Thank you Ultimate Games for sending us this game to review!

The Beast Inside is psychological horror game with an interesting premise. You flip between playing as two different characters. The first is Adam, a man who has moved to an old house in the middle of nowhere with his pregnant wife while he works on decrypting intercepted Soviet intelligence during the Cold War. The second is the son of the house's previous owner, Nicolas, who is portrayed as having just come back home after a decade spent in a mental institution. Starting as Adam, you play through the story until you find a page of Nicolas' diary, where control switches until that "entry" plays itself out, then switch back to Adam. As you play, you will uncover the dark history of the house and discover secrets that linger on and bleed into Adam's life there.

While the premise and story execution are intriguing, the execution in its gameplay, sadly, does not fully deliver. For the first several chapters, the atmosphere was exactly what a game like this calls for, ratcheting up tension and making the player uneasy about moving forward. These early chapters relied on darkness, subtle noises, and a handful of jumpscares to keep the player on edge.

As the game progressed, however, the tension started to really lessen. This started most notably with a chase sequence running from the flaming, angry spirit of someone who has a personal vendetta against Nicolas, culminating in a boss fight where you're given a revolver and a huge arena to shoot him dozens of times before he is defeated. Not only was it really easy to die several times while you learned how the ghost behaved, but this whole thing came out of nowhere. You are given a gun for the first time just as the chase sequence starts and then never get one again for the entire rest of the game. It's a gimmick that exists for this one portion of the game, and dying all of a sudden, non-cinematically with a black screen and red "You Are Dead" text takes this entire moment from "big and scary" to "grindy and frustrating".

After this point, the game seems to bring out a chase sequence in practically every other chapter. And The Beast Inside isn't always great about making it obvious which direction you need to run. More than once, I dove headlong to my death, into the arms of another undead enemy or straight into a room that was aflame, because it wasn't immediately obvious which way I was supposed to go. And once you die, get the underwhelming "You Are Dead" screen, and are stuck in the loading screen for another 30 seconds, all the tension is gone.

These aren't the only tense moments undercut by bad conveyance. Whether it be the protagonist declaring "I need to hide" when what he really means is "I'm going to have to sneak by", or hiding the item needed to escape a situation like a needle in a haystack, the number of times I died when it didn't feel deserved definitely exceeded the number of times I felt like I died due to my own lack of skills. In two different instances, you are stuck in an area with no clear indication of what is required to escape, and the answer turned out to be a conveniently placed but hard to spot metal pipe. The game also incorporates quick time events just often enough to remind you they exist and to nearly fail them every time.

The Beast Inside seems to have taken several mechanics directly from Amnesia: The Dark Descent. For instance, the invisible water monster is here, complete with tossing objects into the water to distract them. Further, opening doors and drawers, moving objects, and generally interacting with the world is done by holding the interact button (ZR, in the case of the Switch) and then moving the mouse/R-stick to drag the object. This is a mechanic that works in some cases; it makes interacting with the world feel more natural, and it gives players a sense of dread when opening a door or about what they'll have to do to close it. But on the other hand, opening and closing an endless number of drawers looking for items gets tedious very quickly.

This is especially true on console, where games seem to not have more dynamic, fine-tuned camera control. What I mean by that is, there is very, very little of the R-stick's travel that is "move the camera slowly" and the rest of it is "move the camera at full speed" or the dead zone where nothing happens even when you move the stick. This makes looking at precisely the right spot, like the knob on a drawer or one tiny note on a desk full of objects, difficult to the point of frustrating. Given that this is my second horror game review in a row (both by the same publisher, weirdly), this is a pattern I've noticed. It's clear the controls were meant for a mouse and keyboard. And turning down my Camera sensitivity would make turning around a bigger chore than it already was. Point is, this is a solved problem, and there is no reason it should be this difficult to interact with the world or turn and run when I need to, the two basic mechanics of the game. /rant

One thing The Beast Inside does well is the puzzles. Adam is a cryptographer, and the game utilizes this story point as an excuse to throw all sorts of puzzles at the player, from playing with light to using special devices to crack codes. None of these ever felt unfair or left me feeling like I had to make some great leap in logic to solve them. A lot of times, simply messing around with things in the environment is enough to give the player a good idea of the direction they need to go.

When it comes to graphics, what matters most is how the graphics enhance the atmosphere of the game being played, and how well it works towards the mood of the game. To that end, The Beast Within's graphics get the same mixed results as its gameplay. The graphics themselves, when simply looking around or in a cutscene, are perfectly reasonable for this type of psychological horror game. They're nothing cutting edge, but they don't need to be. The mouth movements don't much match what's being said, but that may be because the game is Polish, so it wasn't meant to match the English audio. What doesn't help is all of the loading. Simply walking through the game, you will see objects like grass and trees fuzz into existence mere feet from you as you walk. If you're like me and run whenever possible, you will also encounter the loading icon that sits in the center of the screen and stops the player from moving while the next area is loaded in. This happened to me very frequently. I don't know if these are optimization issues exclusive to the Switch, or if they are universal across all versions of the game. For what it was worth, I was playing on my Switch 2, so there's no reason, from a hardware standpoint, that I should have experienced as much loading screen pauses and object load in as I did.

The areas you trudge through don't seem to make much sense, either. You're in the middle of nowhere, with a single road that leads directly to your house, but you will encounter a campsite, weird treehouses, a remote cabin, and a huge inn all within jogging distance of your house. And I do mean "jogging distance"; if you don't sprint through these areas, you'll spend a lot of time just walking around in the map during Adam's sections. And during exploration sessions in the house, as the game tries to funnel you to the point it wants you to go, it locks the doors to almost every other room. I get the game is trying to help you find the next point of interest, but it feels very weird to be locked out of almost every room in a house I ostensibly own.

To my point that the graphics issues may have been related to being over-optimized to run on the Switch, the sound and music was a generally better experience. Voice acting (frequent cursing aside) was generally good. There are a half dozen or so voiced characters, and they all play their parts very well, delivering very believable dialog and emotion. The Beast Inside definitely knows how to ramp up the music during chases or when you've been spotted to dial up your panic, and to let things sit quietly when you think you're safe. I also really enjoyed the song that they played during the credits; it does a good job of being both catchy and really hammering in the feelings the game's story leaves you with.

In terms of stability, I did experience a handful of bugs. In one of the early chapters, when attempting to open a fuse panel, the door glitched out and flew off its hinges; it eventually corrected itself. There was a moment in a later chapter where the character has handcuffs dangling from one wrist, and the dangling cuff flings itself all over the place in a hilarious manner that conflicts with the situation the player finds themselves in. The game froze during a loading screen in chapter 12, forcing me to relaunch the game again to continue.

The worst bugs all seemed to happen in one particular section of chapter 9, where a multi-step puzzle leads to a hidden room with lots of things to read. First, many of the things the player needs to inspect to solve the puzzle appear grainy and difficult to read. While inspecting these objects, the prompt tells the player to press B to stop investigating, but the A button needs to be pressed. Then, in the hidden room, while reading some very long text, the game doesn't allow the player to scroll through the text, leaving the last quarter of the page unreadable. This is particularly frustrating because this exact moment gives the player the biggest clue as to what is happening during Nicolas' part of the story. I was so frustrated by this that I closed and relaunched the game. When I did this, the key item that you get by completing the puzzle and which opens the hidden room disappeared from both the world and my inventory, leaving me with no way to progress. The game has an option to start from the last checkpoint (the default) or to restart the chapter from the beginning; I ended up needing to restart the chapter and go through the entire puzzle again, only to find that in all my effort, the scrolling issue did not resolve.

It should come as no surprise that a psychological horror game with a Mature rating has major moral issues. The ESRB notes about "Blood and Gore" and "Intense Violence" are an understatement. Not only are the main characters frequently pitted against corpse-like ghosts, these undead enemies are often grotesque in the extreme, having their entrails fully visible. When they are defeated, it is often in spectacularly gruesome fashion, with a machete being used to dismember, disable, and split open the enemies in various ways. Likewise, when the player is caught, they may be treated to a small animation of the enemy driving an axe or pickaxe directly into their face. Blood splatters everywhere, blood is seen all over the environment, corpses are a frequent sight, and at one point, one character even counts by cutting off his own fingers instead of sticking them up while talking. To top it off, at one point, a key item is found in a mutilated deer carcass.

Language is another big concern. Adam says f**k so often that it may be the most common word in the game's script. We also get d**n, s**t, p*ss, G**d**n, and Jesus' name being used in vain. Nicolas' portion of the game takes place in the 19th century , and he is temporarily confronted by the ghost of James Booth, the totally historically accurate brother of John Wilkes Booth. A letter nearby shows that the other Booth brother also had plans to try to assassinate Lincoln, whom he calls a "n****r lover". There are also references to pornography and prostitution, though neither is shown in game. In terms of sexuality, the only real concern comes from Adam's wife, who wears a very low cut top for the duration of the game.

It's unclear if the ghosts in the game are supernatural in origin or simply in the mind of the player characters, but one of them is called "the devil", and another is a "zealot" who calls on God to curse those who she perceives to have wronged her, walking around and shouting to God for deliverance. One ghost sets the area on fire and can summon fireballs and explosions in a way that can at least appear demonic. Finally, this game features a storyline which involves child abuse, corrupt judges, detectives who care more about breaking a famous story than in justice, and greedy mine owners who would kill their competition and stiff their workers in order to secure their own fortunes.

The Beast Inside gets a lot right in terms of environment, atmosphere, and storytelling, but it gets a lot wrong in its execution. It's possible that some of the graphical and stability issues I encountered would not have occurred on a more robust system, like a modern console or a beefy PC. That wouldn't have fixed the conveyance and gameplay issues, though. At $24.99, for a game that took me under 10 hours to beat, with the issues I encountered, I'd be very hard-pressed to recommend the game. However, it has been as low as $2.49 on Steam, where a mouse and keyboard and potentially less graphical optimizations may make the experience more playable and the low point of the game a little less annoying to deal with. Even then, be prepared for the numerous moral issues that this game comes with, and to curse at it about as often as it curses at you.

-maestro_dana