[Disclaimer: I received a review key for Necrophosis 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, Linux, Steam OS
Release Date: April 25, 2025
Publisher: Dragonis Games
Developer: Ares Dragonis, Adonis Brosteanu
Time Spent: 4 Hours 6 Minutes
[I'm going to be honest with y'all. I'm having a hard time with this article. There are a lot of layers to take into account, and I don't fully grasp all of them, which I'll get to in one paragraph down. So rather than talking so much out of my ass that get everything wrong, I'm going to talk about aspects of the game and pepper the article with screenshots I took (when I remembered). The game is absolutely beautiful if you're already one to look at a Hieronymous Bosch painting and can see the beauty in semi-graphic depictions of the afterlife. They may not make a whole lot of sense, but that's okay because there were times when I was playing that I wasn't sure what was going on either. So we're all a bit even.]
If Dragonis Games's first game, The Shore, used up their entire palette of blue, then certainly Necrophosis has exhausted their palette of reds and oranges. Necrophosis is a purposefully obtuse and vague walking sim and light-puzzle game that takes visual inspiration from Polish surealist painter Zdzisław Beksiński, with hints of HR Giger, and cosmic deity influence from H.P. Lovecraft that had a romantic fling with John Carpenter's brain. The one thing that held me back from absolutely loving this game was that it wasn't until I read the smallest of blurbs on the Necrophosis Steam page that everything clicked.
"Billions of years after the universe met its demise, you awaken in a realm..."
That's really all I would've needed at the beginning of the game to help get a grasp on what was going on. But I get that that's part of the game. You awaken (more like are birthed) and are pushed into this orange and red world full of grotesque imagery, doing little tasks to access another area. What are these humanoid husks shambling through this decaying wasteland, praying at seemingly random intervals? Why does nearly everything need a brain from something else to act like a key opening a door? Why is the Space Jockey's device now a laser canon? That last one I get is purely just an easter egg.
While researching and writing this article, I read and saw a lot of comparisons to Scorn, released in 2022 from Ebb Software, and while both games pull visually from H.R. Giger, the biggest difference that I could tell was that Scorn has varying levels of combat, whereas Necrophosis is 97% walking-sim and 3% stealth-running away from things that will one-shot you. I very much appreciated being able to take my time to look at everything, since so much of the game took visual inspiration from Giger and Beksiński, I wanted to fully take in what I was looking at and appreciate it. Not that I really wanted to spend 13 minutes trying to figure out a puzzle while fleshy bird-like creatures kept bursting and popping out of dozens of holes in the back of a creature embedded in a boulder. If I didn't have any kind of trypophobia before, I have the seedlings of it now.
The point is, I really enjoyed just looking around the overall world and the different locations in their saturated color palettes. Thankfully, as the game progressed, you moved away from the yellows and oranges to deep reds, and even calming shades of green and blue, so the entire game didn't wear on your eyes in shades of warmer hues. It was often difficult not to be able to find something to look at off in the distance and just stare for longer than is recommended for a YouTube playthrough video series. Although some of those videos became corrupted, as I've previously discussed, sadly, there is no video where I stare at a blackhole for over a minute.
I tried to look up the etymology of Necrophosis because it just screams etymology. I know "necro" means dead because I've been playing Dungeons & Dragons for the last 32 years, and I've been listening to various sub-genres of death metal for almost a quarter decade, but "phosis" was throwing me. I thought maybe it was related to the Greek "physis," which would then make sense, being "The Nature of Death," or something to that effect. Except everything I've looked up tells me that "phosis" isn't a real word. I genuinely could lose myself trying to figure out the meaning of Necrophosis, but then this article would never be finished, so let's leave this unsatisfyingly unfinished here.
I had a feeling that I was going to really enjoy Necrophosis, and I definitely liked that Ares Dragonis didn't include any of the frustrating chase sequences that were in his first game, The Shore. Necrophosis was nearly pure and unadulterated walking-sim with some light puzzle elements set amongst a horridly beautiful backdrop. And that's perfectly enough.
P.S. I wanted to put this at the end of the article because: 1. I don't know if it's a correct interpretation, but it's what I was thinking while playing, especially by the end of the game, and 2: I couldn't figure out how to sucessfully place it within the body of the article. I think what the game is about is that you're a physical manifestation of the concept of consciousness of all things that have ever existed, and it is your decision (although I don't think the game actually gives you the choice to make or not), whether or not to start a new universe/life cycle and to start existence all over again. That's my theory, just me and Columbo.
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