Caput Mortum
The Trespasser sequel we didn’t know we needed.
Caput Mortum is one of those things I stumbled across and became infernally drawn to, incapable of resisting. It is a first person ‘horror’ game set in the countryside of 16th century France, with your nameless, aimless character finding themselves in an abandoned village facing a looming tower. With no other logical course of action, you climb the hill, enter the bizarre structure, and descend to the depths of Hell. And, yes, Hell is a classroom.
The main gimmick of Caput Mortum are its controls - it’s intended to be played with a very cumbersome PS1 era scheme, with the left stick handling strafing and linear movement, and turning and tilting the camera put on the trigger and shoulder buttons. The slow, awkward movement and viewpoint does a good job accentuating the claustrophobia of the cluttered, low-resolution environs, and adds artificial difficulty to the otherwise straightforward combat and navigation. And that’s a good thing. It really does feel a lot like games like King’s Field, which is certainly the goal - one of the control scheme options even swaps the turn and tilt controls, and the preset is called ‘King’s Field’ outright.
The right stick then handles the second part of the control gimmick - your free-floating hand. To interact with objects, smack them with a weapon, or pick up and use items, you have to be in range and also have your hand hovering over the location in question. You slide it around the screen with the right stick, and can see your whole arm stretching out, covering up parts of your view, and requiring even more awkward inputs to operate the many context points throughout the game. Again, this works surprisingly well. It reminds me of the manual manipulation in the Penumbra and Amnesia games, but in a low-fidelity setting and therefore minus the requirement to push open every door yourself. It is also vaguely similar to the noodle arm from Trespasser, but without the terrible physics and boob tattoo health meter.
Each floor of the tower you descend to is a standalone level, with a checkpoint at the start, a sequence of puzzles to solve, and usually a tiny bit of combat or hazard management filling the gaps. None of it is too challenging, but it is all very evocative and effective. I really loved the Classroom level, which requires you to ‘play’ with a certain character - it effectively took the place of, say, respawning enemies, but kept me more on edge and anxious for sudden noises than constant combat would. The puzzles are generally pretty simple, but again have the occasional flash of clever utilization of the setting and controls. For the most part, you’re just picking things up and carrying them to the spot where you use them, and there’s no point where you’ll actually have to practice some lateral thought or write anything down, but there also weren’t any that I’d say were poorly designed or frustrating.
By the end of the game, you’ll have multiple different weapons to juggle, all with their own uses, but the difficulty tops out pretty early in the final third. Even though it seems like you’ll be stumbling over the controls a lot, in practice once you get comfortable with them, the game stops really pressing you to do anything too complicated. The final area is probably the weakest, with a bunch of skeletons that are trivial to fight but also kind of annoying and frankly generic looking.
Now, a lot of this game is tied up in the control scheme, and it’s absolutely the way to play if you want to get the most out of its very short run time. However, if you really cannot wrap your head around it, you can technically use a mouse and keyboard to just whip through the game trivially, snapping your head around, taking smooth lines around obstacles, and basically humiliating every enemy. But if that’s how you’re going to play, it’s going to be an even shorter and easier experience than it already is, and will likely be a lot less memorable.
After you clear the game, you get a hint about how to open a combination lock that appears at about the halfway point, and if you restart the game and find the clues to it, you’re rewarded with a secret item, which, as far as I could tell, is just used to get a second ending. It’s not much, and isn’t difficult at all to do, but it does add about another half hour or so to the game, and gives you an excuse to replay the segments that had you creeping around waiting for jump scares at an amusing clip while scanning for clues.
The game’s biggest strengths, in my opinion, are the art and sound design, which are then heightened by the awkward controls. It does a great job of walking the line between active and passive horror, without resorting to the sort of cheap tricks the genre is laden with. Enemies mostly mind their own business until you get too close, and the game adds a very Penumbra-style ragged breathing and blurred vision when you look directly at them - until they die, and you can calm down and examine the fantastically grotesque corpse. Other moments are even scarier for being more subdued - the house with a chest in the village almost had me fall out of my chair, and there’s nothing actually dangerous about it. There’s just a really good sense of decay and dread that makes walking around and examining interiors consistently tense, and it never yanks control away from you to show off some hollow scripted event.
All of which made it somewhat surprising to me that the credits reveal that quite a lot of the assets were purchased - nothing looks terribly out of place [aside from the skeletons at the very end] and the game has a very consistent look and style throughout. I have to assume most of them were manually adjusted to fit with the overall art direction, and it’s still a pretty impressive accomplishment for a small team even if some of the work is off-the-shelf.
Caput Mortum is a solid, satisfying, and subtly spooky game - but whether or not there’s enough game here for the price is a different question. It’s certainly much better in virtually every way than something like Scorn, but if you like the look and tone of Caput Mortum but aren’t jazzed about the controls and would like something a bit longer, check out Northern Journey too.
Caput Mortum can be purchased on Steam.