I told myself that I should be more invested in getting ready for the next semester (September 4th). Still, I went on and played a spooky demo, which, upon playing, had me with no idea what I was doing, until my wife came in and told me exactly what to do.

This week is Below, Rusted Gods.

Below, Rusted Gods is one of those first-person spooky games by FromSouthGames. Don’t fret, there is literally no information about the game on Steam, except that it is releasing at the end of 2025 for the PC.

There can be nothing wrong with opening up a game with me riding an elevator, and it opens to an obvious Cold War underground HQ, and then being told that I am now the newest recruit to monitor and direct an assault team that has descended into a weird stone portal that obviously has “unimaginable horrors” written right across the top of it.

Cool.

Being new to the whole “instruct a group of people on what to do” when you yourself have no idea what to do, is a lot more intimidating than I thought. There is a terminal to talk to the guys in the abyss, a radar to see if there are any bad guys in their area, a life support system to check up on your new friends, and a random TV connected to another TV with a VCR. The onboarding is quick and easy, and if you’re like me, you missed the talk about what to do after the “check up on your friends” section, and I was stuck not walking into the bathroom. The moment-to-moment gameplay feels like playing some minigames before the spooky thing happens.

Weird.

Below, Rusted Gods does the spooky thing in a way that was most certainly off-putting, but it is kinda telegraphed. When I figured out that I had to walk into the bathroom (for whatever reason), there was a spooky moment. What else am I supposed to feel when the game instructs me to look through an eye-sized hole in the bathroom wall? There are a few genuine spooky moments, more geared towards the end of the demo.

I absolutely love the photorealism that Below, Rusted Gods is going for. The tube TV camera feels too making everything so much sweeter. It makes me feel like I am really watching some Cold War Horror movie. The grotesque monsters that peek their heads in every once in a while are oozing with that 80s monster movie look; lots of tomato sauce, shaking bodies, and deformed skeletal structures going on.

There are loads of cassettes to pop into the convenient cassette player to forward the spooky narrative about what is happening to the people in this facility; regardless, the audio design nails the isolated feel. The player is essentially alone, and all the whir of all the ancient technology, like the tape recorder, that the player can check the transcripts of old conversations with NPCs, really brings home the horrors of being alone in this kind of situation.

All in all, I liked everything I saw in the Below, Rusted Gods demo. I admit that if I had just listened, then I could have understood that I needed to go to the bathroom to forward the story, so that’s on me, not the game.

Below, Rusted Gods has everything that makes it a true spooky game. It looks great, sounds great and though some of the spooky moments were televised nationally, some of them were pretty good and had me taking a quick breather.