Aggressively in all-caps, CONCLUSE is one of those games that styles itself as a retraux experience. Similar to the way Puppet Combo makes their games, the developers of CONCLUSE (I might just put that in lower case for the rest of the article because it’s already looking a little silly), Studio Snowspot and T. Allen Studios have created an experience that hearkens back in graphics and atmosphere to the very earliest PSX horror games. Namely, hey, the one I’m also playing through right now!

Concluse takes it to a greater extreme than most though. It is one of the darkest games I’ve ever played, and I mean that in a literal sense. You can see maybe four or five steps in front of you inside buildings, and maybe ten if the area has any lights to speak of. It is a murky, surreal fever dream.

I believe it originally came about as part of a sort of “lost PSX horror game” experience on YouTube. Bits and pieces of the “game” were uploaded, and then they obviously eventually decided “hey, let’s actually make this a game.” And I have to say, it turned out really well. Even if it is fairly derivative of Silent Hill 2 at quite a few points.

The basic concept is that your wife has been missing for some time, and finally you’ve found her at a strange, distant and isolated New England town, called “Hell”. Already very Silent Hill, the game is made more-so by the presence of a cone-headed being that watches you from the shadows. Hmm… and a staticky television that plays haunting VCR tapes?

But Concluse separates itself from Silent Hill a bit when you actually start playing. There’s no combat, but quite a bit of puzzle-solving and exploration. The atmosphere is simply majestic; a haunting combination of little noise and sparse graphics that make every noise genuinely unsettling. Even the clack-clack sound of your own footsteps on the stone floors is oddly chilling. The sound of a woman’s awful, hysterical laughing is the sound that I imagine will stick with me the most.

You can pick up quarters and make phone calls, either to your own home, your mother, or your missing wife. As you can only call from each payphone once, it encourages both exploration and multiple playthroughs as you try to find all the collectibles. Stuff begins to go wrong with each further call back to those you know, and often in truly disturbing ways that will stick in your mind when you are trying to get to sleep. Not to mention the game has a number of cool FMV cutscenes reminiscent of a lot of old PSX horror games, directed with a nice stylistic air about them.

Concluse is cloying. It sticks to you. It prods and pokes experimentally at your chest, then begins to grind down at your soul. Fingers made of black tar dip into your heart and then the tar begins to bleed into your system. It’s not a horror game where you have to protect your player character. It is a horror game where you have to protect yourself. Your own internal health bar drains every moment you play, very similar to how Silent Hill operates as well.

In the end though, so what if Concluse is a lot like a first-person Silent Hill game? It’s not like Konami is doing anything with the franchise. It’s not like we get enough surreal horror games with the Silent Hill bent. It has been a long time coming that we get a new, actually good Silent Hill game. If it happens to come from an under-the-radar game with enough fresh ideas of its own to stay interesting, then so be it. It shouldn’t be the Silent Hill name we are necessarily attached to. It should be the ideas. The surreal horror games that are actually good are so few that it is a true joy whenever we find one that works.

The developers behind Concluse get abstract horror, the sort that messes with your brain and leaves you messed up and depressed. While not as effective as Silent Hill, I suspect that with the developer’s second game in the series (coming this year), which adds combat, a longer and more involved story, and just generally more sweet surreal and depressing horror, we may finally see a strong heir to the throne of gaming’s most sadly absent horror franchise. The throne has sat empty for quite some time, with a number of pretenders passing through. Will this pretender finally claim the top spot in this modern era of ours?

You can play CONCLUSE for free on Steam, and wishlist the sequel here.