of your worst nightmare. In here, it’s his playground, and so long as you a prisoner in this booby trapped jailhouse of twisted fates and medieval mechanisms, you will play the dominos as they fall. Best of luck, traveler — there’s no turning back now.

Let’s Play a Game

Is This Game Trying to Kill Me? invites you to enter the gloomy quarters of an old cabin—a shack of finite space and ominious contraptions. Here, in the center of the room, you will find an old computer—a system that just so happens to foster a puzzle game. The only drawback to playing this game is that, if you make a mistake or put all of your eggs into the wrong basket, then the cabin will respond accordingly.

To give you a clearer understanding of how it works, here’s a common scenario: should you reach a crossroad and have the option to pull on one of several wooden cranks, but mistakenly yank on the incorrect one, then something disastrous might just happen on the other side of the game, be it a blistering spike through a hidden wall or a fatal shot to the scalp from behind. Whatever the case, the choices you make are paramount.

The journey begins in a hollow cabin—a seemingly desolate place where the world revolves around an object of a rather peculiar nature. Upon entering this old shack, you find yourself left with an ultimatum: play the resident at its own game—a task that involves logging into the peculiar object in question to endure a series of retro-inspired arcade puzzles—or sit idly by while the story progresses at a snail-like speed.

Unfortunately, there isn’t a huge plot to feast upon here, as it more or less depicts a poor soul’s attempt to thwart their captor’s rigged maze-like home and escape. And that’s about it. Granted, there are a few secrets tucked into the book, but for the most part, what you see is what you get — an escape room with a violent twist and a tremendous amount of gruesome discoveries.

To Die Is to Live

The game itself involves two separate modes of play: exploring the cabin in a first-person adventure, and completing puzzles from within a 2D arcade game. And if that sounds like an easy combination to juggle, well, it isn’t. It isn’t an easy thing to alternate between due to the fact that, with each puzzle that you solve, the cabin evolves without telling you exactly what has changed. For example, if you activate one mechanism in the game, you may come to find that another one has sprouted up on the outside of it, in the cabin itself. To this end, you often have to critically examine both sides of the coin in order to progress. And if you fail to connect the dots, well, let’s just say bad things happen.

While its storyline isn’t anything short of mediocre, the ambiance and unsettling nature of the situation are both perfectly orchestrated and befitting of an otherwise excellent first-person survival horror. Its characters, specifically those of the cabin quarters, are great additions to the pot, too, despite having little to no real dialogue or bottomless back stories to unravel along the way. Granted, the cabin is rather liminal in terms of its size and appearance, but with an eerily vacant soundboard and a lot of intelligent set pieces, it’s also an attractive place to scuff your feet for two or three hours.

Biding Your Time

There is something of a challenge to the process of combing over multiple layers of the same game, I’ll say that much. However, I wouldn’t go as far as to say that the puzzles are bordering on unreasonable or the least bit impossible. There is a hint system, too, which means that the likelihood of hitting a dead end and fumbling about in the dark are extremely slim. That isn’t to say that you will breeze through the campaign, mind you, as the game does take full advantage of its gory contraptions to slap you with a tripwire or a deadly curveball every so often. And yet, in spite of its sadistic molehills, it still gives as much as it takes. And it’s satisfying work, truly — more so when you achieve your goals and beat the odds of surviving.

Verdict

Is This Game Trying to Kill Me? is the ideal fodder for the most paranoid of puzzle-picking people. It’s all fun and games till someone gets hurt, I’ll admit. And, given that most things are trying to kill you in this little bouquet of barbaric carvings and hazardous contraptions — that’s a common occurrence, funnily enough. And you will get hurt, which in itself is still a lot of fun, despite the fact that you will spend more time second guessing the situation and throwing caution to the wind for a second shot at surviving the unknown. It’s the fact that you’re always looking over your shoulder or tiptoeing between puzzles, that’s the engaging part. It’s the sort of dopamine that you’ll want to chase down the rabbit hole, perhaps not for an entire weekend, but for enough time to make the deaths feel worthwhile.

With an ever-evolving underbelly of wicked trimmings and multiple choices and outcomes to carve through, you might find yourself stuck in this particular ode to a perpetual cycle of passive-aggressive torture for a concerning period of time. In addition to its clever hybrid approach of incorporating two different genres into the same cauldron, Is This Game Trying to Kill Me? also comes clean with a compelling escape room-like theme that’s bursting at the seams with numerous intuitive puzzles, unpredictable gameplay mechanics, and a novel art style that has the potential to become a standout feature in its chosen setting.

If it’s a quick romp through a bottomless hellhole of unsettling cabin fever that you are on the market for, then you should definitely consider heading out into the woods to roll the dice in Is This Game Trying to Kill Me? You will die — but you’ll also have a bloody great time doing it.