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There’s a hand reaching out of the toilet in the women’s lavatory, groping around in the air like it wants something. It’s freaky – this whole place is freaky. It’s a hospital ward overrun by a fleshy, otherworldly infestation of… something. Doors are obstructed by fleshy vines and huge fleshy pipes bulge intermittently with the passing of something within. Darkness and malice tinges the air. I’m reminded quite strongly of the Upside Down in Stranger Things. It’s a place I don’t understand, a place of bizarre rules and inhabitants. For some reason, there are mannequins arranged in distressing postures – mannequins that seem to move around. And in the middle of all of it is me, an older gentleman (in the game!) who woke up in this wretched place. Why, I don’t know, but I know I want out. Anyone would. This place is a kind of hell. And then it comes to me: toilet paper! What else would someone be reaching out for in a toilet but toilet paper? It sounds simple but it works. This puzzle is solved. Onto the next one I go.
This, in a nutshell, is Post Trauma, a new survival horror game from Raw Fury and Red Soul Games. I say “new” but it’s probably more accurate to call it old. Old in the sense of how it plays and what it’s inspired by: the classics of the genre, the Silent Hills, the Resident Evils. That’s what this game overtly calls back to, and why it plays more slowly and more awkwardly than modern games I’m used to. Think: fixed camera angles, designated save points, and no map. Think: tricky puzzles and a refusal to pander to you.
The demo I play of Post Trauma takes place entirely in the hospital ward, which, rather than being a transitory place I move through, serves as a kind of contained playground I loop around, solving a chain-reaction of puzzles as I go. Some puzzles are contained in the rooms you find them in, like a computer in an archive room that I need a password for, which I can glean from clues around it. Similarly, in another room, there’s a hammer in a lockbox that requires a combination that I can glean from a puzzle on the wall. Neither of these puzzles are simple, by the way – the game never just gives you the answer.
But the more of the hospital ward floor I discover, the broader the puzzles become. I find a blood sample machine I instinctively know I will need to find blood samples for, but from where, I don’t know. I find a fleshy monstrosity writhing on a table that I instinctively know I’ll have to do something with at some point, but what, I don’t know. I find vending machines and strange books, riddles and archival data, and I know all of it must contribute to a solution at some point, but when, I’m not sure. So I loop around the ward again, looking for the current domino piece of the puzzle I need to topple to move the game on. Toilet paper!
I’m not entirely alone here, though. There is a threat in a demo I play, and it’s a bulbous, two-legged-but-many-handed thing staggering around the corridors. Should I get within its noticeable range, it will come for me, and as I discover the hard way, I can be killed. But I’m not without a means to defend myself now I’ve freed the hammer from the lockbox. I can fight, albeit clumsily, and thump the monster into submission or death – it’s not clear. Whatever happened, it retreats, leaving the ward apparently threat-free to keep looping around, which is a relief. But even with it gone, there’s an ominous sense it might return, and there are those moving mannequins I mentioned above, in torturous positions whenever I’m least expecting them. I don’t know what they’re capable of, and the flickering dark is doing nothing to calm my imagination. One of them is holding a scalpel, for Christ’s sake.
But Post Trauma is not especially scary. Tense, maybe, and disturbing, definitely, but nothing really makes me jump. I don’t mind that. I actually prefer that it’s not aggressively trying to scare me but that it’s content with letting a sense of discomfort build instead. It speaks to a game that’s not in a hurry to do things, a game that’s confident enough – or perhaps stubborn enough – to make me think. Post Trauma doesn’t tell you where to go and it doesn’t drop generous hints. It lets me fume and stew. That jarred with me to begin with but, once I settled into it, something like appreciation formed. It’s a bit like watching an older film and taking a while to adjust to the longer scenes in it; it takes a while to adjust but once you do, there’s a substance there that’s timeless. Post Trauma has a bit of that. It’s a game that values intelligence and I think appeals to it, and I like that a lot.
This piece comes from a trip to Raw Fury’s HQ in Stockholm. Raw Fury paid for travel and accommodation.