[Disclaimer: I received a review key for DeathOmen through Keymailer, a third-party website/company that connects publishers and developers with content creators. The game was given without promise or expectation of a positive review, only that the game be played and content be created through the playing of the game and the experience. Unless otherwise noted, all content in the following article is from my own playthrough of this game.]
Systems: Windows, Steam OS
Release Date: February 5, 2025
Publisher: CreativeForge Games
DeathOmen is an atmospheric-horror walking sim that builds tension through interspersed jump-scares with some questionable mechanics.
The game starts with your character waking in a darkened room with a laptop. The laptop seems to be a central hub for cameras placed throughout the house, twelve in all, and one particular room where a woman lays awake on her bed unmoving. There is also a strangely designed storefront where you can buy a hot dog, medication, or a flashlight. This storefront is one of the more clunky aspects of the game and what looks like AI-generated artwork for the icons doesn't really fit thematically with the rest of the game. These same icons pop up again once you enter the code to leave your room and step out into the hallway when the game tells you that you're hungry and should eat sometime, presumably a hot dog purchased from an online marketplace.
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I then spent the next 32 minutes trying to figure out what the game wanted me to do. I explored the explorable house with a handful of doors being locked without a "This door requires a key" notification, which was actually nice because that told me that I didn't need to worry about trying to open that door. There was another keypad on a door downstairs that I figured out after reading an apparent letter to myself. The first half, being the last 16 minutes of our first video was actually quite tense as I was fully expecting something to jump out at me or to find something happening on the cameras via the laptop upstairs. By the end of the first video, the first 22 minutes, I felt mostly engaged, but when I quit, it was because I didn't know what else I was supposed to do. In the second video, all 16 minutes, there was close to no feeling of dread or wondering what was going to happen because it was essentially just a repeat of the last half of the first video. Wandering around the house trying to figure out what to do. It was only after reading the Steam Forums and watching a walkthrough video from Zhain Gaming, did I discover that what I was missing was an annoyingly placed USB drive hidden behind a book on the bookcase in the downstairs office. I genuinely don't understand this design decision. There's no reason that I can understand to keep the USB drive so secretly hidden from the player since this is essentially what ends up propelling the game forward through to the end of the game; I think it was supposed to have been the player character who was the one that "hid" the USB drive in the first place. The developer even acknowledges that the USB drive is often a difficulty wall that has come up with other players.
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Once you have the USB drive, it gives you access to the laptop on the desk in the office which has a similar interface to the laptop upstairs, but instead has access to a different series of cameras. I can only assume that this is your character's regular job as an offsite video surveillance specialist as you acquire $1 every time you click to the next camera in sequential order; although I don't know how you're supposed to "report" anomalies like the paper on the fridge states. Like the USB drive, acquiring money to make purchases from the online marketplace is a form of gating off the player from the next section of the game, requiring you to purchase an item upstairs and then travel down to the front door where the item is immediately delivered and dropped off on the table just inside the front door. At one point I did try to buy the flashlight because I had the money, but the game told me that I didn't need the flashlight yet so I couldn't buy it; until a few minutes later when I needed to go into the basement and the game told me that I should buy a flashlight before going into the basement.
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The remainder of the game is a series of tasks, requiring you to return to various rooms in the house to pick up items before the game tells you that your character is tired and should return to bed for the night. While exploring the house and returning to rooms to collect items is when all of the jump scares happen and I do admit that most of them are very well timed, never giving you long enough to look at what it is that's scaring you for you to develop a clear image of who and what is doing the scaring. When there is a static-induced jump scare, there is a slight chance that it will trigger a countdown timer with a classic "mental trauma" icon and the first time it happens the game prompts you to take your medication. So then you must return to the office to click through cameras to earn at least $30, after which you return to your laptop upstairs to buy the meds which are then delivered back downstairs by the front door. Thankfully, and oddly enough, you are given 10 doses of your medication and there were only three or four instances in the rest of the game that required you to take your medication; in a separate playthrough I watched what happened when the timer reached zero and it's just an instakill screen with "Fatal Panic Attack" blazoned across the screen in bright yellow text.
Throughout my entire playthrough on the Steam Deck, the only issue I ran into was that I couldn't invert the y-axis natively, but I was able to invert the touchpad in the Steam Deck controller settings, similar to what I had to do with Hell Dive. This meant that the touchpad was always inverted, making navigating any menu with the cursor a little awkward, but manageable; significantly more so than had I had to play the game with standard y-axis controls. I didn't change any of the graphical settings and the game ran anywhere between 30-52 fps.
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Overall, I found DeathOmen to be a mixed bag in the best way possible. The story was a little convoluted in both its telling and its final explanation for why all of the events were happening the way that they were. The purpose of the two laptops with their multiple cameras felt more like a mechanic whose sole purpose was to require the player to perform an action to trigger an event to progress the game without it feeling well integrated with the rest of the story. And the atrociousness of the online store and the USB drive. But once you acquired the USB drive and the rest of the game progressed at a reasonable rate. The jump scares were well timed and paced so that there was a feeling of dread as you walked through the house, constantly wondering if you did actually close that door or when that door opened and by whom. DeathOmen also didn't overstay its welcome taking me a little over an hour once I located the USB drive (although I probably could've saved some time had I remembered that there was a spare fuse for the electrical panel in the nightstand). Good tension and jumpscares hampered by a mediocre story and occasionally confounding mechanics. Take that how you will.
~JWfW/JDub/The Faceplantman/Jaconian
I Don't Want To Die Alone
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