🏚️👻 Insomnis | PC | Review | 3/10 | "a series of supernatural inconveniences" 🏚️👻 @Path_Games @PixelHunted #IndieGames #GameDev

For anyone born after 1980 the prospect of inheriting a haunted house doesn’t hold the fear that it did for older generations. Sure, you’re now the custodian of a dilapidated mansion with peeling wallpaper, bloodstained carpets, spooky dolls scattered everywhere, and a minor infestation of ghost kids, but if it’s a choice between that and living under the thumb of a landlord I’ll pick the ghost kids anytime.

This is what faces ‘Joe’ in Path Games’ Insomnis, who arrives in the middle of the night at his grandfather’s estate in Leeds to survey his new inheritance. First impressions aren’t great: the place is a tip, the sink is full of mouldy dishes, most of the rooms are locked behind fiendish logic puzzles, and there’s the faint sound of children’s laughter echoing through the cold Leeds night. But Joe is clearly a practical kind of guy, so starts tidying up and figuring out the deal with the whole ghost kid thing.

What follows is less a white knuckle rollercoaster of survival horror and more a series of supernatural inconveniences. Joe (voiced by a monotone German guy who sounds like McBain from The Simpsons) is a model of Teutonic unflappability, responding to being haunted with a flat “vat vas zat?”. The game builds very little atmosphere with its boxy rooms and repetitive assets, though even that dissipates when the ghosts show up and simply stand around waiting for you to hit an invisible trigger.

Letting the audience get a good look at the monster is never a great idea in horror and any minor scares the ghost kids could be capable of are then punctured by the moments in which they cycle through short animation loops as you amble around them.

You’ll also figure out early on that there’s no combat or enemies in the game. This is a double-edged sword: while it drains away any last chance of the game actually scaring you, at least you don’t have to struggle through any cack-handed instadeath stealth sequences (I’m looking at you, Bloober Team).

It’s telling that, for me, the only time the game instilled a genuine sense of dread was finding an unpaid electricity bill for £15,000 in a drawer. Ghosts can do one but I refuse to tangle with British Gas’ collections department.

It leaves Insomnis as a straightforward puzzle game that can be beaten in just over an hour. The highlights are the rare moments of lateral thinking, but by and large, the tactic is simply to scour every room for interactable objects, add everything to your inventory, and then rinse and repeat on other rooms. This leads to the bizarre situation where you’re collecting puzzle elements long before you know why you lead them - leaving you wondering what future use a pair of stained pants will have.

The rest of what’s on offer are literal children’s puzzles - the kind of thing you might find on the back of a placemat in a fast-food restaurant. Granted this makes sense coming from ghost kids, but it’s not exactly brain-taxing stuff.

Taken in isolation I could deal with friction-free puzzling, bored-sounding acting, the recycled assets, the painfully slow movement speed, cliche horror tropes, and a dull story. But all at once? Eesh.