The Great Below is an Inscryption-style horror game that could be a metaphor for nuclear waste disposal

rockpapershotgun.com:

Some people sing the praises of "visceral" games. Others extol the virtues of "immersive" games. Me, I'm increasingly drawn to "perverse" games. No, not like that. Well, not entirely like that. I mean "perverse" more straightforwardly as in deliberately awkward and unreceptive in their core design, almost self-defeating in a way that has you saying "WTF?" and hankering to know more.

Take The Great Below, a new horror... thingmabob from Porto, Portugal-based Dobra Studios. It's about exploring a strange house full of dreadful paintings in the dark. It's a 3D game with keyboard move-look controls, but the twist is that you can only move around while looking at a 2D map, with your position marked as a pair of footprints.

Viewing the map doesn't take you out of the world, however. As you fumble around, hitting "E" button to rattle doorknobs and read painting descriptions, you'll glimpse passing furnishings and changes of wall texture at the corners of the screen. You'll also hear things, like running footsteps. You can strike a match to look up from the map and interact with things more elaborately - some of the paintings play a role in puzzles - but doing so roots you to the spot and fixes your gaze straight ahead.

Extinguish the match, and the game warps you back to the starting room, a reassuringly firelit chamber with letter grids scrawled on one wall. It's an archaic, broken-up process of discovery and deduction, more reminiscent of first-person dungeon-crawlers like Etrian Odyssey than, say, Fatal Frame. It makes me curious, which is of course both a great and a terrible thing to be, when you're playing a horror game.

Quite what you're searching the house for remains to be seen, but scattered documents make