Quarantine Gaming – Horror Of The Deep Impressions

Fallen into a giant old dungeon, unclear for any destiny, you have to descend deeper and deeper to a place, where even all cries will be silenced.

HORROR OF THE DEEP is an immersive first-person horror experience, inspired by Amnesia, and with a strong emphasis on exploration, atmosphere, and mystery. Descend into a vast complex and explore sheer endless paths, hidden secrets and messages, veiled in a darkness, that will question your sanity. If you can resist this madness, you may find out a terrible secret and your purpose within this journey…

Above was the official description provided by the developers. While yes it is clear you are in a dungeon of some sort, nothing else in this game made much sense to me. You are thrown into the game with no backstory or real direction as to what you are trying to accomplish. Now initially, this really intrigued me and had me pushing to go deeper and deeper hoping to find answers. The games environment is a stone dungeon dimly lit by torches and the occasional lantern you can take along. As you traverse these maze like levels your goal is basically to make it to the end. The first few “levels” are very straight forward, traverse the level, discover some little weird notes about the creatures in the dungeon and get to the end. Later one you encounter levels where you need to locate three keys in order to unlock the exit door, nothing too hard overall, other than maybe getting a little lost. But as you go further and further you discover these shadow like creatures who if they see or hear you will charge at you causing instant death. A little unnerving? Sure. Do you get stuff to defend yourself with? Nope. So it’s a stealthy maze kind of game.

The visuals in this game are rough, definitely look and feel like last gen graphics, I also experienced a lot of frame drops and dips in performance. The creatures you encounter are interesting enough but everything else is dull and repetitive.  As I mentioned everything is VERY dark, hard to see where you are going, where you have been and what’s lurking in the shadows. This might have been an intentional design choice but it quickly led to frustration and boredom for me at least. I am typically a fan of both horror games and walking sims, when they are done right. Unfortunately for me, it didn’t do either well enough to keep me interested, partner that with the disjointed and uninteresting story. This one lead to a quick uninstall from me after a few hours of game-play. One thing it might have going for it, at least on PC, is it’s VR mode. This would probably make for some great jump scares and possibly better performance on a PC, but on the Xbox its very rough.