Watch on YouTube: DERELIKT release date trailer
Some people remember the original PlayStation fondly. Others remember it accurately. DERELIKT is for both camps. The narrative retro shooter from German developer Visuwyg and Warsaw publisher Hyperstrange came out on Friday 13 November on PC, through Steam, GOG and the Epic Games Store, with PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series versions to follow later. Friday the 13th feels like the right release day for a game about dark corridors in which something very old has woken up.
The setting is the Von Neumann Outpost, a research station grafted onto a derelict asteroid in orbit around Saturn. The lights are out, the systems are failing and the dozen or so survivors cannot agree on what happened, which has been the traditional opening position of every space station since the Nostromo‘s crew sat down to dinner. You are under-equipped and a long way from help, juggling inventory space for ammunition and medical supplies while solving puzzles of the Resident Evil and Silent Hill school and dealing with what the developers cheerfully call eldritch abominations. There are 12 levels with a light metroidvania structure, so expect locked doors that you will come back to with the right gadget.
The influences are worn openly: System Shock 2, Doom 3 and, rather endearingly, the PlayStation Alien Resurrection of 2000, a game better remembered for its controls than its xenomorphs. The real draw is the look. DERELIKT began as Visuwyg’s research project into recreating PS1 graphics, and it shows: affine texture warping, buckling geometry, hand-painted vertex colouring and full-motion CGI cutscenes of the kind that once came on a disc of their own. Unlike the real thing, it has modern controls and quality-of-life improvements, so you get the 1999 nightmare without the 1999 thumb ache.
Hyperstrange has form here, having published the brutal retro melee shooter Elderborn and Postal: Brain Damaged. A free three-chapter demo has been on Steam for anyone who wants to sample the station before buying. We haven’t played the finished game, so there’s no verdict yet, but the trailer does a fine job of making polygons that would have looked at home on a 1998 Official PlayStation Magazine demo disc seem genuinely unsettling.
Here at SFcrowsnest we suspect the PS1 look works so well for horror because the hardware always seemed faintly frightened of itself. Textures swam, walls bent when you turned your head, and everything in the distance was fog. Developers in 1998 spent their days fighting those limitations. Visuwyg has simply noticed that they were the scariest thing in the room.
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