Do you enjoy Resident Evil? Now take out everything that makes Resident Evil fun to play and you’re left with Pneumata, a survival horror game by Deadbolt Interactive which claims to be one of the ‘scariest psychological horrors in years’ on its Steam page.
In Pneumata, you play as a detective who is investigating the disappearance of his wife. One night, he’s sent a VHS which shows a recording of himself looking for his wife on a strange island – apart from shouting about how confused he is, we don’t spend any moment pondering about the strange situation and how it’s possible. The VHS was recorded in a town called Milton, so our search takes us there. Upon arriving, we find an abandoned town where its mutated inhabitants are on a rampage. We must work our way through the Clover Hill apartment complex to uncover the truth behind what has happened here and recover our memories… or not as Pneumata skims over its plot in exchange for more important things, such as sending players on a wild goose chase for a set of keys with vague directions.
Starting with the story, it was extremely bare bones, so much so that I had forgotton why we were there to begin with as, once we’re dropped off in Milton, our search for our wife is barely brought up at all. Our journey to find her takes us through the apartment complex and sewer system and then to an underground Resident Evil-style lab. It’s vaguely explained why people are turning into mutants but it’s not elaborated on enough to feel like a satisfying answer. It just feels like the developer wanted insane, pig mask-wearing murderers, then they wanted a giant guy with a chainsaw, then they wanted zombies and mutants so they threw it all in without second thought. The plot twist is so painfully obvious yet, again, not presented enough to feel like the story is taking an unexpected or even interesting turn, it’s just thrown in without making any sense, again, for what feels like the sake of just including a plot twist.
But that would be all well and good if Pneumata was actually fun to play, which it not only isn’t but it was almost painful to get through until the end. The map design and objective system is easily one of its biggest problems as I spent so long stuck on things that should have barely mattered, such as leaving a boss room; straight after a boss fight in a church I found that my first big challenge of Pneumata was finding my way out. The solution was shooting some wooden panels off a window and climbing through it, neither of which had been introduced in the game yet so I didn’t realize it was a possibility. And then laughably when you come across safes, which should present some form of challenge for unlocking, the solution is usually written on a note in the same room. In fact I think in one instance this has been added in later because I found another solution for a late game safe hours after I had already unlocked it and then found a shortcut back to it, which probably meant it had once been much harder to crack until the developer changed their mind and just stuck the solution directly on the safe.
Pneumata is set in a semi-open world and you’ll often be traipsing back and forth through it for various items to unlock your next path. The trickiest one of these by far was the elevator key, which I was told was ‘in the communal shack’. There was no direction as to where this shack was, no signposting, and I had not found it yet so couldn’t rely on memory. In fact it wasn’t even a “shack” it was a regular house, of which there are many in the area. This wouldn’t be so bad if Pneumata’s level design was actually designed to help guide the player in the right direction with the use of lighting or furniture or wall placement. Instead, everything outside is pitch black and some areas are lit up just to look pretty rather than being of use for direction, luring you off the path. Inside buildings is a mass labyrinth of halls that all look the same, with no indoor map such as the one used in this game’s key inspiration, Resident Evil. Instead you’ll find yourself wandering back and fourth until you accidentally find where you need to go. In fact there are many situations designed to make you look for a way out while being attacked by gangs of enemies, purposely creating a scenario where you have to keep dying and retrying to search every nook and cranny for what is probably a vent tucked away in the corner – how fun!
The combat isn’t much better. For the first hour and a half of Pneumata I didn’t see a single enemy in sight. Then, when I eventually did get introduced to them, I discovered they are unintelligent bullet sponges that will recoil everytime they are hit with a bullet, making them painfully easy to hold back if you keep your distance. They will either run blindly into a wall, away from you, or straight at you until they morph through your character or back you into a corner so there is no possible way for you to survive. On some occasions I realised the enemy wasn’t programmed to spot you by sight but more know exactly where you are when you pass a certain spot. The most obvious instance of this was in the sewers where I stayed up on a ledge rather than dipping into the water of a large area filled with enemies. They didn’t spot me, despite looking right at me, until I got into the water, at which point enemies from outside the room, out of sight, suddenly honed in on my location and came bounding around the corner. In fact, in the later stages of the game I realized that everytime Pneumata upped the difficulty, it simply threw more enemies into the room and purposely created situations where you would be backed into a corner, or stuck with them in a narrow corridor with no way of squeezing past them if you’re out of ammo. In fact, there’s two instances where our clutz of a character drops or stupidly puts down his gun for some reason in a cutscene precisely so we can end up in a situation where we’re in a room full of broken enemies ready to bombard us without a gun. Not to mention that for some reason the main character keeps putting away his gun after around 30 seconds of unuse which is incredibly irritating when you have it out to stay prepared for enemies that could be around the corner.
Our second boss fight involved the first fully mutated enemy in the game, which is proudly introduced through a series of cut scenes as we’re making our way back to that area. But hilariously, once I had reached the boss area, it came barreling towards me and immediately got stuck in the gate. And then the two final boss fights of the game were honestly some of the worst I’ve ever experienced before. The first of which just consisted of a larger zombie which charged at us down the hallway while a gaggle of regular zombies came at us from the other end, making no room to escape unless you did what I did and purposely glitched through the giant one. Then the final boss is the main villain, a giant with a hammer, who is again followed by another bunch of regular zombies just to amp up the ante in some way other than just designing a decent boss. This boss has not one but THREE phases, where each time you kill him he simply regenerates. Meanwhile we have once again dropped our gun and have to manically run around, trying to grab one of the many turrets placed around the room while the zombies run as fast as we do so are directly on our tail, not allowing time to actually mount the turret and fire. Could you imagine if we reached the end of a Resident Evil game and Leon just decided to suddenly put down all of his guns?
As a survival horror game, resources are supposed to be scarce, yet for around two thirds of Pneumata this was barely a problem at all. In fact, Pneumata kept on throwing health items at me which I barely had space in my inventory for. It wasn’t until more enemies were thrown into the mix that I often had to resort to using melee weapons after running out of ammo – which is, again, some of the most poorly designed melee combat I’ve ever seen. The stamina bar is a nightmare to handle, it depletes both when you swing a melee weapon and try to run, and it depletes after roughly three swings before taking an AGE to fill back up again. Meanwhile you’re trying to awkwardly shuffle away from the enemy because you’re unable to run. On top of this, the controls for melee combat feel incredibly unresponsive and clunky.
This is not including the general quality of life (QOL) elements that Pneumata is missing. The biggest one of these is a lack of a health bar of sorts on the HUD. We do get blood splatters but, as mentioned before, the game is so dark that these are barely noticeable in the heat of battle. You will also be prompted to heal when you need to, but it would still be very nice to have an actual health bar of sorts on screen without having to go into our inventory to see it. Another missing QOL feature is actually being able to see what keys we have. More than once I picked up the game after a day or two break and couldn’t remember what keys I had already picked up, the only way to check would be to once again traipse around the map and find a door to select a key for. Controller and keyboard mapping would have also been incredibly useful, as some controls, such as kicking, I had to discover by accident because there is no way to see what actions are available and to what buttons or keys. Though I will say that there’s some decent accessibility options for color blindness but somehow the developer forgot about the most standard accessibility option of all: subtitles… which Pneumata REALLY needs.
The visuals are the only thing Pneumata has going for it. If you don’t consider the need to actually see where you’re going then the lighting looks really atmospheric aside from the use of random neon-colored flares and lights in some settings which look tacky and are just not something that would realistically be used in this environment. Built in the Unreal Engine 5, the textures and environments look great and where its budget does appear to come into play, the game uses a few filter effects to mask this… and that’s probably why it’s so dark too. The cutscenes did start to become really irritating as, again, they were overused. They mostly consist of the player travelling somewhere and then the game just suddenly snatches away control of the camera so it can point them at something in particular which feels really unneeded a lot of the time.
Unfortunately, the audio work is another part of Pneumata that was not only ineffective but also really ruined the experience. While a lot of the sound effects used are creepy, they become so overused that they quickly grow irritating, especially when you’re aimlessly wandering down the same hallways while lost and keep triggering the same sounds on a loop. A lot of the sound effects used also make zero sense in the environment and honestly sound like they’ve just been picked out of a catalogue and randomly thrown in. There are plenty of examples of this but a key one was this page turning sound effect that I kept hearing while walking around certain areas. Another was the sound of someone lighting a flare, which would just keep going off while I was around the elevator area. Other effects were used to make it sound like something was around the corner, which started off as incredibly creepy and kept me on edge. But when I realized that the sparse enemies in this area had the same repetitive sound effect to recognise, so the overused ambient sound effects became more of an annoyance in a ‘the boy who cried wolf’ kind of way.
But easily the worst aspect of the audio design was the mixing. I had a very hard time getting this to a point where I wouldn’t have some random sound blowing my eardrums. While you can adjust the master, music and sound effects levels, these do absolutely nothing. It honestly feels like the different sound effects and dialogue bits haven’t had their levels matched at all as some will be so quiet you can barely hear what’s being said, so you’ll turn up the volume only for some random sound effect or voice line to blast its way through your ear drums. Other times ambient noises will cut off, combat music will be on an obvious loop where you can hear the break where the track restarts, and on more than one occasion I had one ambient sound effect glitch where it would just keep repeating over and over again. In terms of voice acting, while some of the NPC vocal work was actually pretty good, such as the performance of Peter, the main character’s performance was really bad. He spends most of his time shouting with very little lines outside of this range.
You may be asking “but is it one of the scariest psychological horrors in years?” and, while it may have been pretty spooky with some cleaner audio design, unless you find overused jump scares to be particularly terrifying then probably not, and if you do then there are plenty of other games that use these far better. I have very few nice things to say about Pneumata other than that the graphics look nice despite being impractical for navigation and it’s also an impressive project for a solo developer, albiet maybe too ambitious. It took over nine hours to complete, half of which could have been cut down with some decent level design, a map, and more informative objectives so that players actually have a sense of where they need to go. Despite taking some clear inspiration from the Resident Evil series it has really forgotten what makes those games fun to play, somehow even making the combat an unentertaining slog.
Jess reviewed Pneumata on PC with a review code.
