As people familiar with this channel have no doubt discovered over time, more often than not I’ve tended to struggle mightily with indie horror titles on the Switch and Switch 2. That isn’t to say there are no games I’ve played that have been good, but more often than not they’ve had a tendency to fall into familiar traps. Whether that’s an over-reliance on cheap jump scares, being great at building mood and tension but little excitement, or just fundamentally not showing enough focus on solid core game design and execution, it feels like the expectation is that consumers should be willing to overlook sloppy implementations just to get their fix.

In the case of Escape from Umbra, the first trap it falls into is being a walking simulator trying to play as horror. This type usually has a focus on creating a moody environment through the use of darkness, creepy music and/or sounds, and the ongoing threat of some monster to be avoided. Check, check, and check! Are there loads of objects strewn about that you won’t be able to interact with, even if sometimes they could sensibly help you out? Check! Are there then environmental puzzles that can be a bit vague, and will require you to determine what around you is somehow important and what isn’t, before even addressing the intended challenge itself? Yeah, there’s a bit of that as well.

Sadly, I got substantially sidetracked right from the start by an inability to get the game’s brightness set in a way that I could make out much of anything at all. Returning to tweak the one brightness slider more than once, with the target image’s visibility never seeming to correspond much to improving the ability to see, was more frustrating than it needed to be, and is actually a problem I’ve rarely encountered otherwise on the platform. Adding to that issue, a lack of initial direction to help orient you on how to interact with the game was flawed, with on-screen instructions for flashlight bursts simply being incorrect, and even when I suspected I knew what to focus on and try to work with, there being no feedback or way to know what was going wrong. There does seem to potentially be something at least marginally worthwhile here, but the implementation on the system seems to be problematic at best.