I really hope turn-based horror RPG Lurks Within Walls gets combat worthy of its lovely claustrophobia

rockpapershotgun.com:

My default movement mode in horror games that actually scare me is: meandering. I seek to approach without approaching, scooting back and forth across the path like a stray hamster, worrying at the corners and avoiding clear perspectives of the route ahead, while keeping the route behind me in my peripheral vision. I have been trained to do this especially by Amnesia, where tilting your gaze too decisively at anything nasty drives your character nuts.

Lurks Within Walls has no time for my hamstery antics. Developed by Here Be Monsters, it's a grid- and turn-based first-person dungeon crawler - a long-lost cousin of Etrian Odyssey that has wound up in an asylum jammed with internet cryptids, reminiscent in cinematic texture of F.E.A.R. In keeping with other grid-based dungeon crawlers, it only lets you turn the view by 90 degree angles and travel in straight lines. Going by the demo, it's a promising restraint for a horror game, though they really do need to expand on the combat, which is currently a slight waste of some terrific creature art.

In the demo, you wake up on a gurney in a curtained room full of boxes containing weapons and items, plus a medical report or two alluding to hellish goings-on in the recent past. You know the stuff: "Subject X should be kept under visual observation at all times. Do not feed Subject Y prune juice after midnight. Do not ask Subject Z about her exciting web3 start-up." The visuals are dingy and fish-eyed and creased by static. The found doc writing is terse and fairly evocative. Setting off down the corridor, you spy a huge, spinning ball of godflesh trapped inside a cage of spotlights.

The game's monsters are the work of Trevor Henderson, a Canadian artist of some repute, who has a lifelong passion for creepypasta photography. They're an unpleasant bunch, for sure, but what really gets me going about Lurks Within Walls is being confined to 90 degree turns while roaming a small maze of lock-and-key puzzles, awash with