I went into Withering Rooms blind, but thought I’d figured it out after the first 5 minutes. You play as a young girl who’s dreaming that she’s under attack by monsters, who’s forced to hide, run, or outwit them if she wants to stay alive. I assumed this would be another “small child in big scary world” game, like Inside or Little Nightmares, and I’d spend the next 8 hours cowering under a table.
It turned out that was only the tutorial. After exactly two (2) harrowing chase sequences, your character Nightingale stops running, picks up a meat cleaver, and goes full monster hunter from that point forward. I respect it. Take notes, Outlast.
Withering Rooms, by Seattle studio Moonless Formless, is one of those indie games that’s perched between several different subgenres. If I had to sum it up in one long burst of hobby-specific terminology, it’s a 2D roguelike survival horror Metroidvania with some Soulslike flavor. More importantly, it’s a Victorian haunted-house story with some truly crazy plot twists, bound up inside a flexible action-RPG.
In 1892 Wales, Nightingale Williams is the latest patient at the Mostyn House, a country estate that’s been turned into an asylum for girls. On her first night there, she has a dream that she’s trapped inside a nightmare version of the manor.
Nightingale soon discovers that for unknown reasons, anyone who goes to sleep in or near the Mostyn House has the same dream. Every night, both the staff and patients at the clinic end up in an alternate version of the House where the sun never rises, the dead walk, and magic is real. As Nightingale learns how to use that magic, she walks face-first into a conspiracy that reaches back into the waking world, as well as the secret of what created the dream.
At the start of the game, Nightingale is unarmed and empty-handed. As you explore the Mostyn House, you can gather weapons, tools, and resources while fighting off zombies, crazed witches, and a host of weirder monsters. When you die, the map resets and you lose everything.
As you get further into the game, you gradually unlock more tools that persist through death, as well as a series of shrines that let you “remember” a single item. Even then, death is a big setback.
That makes it sound like you should avoid fights, but dead enemies drop body parts that you need for quests and upgrades. You’re supposed to be killing everything you see, but you also have to pick your battles carefully. Most monsters will take your head off in a straight-up fight, so the key is to cheat as hard as you can.
Early on, that means using distractions to decoy monsters into ambushes and traps. Later, as you get better weapons, spells, and crafting schematics, you can use improvised explosives, alchemical solutions, and throwing knives. You’re a teenage girl and they’re murder zombies; this fight was never fair in the first place.
That’s where the survival horror really kicks in, as a lot of Withering Rooms’ midgame is about resource management. You’re trying to take enemies out as cheaply as you can, because you’re never more than one or two mistakes away from death.
I’m ordinarily not a big fan of games with this sort of deliberately steep difficulty curve, but Withering Rooms gives you a lot of flexibility in how you approach any given situation. You can absolutely play it like a Soulslike and dodge-roll your way to victory, but by the time you reach Chapter 2, you’ve got enough spells, potions, weapons, and types of armor that you can come up with a lot of different and effective game plans. Personally, I prefer to throw bombs at monsters from behind my wall of disposable summoned minions, because all I’ve ever wanted out of life is an unfair advantage.
The real star of this game, however, is the Mostyn House, which has to do with a particular game mechanic. Whenever you cast spells or get struck by certain attacks, Nightingale gets increasingly cursed. At low levels, this is actually useful, because it lets you see things that would otherwise invisible. If you max out your curse, though, you’re hit with a potentially lethal damage-over-time effect.
At about the halfway point, your curse also starts to bleed over into the environment. At that point, the Mostyn House turns into a carnival of horrors that might be the single most impressive part of Withering Rooms. You get to watch as the walls bleed, the lights die, and the furniture gets replaced by statues or covered corpses or industrial decay. It’s Silent Hill by way of Edward Gorey, where the whole building feels like a fist closing around you, and it’s almost worth the price of admission by itself.
The only real flaw I’d point to with Withering Rooms is one that didn’t occur to me until I sat down to write this, and it’s Nightingale herself. Even for a silent protagonist, she’s barely involved in the story, to the point where I don’t understand what motivates her for the first half of the game. She simply floats from one task from the next. It feels like dream logic, which makes sense in context, but it’s strange that I have no idea what Nightingale actually wants to accomplish here.
Other than that, and I’ll be the first to tell you it’s a really minor criticism, Withering Rooms succeeds at everything it tries to do. A lot of games have tried to go for the Soulslike tough-but-fair approach in the last few years, but Withering Rooms also manages to be creepy, memorable, and accessible. If you can get past its difficult opening hour, it’ll draw you in until the end.
[Withering Rooms, developed by Moonless Formless and published by Perp Games, is available now on Steam, PlayStation 5, and Xbox Series X|S. This review was written using a Steam code sent to Hard Drive by a Perp Games PR representative.]
