Thank you TPS for sending us a code to review! It was a privilege to be one of the three people to ever play this game.

That's only a very small exaggeration, by the way. According to SteamDB, the highest concurrent player count for Discarnate: Locust is "1", and only 3 instances of player activity are logged.

Of course, I can't be one of only three people to play the game. After all, there are 3 YouTube videos of people doing silent "playthroughs" of the game. All three of them are less than 10 minutes long and involve the player wandering around outside stuck on the first puzzle before eventually giving up and cutting the recording. I'll link all three of those videos here; they were instrumental in validating my own experience with the game.

http://y2u.be/2UvOTvuVGOw
http://y2u.be/4suP_PI5PSw
http://y2u.be/c-rRyMVsFYE

No, no, I'm not one of three. I'm one of thirteen. See, the Steam Achievements page for Discarnate: Locust says that 100% of players got the achievement you get just by launching the game, but that only 30.7% got most of the other achievements. On the day I first played the game, the percentage for those other achievements was a round, no-decimal-shown "33%".

Doing some maths:
- 1/.333 = 1 in every ~3.000 players before I played the game, or 3/12
- 1/.307 = 1 in every ~3.257 players after I played the game, or 3/13
- In other words, the addition of me to the denominator of the player count was so significant, it was almost trivial to determine that I am the thirteenth person to play Discarnate: Locust.

Based on the evidence here, and given the complete lack of people who have played the game, I would hazard a guess that the 2-3 people who have gotten every achievement are the developers themselves, making sure the game works.

So what is Discarnate: Locust? Well, it touts itself as a horror and puzzle game. The developers are (or were) very proud of how difficult their puzzles were, saying things in the trailer like "these puzzles were cooked up by a mad man" and the details on the Steam page saying "Be assured that the answer to our test cannot be found online" (they were certainly right about that last one).

Your unnamed protagonist is given a mysterious letter by "The Collector" to go into a locked house and retrieve some valuable item for him. This letter is crumpled up and basically impossible to read if you're playing from the couch, but it does appear that the collector was going through some insane rambling in a very neat hand script when writing his letter to you. Of course, I had to get a screenshot of the letter from one of the YouTube videos above because there is no way that I could find to see the note again once you've started the game, not even by relaunching the game and starting a new run.

You are then plopped on the sidewalk in front of a house on a street with a flashlight a few feet ahead of you, an infinite void of darkness in front of you, and a locked chain link fence behind you, preventing you from doing anything but going up to the house. On the front door is a word lock. Sneaking around behind the house, you find an empty pool, a playset, a tree with a noose hanging above a kicked over step ladder, an open shed, several locked doors, and a storm door to the basement locked with an 8-digit code. On the door are some words, like "Reign", which has been crossed out, and "Human life is pickle [sic]". In the open shed are some tools and a German flag with a black X painted on both sides of it.

When you're walking around in the dark, the dramatic, understated music that cuts in every now and again is spooky, and the overall ambience is unsettling. I spent the first half hour or so pretty spooked. Then the game started playing some unexpected noises in my ears, things like a soft "Hey" whispered directly into your ear, or knocking coming from behind one of the locked doors. At first, this is scary as well. But as you pass the half hour mark, and the sounds begin to sound more like they're drawn from a random collection of sounds, and you still have no clues that seem to help you open either door, it goes from spooky to annoying. After the first hour, I went off to YouTube to find help, found the three videos linked above, and found out I was truly on my own.

The game takes several steps to rub salt into the wound, too. For instance both locks have brute force prevention mechanisms in place. Try too many codes in too short a time, and a 3-minute timer appears at the top of the screen. It was not clear to me at first what the timer was for, especially since it doesn't actually stop you from changing the code, clicking the "submit" button, and doesn't change the message from "that code doesn't seem to be correct" to something like "you've been temporarily locked out". I used an online dictionary search to look for all the words that could be made with the ones in the word lock, and it turns out to be a fairly extensive list. One further pain point, though, is that in one of the trailers, we can actually see the player entering a code into the lock and getting through the front door. Not only is the code not an actual word, but that code doesn't work in the game. While that hint may have been a bust, it seems like the trailer includes some hint about finding an item in the pitch dark somewhere. Great stuff.

So what exactly happened to the game? Honestly, I have no idea. I'd be tempted to say that the game was so difficult, no one got through it, but even that wouldn't explain measly numbers like 13 total players across 2 years. I decided to crawl the wayback machine and put together a timeline:
- The first snapshot appears on Feb 29, 2024, announcing the game's upcoming release on March 4.
- We get another snapshot on March 10 with a sale price of $11.99 but a 20% introductory sale. The first review is now visible, posted March 4th, the day of the game's release.
- A snapshot on May 25 shows the game still up with a price in Euros (11,79€), though some elements on the Steam page are now broken. The second review is now visible, posted March 15th.
- By the snapshot on October 11, 2024, the game has been pulled from Steam.
- One final snapshot exists on March 27, 2025, but nothing has really changed since October.

Those two reviews still exist, by the way, both thumbs down, one in English and one in Chinese.

Not at all what I expected based off of the screenshots and video. Hard pass, refund requested.
- Mirage, March 4th, 2024

门都进不去。。还有锁上的倒计时我以为是过不去会直接开的 结果什么都没有发生。、。、、提示太差了

Translated from Google: Can't even get through the door. . There was also a countdown timer on the lock. I thought I would just open it if I couldn't get through. But nothing happened. ,. ,,The prompt is too bad

- 炸毛张（散修）, March 15th, 2024

My guess? The game released with little-to-no marketing (the only advertising I saw for this came from a website called adventuregameshotspot.com), was too difficult for the few people that picked it up, got no traction, got no off-site reviews (the Metacritic page is completely empty) and in the end, rather than allow the game to just sit quietly on Steam, they simply pulled the game. No fanfare, no backlash, no controversy...just quietly pulling the plug on a game nobody played. Even the developer's webpage is dead.

The sad thing is, given the rising interest in things like ergodic literature, and given how good the atmosphere for the game is, the developers did have SOMETHING here. With the right pushes in the right locations, maybe hints online, or an active social media presence, I have a feeling this game could have done well. They could have steered Discarnate: Locust down the same path as a Five Nights at Freddy's game, where the gamers come together to solve the puzzles. Then again, given part of the Steam description says "There is no clue or hint system in our test, once you enter you are fully on your own until completion or failure. Only the enlightened few shall claim the fruits of their labor," perhaps that would have been the opposite of what they wanted. Still, the atmosphere was tense, and my mind kept ruminating on the puzzles days after, wondering if maybe I could actually solve one. I think the developer could have made something truly fun had they tried again. Either way, I may not be one of the "enlightened few", but it's certainly interesting to have been one of the only few.

-maestro_dana