I’m always onboard for a Lovecraftian horror game. Vixa Games’ 2D side-scrolling survival horror, Edge of Sanity, follows Carter, who was working as part of a resupply team at an Alaskan field lab when suddenly the site becomes infested with nightmarish Lovecraftian beings. We team up with Frank, an injured man who we help out when all hell breaks loose, and then setup camp and start our search for survivors and a way out.
While I didn’t find Edge of Sanity’s story or characters to be particularly compelling, I did really enjoy its gameplay loop. Edge of Sanity progresses in days, at the end of each day your camp members will consume the resources they need to survive before moving onto the next day. This means every day counts when you are struggling with supplies.
There are three types of location to explore: the mines, the labs, and the forests. Each location type will assure a certain type of resource will be available to loot: the mines will mostly have metal for building, the labs will have consumables such as food and water, and the forests will have wood which is also used for building. Locations are discovered by sending camp members out to scout for them, this will take them a day to do so, meaning one camp station will be unmanned for a day. When you send a camp member out to scout for one of the three location types, they will find two locations for you to explore.
As mentioned before, at camp you will have various resource-producing stations which need to be manned so that your supplies don’t entirely rely on what you’re scavenging on runs. If a camp member is ill they will not work as efficiently, if they are injured they can’t work at all, and if their morale is low then they will also work slower. You can also assign camp members to the tent to allow them to rest which will help boost their morale and allow them to heal faster.
As mentioned before, Edge of Sanity’s gameplay is its core strong point. On each run, you have one chance to collect all the resources in the area. If you die, you’ll lose all the resources you gathered in that run and the area is gone forever, so you’ll have to try elsewhere for the materials you need. This will also mean you’ll have wasted a day, so if your camp members were on their last legs and relying on this supply run for survival, then dying will have major consequences. When a camp member dies it’s permanent and you’ll lose that extra pair of hands for the rest of the game.
There’s a wide range of enemies, each has different techniques you’ll need to use to defeat them. One of the things I liked most about Edge of Sanity’s combat is that you can really approach it in different ways and the game encourages you to do so by applying durability to your weapons so that you can’t just rely on a single method. Because resources were limited I was constantly trying to find ways to save ammo and the durability of my weapon. If there is a way to sneak past an enemy then it’s best to do that rather than waste valuable ammo that you might need for an emergency situation later.
As this is a Lovecraftian horror, you also need to deal with your stress levels to avoid descending into madness (death). Each time you’re near a creature, your stress levels will rise and you’ll need to use certain consumables to bring them back down again – or spend a day resting. Maxing out the stress bar will take you up a level in madness, giving you a permanent debuff and also taking you one step closer to death. I did find that the stress levels could be a little unfair at times. While I could keep an eye on them when dealing with creatures, sometimes timed events would force them to go up out of my hand. So, while I may have been carefully planning my exit back to camp while keeping an eye on my stress levels, simply attempting to flick a certain switch and suddenly experiencing an hallucination would suddenly make them jump up.
On top of this, there were certain events where the game would, again, spring a time event on me which would result in death because I didn’t have the resources for it. An example of this would be when I no longer had an axe or stones, so couldn’t take on the regular humanoid enemies. I had no choice but to attempt the level with stealth, which I was managing really well until I entered a room, flicked a switch, and suddenly the door shut behind me and I was up against a humanoid with no weapon and nowhere to hide. Most of the time when facing an enemy with no weapon there’s somewhere to run away to or hide. But I did not have this option here and just had to sit there and die after putting so much effort into sneaking around the level.
But aside from this, Edge of Sanity’s gameplay is really fun. It’s addicting in a ‘just one more run’ kind of way because each run only takes ten minutes or so to complete. It has an anime episode effect where you keep saying “just one more”, because what’s ten minutes? And then it’s suddenly two hours later. I also think it balanced the struggle for supplies really well with progressing the actual storyline. At certain points, you’ll have a storyline objective to travel to rather than a supply run, which will also take a day. So you have to decide whether to do another supply run or progress the story. At one point you’re repairing a truck to make your escape, so you again have to juggle the need for food and water with finding the materials to repair the truck. I did think Edge of Sanity missed out by not including boss fights besides the one at the very end. Although the gameplay loop is fun, some may find it a bit repetitive and boss fights would have helped to break it up a bit.
Some days will give you dilemmas to make, you’ll often return from a supply run to find that something has happened while you’re away and you’ll be given a choice. These will usually show what the outcome of this choice will be, but still often present tricky dilemmas, such as your food going off and having to decide whether to chuck your whole supply out or stick it up and make some of your camp members sick for a couple of days. Even though we know what the outcome will be, it’s still a tough choice between disposing of supplies that we’ve worked hard to gather and everyone will go without them for the day, or make two or more camp member sick resulting in less production of materials anyway.
Visuals-wise, Edge of Sanity takes a unique approach as a horror game and opts for simplistic 2D visuals which give it a softer touch which somehow suits it perfectly. The colour scheme is very vivid and everything pops out really well when it needs to, but tones down when you’re focusing on combat. The music also isn’t too distracting, though it isn’t memorable either. The sound design for each creature is really helpful because it allows you to prepare for the type of creature you’ll be up against before they’ve even come on the screen, the only problem is that I sometimes found where the sound effects were coming from to mislead me, as often creatures that are on the floor above you sound as though they are just around the corner.
As mentioned before, the storyline was a real let down in Edge of Sanity. It felt very predictable and although I thought the dialogue was quite well-written, I just didn’t find any of the characters very interesting. There were also some annoying parts where I would get a storyline objective and would travel there only to find a brief, pointless conversation with a character and no loot to make up for the lost day which would be a massive waste if we were particularly short on supplies.
Overall, Edge of Sanity is a fun side-scrolling Lovecraftian survival horror despite its underwhelming storyline. It has an addicting gameplay loop with a great balance in resource decisions and leadership dilemmas.
Jess played Edge of Sanity on PC with a review code.
