After about four hours with SUFFOCATE, the new Taiwanese indie horror game from Naughty Cow, I’m left disappointed. What looked like a promising entry into the country’s growing horror scene — known for atmospheric titles like Detention and Devotion — turns out to be a largely forgettable experience. Despite some moments of potential, SUFFOCATE struggles with repetitive gameplay, pacing issues, and technical frustrations that smother whatever fear it tries to inspire.
A Promising Setup That Quickly Falters
SUFFOCATE begins with an intriguing premise. You play as the daughter of the Lin family, Tanya, who finds herself in a traditional Taiwanese home haunted by a vengeful female spirit. The prologue sets up an eerie story involving guilt and Taiwanese cultural expectations, a setup that initially hints at psychological depth. Unfortunately, that promise starts to unravel by the middle of Chapter 2.
The story’s pacing feels uneven, and for every interesting bit of Taiwanese history or chilling discovery, there’s another long-winded cutscene featuring clunky-looking character models or a repetitive chase sequence that kills the tension. The narrative has flashes of competence but never builds momentum. It feels less like uncovering a psychological horror mystery and more like checking boxes in a rote haunted-house walkthrough.
The Atmosphere Never Fully “Suffocates”
Visually, SUFFOCATE is fine. The environments, including dark corridors, flickering lanterns, and traditional Taiwanese architecture, are competently designed and occasionally effective at creating unease. The graphics won’t blow anyone away, but they get the job done. I didn’t feel Unreal Engine 5’s capabilities were fully, or properly utilized.
The sound design is another mixed bag. The background music and SFX are serviceable but uninspired. You’ll hear the standard horror tropes, but few of them land with any lasting impact. It’s all too familiar and predictable, lacking the nuanced layering that made games like Devotion’s soundscape so haunting.
Most importantly, the horror atmosphere falls flat. Despite the gloomy visuals and occasional jump scare, I never felt truly afraid. There’s no psychological dread, no sense of escalating terror, just a few mild startles followed by long stretches of monotony. For a game called SUFFOCATE, it rarely makes you feel the weight of fear pressing down on your chest.
Gameplay: Hide, Run, Repeat
If SUFFOCATE billed itself as a hide-and-seek puzzle game, it might have been easier to accept. But as a psychological or survival horror experience, it simply doesn’t deliver.
The gameplay loop revolves around hiding from a ghostly pursuer, searching for items, and solving basic puzzles. There’s little variation from one encounter to the next, and the chase sequences quickly lose their tension. Instead of dreading the next encounter, I found myself sighing whenever the ghost appeared, as it became a chore rather than a thrill.
Item collection and puzzle-solving offer some respite, but they’re rarely satisfying. A temple puzzle involving drums and gongs had promise until a bug froze me in the inventory screen, forcing a full reload. That kind of technical hiccup is the last thing you want in a horror game, though I imagine such technical stutters might be improved upon in future patches.
Technical and Performance Issues
Performance-wise, SUFFOCATE runs fine with no initial crashes or major frame drops, which is something. But several bugs and glitches undermine the experience. I was playing with a hall-effect joystick controller, but sometimes, PC controller inputs just don’t register, particularly during chase sequences. Quick-Time Events (QTEs) feel inconsistent. In Chapter 1, escaping the ghost by mashing the X button failed multiple times despite identical timing.
During the aforementioned temple puzzle, opening the inventory trapped me in the menu, forcing a full reload. None of these issues completely break the game, but they chip away at the experience piece by piece. For a horror game where tension and control are everything, even small technical frustrations can make the difference between true fear and the player’s fatigue.
Verdict
What’s most disappointing about SUFFOCATE is that it doesn’t know what kind of horror it wants to be. It gestures toward psychological horror but never digs into its characters’ mental states. It flirts with survival horror mechanics but doesn’t offer meaningful resource management or combat. What’s left is a repetitive ghost chase game that feels hollow and shallow.
By the time I reached mid-Chapter 2, I wasn’t terrified, I was just tired. The game’s title suggests panic, claustrophobia, and mounting dread. Instead, SUFFOCATE suffocates under its own pacing, repetition, and lack of emotional weight.
SUFFOCATE has its moments, a solid technical foundation, decent visuals, and an intriguing concept rooted in Taiwanese folklore, but it never pulls those elements together into a cohesive horror experience. The scares are surface-level, the pacing is uneven, and the gameplay lacks depth or variety.
Unless you’re a die-hard fan of Asian indie horror and don’t mind a slow, buggy hide-and-seek loop, it’s hard to recommend. For everyone else, SUFFOCATE will likely leave you gasping not from fear, but from frustration.
(6 / 10)
Above Average
(6 / 10)Rely on Horror Review Score Guide
A review code for PC was provided by the developer.
