When it comes to horror-oriented games on the Switch, more often than not they’ve tended to be of the jumpscare and quick thrills variety. While there’s absolutely an audience for that, and a few popular series that have been able to capitalize on that style without necessarily having much substance in terms of gameplay, there’s absolutely more to the genre than that. One thing Edge of Sanity does reasonably well is to provide the counterpoint to that style of play, replacing quicker junk food scares with a slow burn sense of creeping doom.

While perhaps people could be tiring of seeing the term Lovecraftian horror thrown around, there’s little doubt that’s the playground Edge of Sanity has chosen to work within. In a similar vein to the notoriously-challenging Darkest Dungeon both visually, and in terms of design, there’s just a generally dark and creepy look to pretty well everything in the game that’s hard to miss. Throw in the somewhat fragile nature of your character, and the other people you’re relying on, and there are absolutely some parallels and those help define many of the challenges you’ll face, which can be as driven by personal instabilities as by the actual threats themselves.

This is sort of where it felt like the game got lost, or at least heavily distracted in its various systems at the expense of the overall narrative and experience. Whether you’re trying to keep your hold on sanity in one person, or trying to roll with a temporary advantage you can see in someone’s trauma, the experience can feel like it lost its focus at times. Instead of being concerned with the grind, and trying to keep scraping back from the edge, it would have been better to feel like the game was pursuing what you theoretically showed up for in the first place.