Happy about: The Lacerator

When you first see The Lacerator store page pop up, you almost instinctively want to move on. It looks like one of way too many linear trashy horror themed action games designed as low budget slasher movies that became extremely popular ever since Puppet Combo cracked that formula. But where those types of games are linear romps with little to no interesting gameplay, The Lacerator is the complete opposite. It’s a branching paths non-linear horror themed action adventure game with a crazy amount of variation and discovery. Not quite as ridiculous as True Crime: Streets of LA was back in the day, I suppose, but fresh and impressive nonetheless.

At its core, this is a survival horror-adjescent type of action adventure where you explore locations, find key items, manage resources with the limited inventory and deal with enemies via combat or escape. But saves (which are automatic) are often quite few and far in-between and several different things affect your general path through the game (the game calls it Flow). Some choices that affect the game are super easy to understand – if there is a one-use item that can open two doors, you make the choice which of the doors you will open during the current playthrough. But the wild additional “choice” concept you get is that the main character may lose his limbs during your playthrough, and lost limbs block certain paths but also unlock others too.

It’s a ridiculous and over the top idea, that works surprisingly well. In my playthroughs so far I’ve seen 4 completely different storylines play out, each bringing me through different locations and having its own tasks and scenarios. Each of which could’ve been modified depending on the lost limbs and there are a few locations I have not seen myself at all, but saw others do them on the internet. It’s really cool and inventive to see this approach as the traditional survival horror barely ever did this since the very first examples of the genre also had a lot of variations in them.

The game is far from perfect, of course and the over the top story might be too much for some. And it is still a relatively tiny indie title, so chances of this becoming the influence it really should be, are somewhat slim. But I would love to think that other developers would look at The Lacerator as a successful experiment on non-linearity in these types of action adventuring and will also attempt to break the mold of very static linear playthroughs, without resorting to some randomness or roguelite elements. Because The Lacerator is really neat and worth checking out.