When it comes to the majority of indie games that have opted for horror as their genre of choice, I’m unfortunately finding it harder and harder to maintain a positive outlook. Sure, there are those who do something different and exciting, whether with their visuals, storytelling, or structure, but they’re few and far between. Sadly, most of the rest are satisfied to rest on their laurels and crank out yet another pretty bland and predictable experience built on a walking simulator, and relying on cheap jump scares to carry the day. Maybe if that style still felt fresh it could be different, but unfortunately that ship sailed quite some time ago.

As you may have guessed, Zooparasite is one of those titles guilty of all the above. Its visuals are muddy, its environments are almost empty, your movement is slow and sloppy, and about all it has to try to keep your attention are periodic attacks from freakish mutated bugs of a few varieties, the most notable being a spider. To the credit of whoever designed the model for that particular critter, it’s pretty messed up looking, but since the majority of the time you’ll only get a fleeting glance in low light before you begin trying to run away from it, ideally you wouldn’t get much of an opportunity to take it all in.

Of course, one of the worst things about the game is that you’ll likely get many opportunities to observe a fair amount of the model without any risk to you… but for a bad reason. Did I mention that the game has some tremendous issues with clipping? Granted, there are things in the environment that until you solve some puzzle for, you won’t be able to get by. But just random things like pipes or other objects in the environment? You can generally just walk right through them. In a similar vein, while you may be able to hunker down for safety in a random locker that is inexplicably sitting empty in the sewer system, it’s perfectly possible for limbs and other parts of the monster’s bodies to just clip right on through them. Thankfully they won’t harm you, but things like this do nothing to raise the impression that great care was put into this release. Maybe if you just like the thought of scares from huge bugs chasing you, this could have something to offer. But even in a category full of pretty sketchy games this feels like a pretty low bar.