When I was a kid, I had a few computer games that I’d found incomplete at garage sales. Some of them were impossible to understand without their manual, if they worked at all, but I’d still fire them up occasionally just to see what I could accomplish.
Repose is one of a handful of games I’ve played recently that reminds me of that experience, as it’s both literally and figuratively about fumbling around in the dark.
Like Dragon Ruins, Repose plays out as if it were an attempt to boil a first-person dungeon crawler down to a single core element. In DR, that element was the experience grind; in Repose, it’s finding your way through a maze of twisty rooms, all alike. It’s a simple formula that’s primarily built around trial and error, and carried by its style and visual design.
At the start of the game, you’re a new employee for a nameless company, who’s come aboard to replace someone named Aaron who abruptly disappeared. Your job is to explore the lower levels of the company’s facility and retrieve any oxygen tanks you can find.
Those tanks are exclusively found on the skeletal corpses of men in astronaut suits, which is the first warning sign. The second is that the facility is patrolled by increasingly bizarre, hostile mutants; the third is that Aaron periodically approaches you in your dreams to warn you about what’s to come; the fourth is that the facility changes dramatically with each new level, from an isolated basement to an abandoned city to what might be post-apocalyptic cyberspace. It’s possible that this is a bad gig.
In each level of Repose, you start at a bed with a fixed amount of energy, which depletes by 1 every time you take a step. Your goal is to use that finite number of available actions to explore the maze until you find something that will let you progress, such as a door switch, a keycard, or someone who knows more than you do.
The first hurdle you have to get over with Repose is that it’s self-consciously designed like a PC game from the ‘80s. It looks like it was built to run on a VAX terminal, although the animation’s too fluid for that; it has no mouse controls at all; the save system uses 8-digit passwords; and melee combat requires you to walk into enemies while holding down the Enter key. It’s a lot to get used to unless you just came out of a 45-year coma.
Past that, it’s a game about pushing yourself to go a little bit further after each consecutive, guaranteed failure. You get access to an in-game map throughout much of the facility, but it’s deliberately not as helpful as it could be. Once you have your bearings in any given level, it’s a question of exploring as far as you can before your energy runs out or something with a TV instead of a face turns you inside out. When you die, you’re immediately sent back to the closest bed to try again, while all enemies immediately respawn.
There are a few more quirks to it than that, but Repose is almost as simple as it initially appears to be. The finite pool of energy is both the only real source of tension in Repose and the most obnoxious thing about it. If you removed the energy limit, Repose would lose virtually all of its challenge, but with it, much of the game is about failing upwards.
As a result, Repose ends up feeling more like a strange platformer than anything else. Once you’ve figured out where you need to go, each stretch of the maze narrows to the successful execution of a sequence of timed inputs: forward, forward, forward, ready axe, kill monster before it shoots you, forward, left, forward, etc.
It’s an odd overall experience. If Repose wasn’t also a surreal horror story, I might not have stuck with it for as long as I did. It’s got some great visuals and interesting twists scattered across its short run time, along with a creepy lo-fi soundtrack.
The dystopian edge of the gig economy has given rise to a slow-building sub-genre in horror, with games like this and Threshold at the forefront. Repose is like “The Prisoner” for wage slaves, and even after I’d lost some patience with its gameplay, I kept going to see what would happen next.
This is absolutely one of those games that remind me why I don’t use a scoring system. Repose’s actual mechanics are simple and guaranteed to frustrate you, but its visual design and overall vibes might make it worth the trip for die-hard horror nerds. It’s in what I think of as the Velvet Underground tier of media; not everyone will enjoy Repose, but anyone who does will go on to make art that’s a lot like it.
[Repose, developed by Attila Bertold Bozó and published by Akupara Games, is now available for PC via Steam for $7.99. This column was written using a Steam code purchased by Hard Drive.]
