As someone who likes to try to find the silver lining in every odd game out there, I’ll admit that those efforts don’t always pan out depending on the experience being offered. Even at a high level titles like Horripilant tend to give me troubles, as attempting to simply define what sort of gameplay people can expect from them is a muddled challenge. I suppose you could go with the press copy stating that it’s “a chilling incremental dungeon crawl through the horrors of a forgotten underworld”... but honestly, and I suppose unsurprisingly, I think that oversells what you’re getting.

In execution, at least from the perspective of the person playing, the game at best has a creep factor, but really nothing more than that. Yeah, there’s the weird face featured in the game’s art, the low growl of the sound of his voice as he speaks to you, and some environmental text that will try to set the mood, but nobody is going to have nightmares or lose any sleep over it by a long shot. The majority of what you’ll really be doing here is just resource management of some sort, collecting materials and money, deciding what you’ll be investing in, and then hitting the dungeon to mostly passively sit and wait for the auto battling system to complete. On a high level from there it’s mostly lather, rinse, and repeat, just making incremental progress to have better stuff in some form.

Outside of not feeling like there’s much that’s terribly interesting to do, I’d also note that for the most part the game does an awful job of helping you understand what you’re supposed to do. There’s just a lot of poking around trial and error style, not really understanding what you’re doing, why, or how to succeed… I suppose you’re just supposed to plod through and learn from your mistakes. In particular I was irked that I could “hire” various critters, but then had no idea what was being done with them or how to use them. I eventually found the means to use just one, the weakest I had, but then also didn’t know how to change to something else more powerful I’d already purchased. As thin as the play experience is already, stumbling blocks like that really made it tough to feel like throwing any more time into this. Even in this sort of subgenre, I’ve simply played games that felt better conceived and executed.