NaissanceE Review

Video games don't usually flex their ability to make you feel unsettled or unwelcome. Sure, games can craft a pretty convincing zombie-infested mansion, and they've got monsters in closets for days, but they rarely aspire to the sort of disorientation found in, say, the pages of Alice in Wonderland. Even the most frightening horror games tend to be marked by the allowances they provide for you. Think Dead Space's handy route finder, or the accommodating logic of puzzle elements in Resident Evil. Scary, yes, but the games are also ergonomic: their spaces feel constructed specifically to be occupied by you.
NaissanceE is not a horror game. Yet the hairs on the back of my neck were at attention for most of the 10 hours I spent in its world. The first-person exploration game by Limasse Five begins with a narrow escape from an implied threat, and though the bulk of the remaining experience involves light platforming and a touch of puzzle-solving, the specter of that early encounter looms large. You're never quite sure that another aggressive encounter isn't imminent, and the Parseltongue whisperings that make up most of the game's early soundtrack don't exactly steady the nerves. But the most foreboding element of NaissanceE is the world itself. Call it the architecture of the unwelcome.

See a distant, lit path, and it's probably where you'll be in an hour.

The first level's title pop-up provides what scant exposition is to be found: "Lucy is Lost." Lost within a giant city, or maybe a ship--it's never made clear. Whatever it is, it's stark and alien, black and white and monolithic all over. The majority of NaissanceE's experience is given to plumbing its depths, simply walking or running about its many tunnels and gangways in search of a way out. The world is mostly composed of simple geometric shapes; if there's a video game equivalent of the bare concrete structures of Brutalist architecture, it's wonderfully realized in NaissanceE. The areas you inhabit run the gamut from cubist caves to massive superstructures. Limasse Five turns these monumental spaces into a ballet of forms; many of the environments wouldn't feel out of place in the opening of 2001