Beastiarium Review

Do not play this game. Stay far away, you deserve better than this rotting condom of a “game”. Just reading these lines is giving this game more time and attention that it deserves. Go. Be free! But if you insist on me actually writing a review…

Beastiarium is set in Petersburg at the beginning of the 20th century, a hundred years after monsters have invaded the Earth, and apparently settled. Unfortunately you do not play as a freedom fighter, or the army trying to take the planet back from this monster scum! No you play as … a person. And your main goal is to … not die? Complete all the puzzles for the sake of personal accomplishment? Beastiarium actually tells you nothing about itself. Not the plot, not who you are or why you are actually playing the game. All you get is a vague backstory about opening gates that allowed monsters to inhabit the Earth.

The purpose of the levels is to solve a “puzzle”. Well, if you’re being charitable you can call them puzzles. The first level will flash the solution on the screen if you take more than five minutes to solve it, the second puzzle is just find a lever, then find the exit. The third puzzle is to just find body parts. Fourth might give you a bit of a problem. In Hobbit-esque fashion you get to solve riddles. They aren’t difficult, you just have to look around the map for the answers, and I’m pretty sure Fazan, the developer of Beastiarium, just looked them up online, but there’s more thought put into it than the previous levels.

But simple game design isn’t Beastiarium’s only, or worst, fault. The level and map design is either basic or terrible. The second level is populated by “corpses”, in reality these are just textureless mannequins that litter the floor. If you disturb them they will wriggle after you, the tense chase action being accentuated by throbbing techno! The game's Steam page states: “its atmosphere will keep you in suspense throughout the story” but this is a lie. There is no tension in any of these levels, least of all getting chased by barely mobile corpses with techno playing, extremely loudly, in the background.

The third level is worse. The goal is to find body parts, but that isn’t made easy as something, I don’t know what, don’t know where it came from, or why it was doing it, but something kept killing me. Killed me if I stood still, if I ran, if I stood on the path, if I stood in the light, stood in the dark. Whatever I did it would kill me. Sometimes as soon as I reloaded the game. Occasionally when it killed me the game would then crash while trying to reload the save. The fact that my laptop has stayed in one piece is only thanks to a YouTube video that showed me exactly where to go. Even then I was still dying and having the game crash on me.

But this is not the worse part! Oh no! The worst part is if you run to a new map too quickly the level won't load and you’ll fall through the map. This happened before the third level, but reloading then slowly climbing the ladders helped. Not so much luck with the fourth level, as every time I try to enter it I just fall through the level, suspended in nothingness for all eternity. Reloading does not solve it and as such I quit. This game is not worth any more of my time, and is definitely not worth any of your money.