I should’ve guessed I was in for something sadistic with Pneumata when the first enemy exploded.
Pneumata is a throwback to an earlier period of survival horror. It’s cramped, filthy, and dark, with a real sense of decay and unease baked into the environment, and finding a box of bullets is like a gold strike.
I figured I knew the deal, so when a big twisted mutant burst out of a bathroom stall at me, I pulled out a baseball bat and took its head off. It dropped, but I hadn’t noticed the big, conspicuous blister on its back.
Once the mutant died, that blister exploded hard enough to knock off a few points of my health. The next thing I knew, I was backpedaling and screaming as a spider the size of a housecat tried to gnaw my character’s ankles off.
By the way, if you’re one of those people for whom the presence of any spiders at all is a deal-breaker, this is your official warning. Pneumata’s got spiders. They’re everywhere, and they’re gross.
That initial fight set the stage for the rest of the time I had with Pneumata, via an early demo sent over by its publisher. There are a lot of survival-horror revivals coming out right now, but Pneumata has a vicious streak that sets it apart from the pack.
You play Pneumata as David, a former detective who’s lost his wife Jamie in a shipwreck, although David can’t remember exactly what happened. At the same time, the nearby town of Clover Hill has been hit with a series of disappearances and murders. On the pretext that the two cases might be related, David sets out to investigate.
I’d previously played a much earlier demo of Pneumata at a Media Indie Exchange show in Seattle last year. Its solo developer, Antonio Alvarado, told me then that the game’s chief influences include Resident Evil, Outlast, and Condemned: Criminal Origins.
Since then, Alvarado signed with Perp Games to release Pneumata on consoles and PC later this year. In advance, Perp sent over an early demo that’s set at roughly the 60% mark of the full game, where David’s trapped inside an abandoned asylum. An unknown contaminant in the water supply has turned the asylum’s inmates and many of the staff into twisted monstrosities and spider hosts.
Pneumata is, first and foremost, invested in making you uncomfortable. Many of its rooms are well-lit, but in the wrong color or frequency or at a bad angle, so it obscures as much as it reveals. The music is a low industrial throb, everything is bloodstained, the hallways are a maze, and many of the enemies are almost silent.
Whatever mutated the people here has spread to the building. Several corridors are blocked off by organic matter, full of blisters that will explode hard enough to kill you if you get close. In some areas, between the red-tinged emergency lights and the growths along the walls, it creates the impression that the asylum itself is infected.
Further, that issue I mentioned before with the chest spiders (aaaigh) sets up a unique push-pull. The demo handed me a 9mm pistol and a break-action shotgun at the start, with a decent amount of ammunition for both of them, and both are powerful and accurate enough to ruin a mutant’s day from across the room. There are a lot more mutants than bullets in the asylum, though, and there are a couple of obstacles that you have to shoot to clear away.
This wouldn’t be an issue in a lot of other games, as Pneumata has a decent melee system. You can block enemy attacks or knock them off-balance with a front kick, which makes it easy to beat them down with a bat, pipe, or crowbar. The complicating factor is that roughly half the mutants explode and spawn a spider when they die, so an all-melee approach presents a slow but steady drain on your healing supplies.
Perp told me that in the full version of Pneumata, there will be more opportunities to use stealth to bypass or ambush enemies, as well as more puzzles to solve as you navigate through Clover Lake. As it stood, the demo was a half-hour series of sudden, violent surprises.
Pneumata is due out at some point this summer on PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X|S, GOG, Steam, and the Epic Games Store, with a physical disc version of its console releases.
A VR version is currently in development.
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