📷 35mm | PS4 | Review | 4/10 | "The very last task you’re given is to find three batteries hidden in a city..." 📷 @PixelHunted

When the apocalypse arrives it’ll probably be kinda boring. Games like Fallout, The Last of Us, and Days Gone are all razzle-dazzle combat, world-changing drama, and malformed flesh-eating monsters to mulch.

Contrast that with 35mm, in which I spent an hour trudging through an abandoned village trying to find a bucket so I could use a grubby broken-down well. Let’s face it, that’s probably a more realistic scenario for you if civilisation collapsed.

This lo-fi Russian horror first person game sees you moving through an incredibly grey abandoned landscape towards an unknown destination. The mood is comically bleak, with buildings that’d have been depressing even before society collapsed now trash-strewn hellholes.

You have a largely silent companion along for the ride, as well as your trusty 35mm camera and a notebook. Along the way you’ll tackle broadly realistic puzzles: sniffing out fuel, searching for medical supplies, or traversing deadly hazards. For long stretches the game is happy to be essentially a walking simulator, though later on you do get some actual combat.

As far as positives go 35mm is actually atmospheric, which gives it a leg up over the vast majority of jump-scare-ridden asset flipping horror titles. The gloomy fog that blankets much of the game does a fantastic job of hiding graphical shortcomings and makes you feel oppressed. Though you eventually get a couple of weapons you never feel at all powerful and large sequences are spent simply running from your pursuers.

There are a couple of sequences where 35mm approaches ‘actually being good’. Inching your way through a deserted subway system while invisible soldiers are clanging doors behind you as they yell warnings had my hairs standing on end, and that’s despite this clearly being a scripted sequence without any actual danger. Plus, being pursued by angry Russian soldiers through a ruined urban environment hits a little harder than it did two weeks ago.

But when 35mm dips in quality it dips hard. The game periodically sends you off on scavenger hunts around large open maps and the very last task you’re given is to find three batteries hidden in a city.

This entails scouring identical apartment buildings, with the annoyance compounded by your character’s movement pace slowing to a crawl for story reasons and a constantly gasping and heavy breathing audio loop playing. Worse, the batteries’ location is randomly generated so you can’t even look up where they are online and be done with it. After my third time dragging my character’s miserable arse across the neighbourhood any sense of atmosphere and enjoyment was gone.

And then there’s the combat. After a few hours of melancholy puzzling you’re thrown into a room with a pack of wolves and a rifle with the single worst shooting mechanics I’ve ever encountered in a first person game. The wolves don’t have any reaction to being shot, take a stupid amount of bullets to the head, do a tonne of damage, and their models are so squared and jerkily animated they look like they’ve escaped out of Turok on the N64.

It was only at this point, maybe 80% of the way through the game, that I first realised I actually had a health meter. Maybe I missed a tutorial, but it turns out that the amount of stains on your notebook represents your health, which explains the thirty confused minutes of respawning, instantly being hit by a wolf, and then dying.

Accessing your inventory doesn’t pause the game, so it was only after reloading the checkpoint that I could use a health pack. Even then the fight was a massive pain, so much so I suspect many players will throw their hands up at this difficulty spike and move onto something else.

None of that is good.