One of the very many games advertised to me as "having no jumpscares" only for it to have jumpscares. Either my definition of the word is very different from other people's, or I'm easy to own.

Probably the best of these indie horrors with a vague and confused "retro-inspired" aesthetic I've ever played, which doesn't put it very high on my actual quality barometer. It essentially has every single idea you've ever read in an ideas guy greentext horror game thread. I struggle to lend any points for originality (the elevator was cool!!). Still, it's just a lot of nice ideas bundled together into a neat package that is suspiciously just as long as it takes an average Youtube audience to drop off a Let's Play. Hmmmmmmm????? Probably a coincidence.

In the interest of fairness, I believe to know the appeal here. This game's success makes total sense; it's the genre in a shot glass, a Now That's What I Call Horror compilation album with all the bang and none of the fuss. But the devil is in the details. After learning that the developer of this game previously made Spooky's Jumpscare Mansion, it all kinda made sense. "No new ideas under the sun" etc., but horror only works for me when it is introducing ideas that feel in some way fresh, with implications that allow them to stew in my subconscious during/after the runtime or for themes to be navigated in a way that evokes something in me.
Lost In Vivo succeeds at what it tries to do, which is take elements from Silent Hill and SCP Foundation, among many others, and allow the player to fight through the layers of horror hell. Enemies with insane designs screaming towards you as you blast them with your shotgun, defiantly keeping your cool under the setpieces and crushing atmosphere that strings the game together like a roving epic. There's an "Abandon all hope ye who enter" graffiti tag near the start of the game, so I mean yea. I find it all a little too grating, obvious and cheap, but hey.

What if shooter but was an incursion to hell.

The most present and conscious camera I've seen. No climax, no build-up, no conclusion, no nothing. Just a disgusting reality permeating the experience.

Also, WTF is up with the sound design and soundtrack?????

"im gonna turn my death machine game into a moving self-improvement story, best idea ever"
just hope that the story of a childish Carmelite who has to separate herself into "bad Maddie" and "Good Maddie" wins me over somehow.
Unlike 1001 spikes or Itakagi's Ninja Gaiden, this game builds its deadmachine without grace or personality by fitting it into that premise. It seems to make sense, but confusing perseverance with masochism and self-acceptance with the separation of "my good half and my bad half" is very childish, although later both halfs come together in the form of ... POWER UP? DAFAC DUDE.
One note: Since I was a kid, I have always been interested in how each person took the rhetoric of the hardcore player, perhaps the difficulty in the 80s was profitable as a time value, but in the 90s and 2000s it was already an aesthetic

I do not find it beautiful. I do not find it moving. I find it precious. Delicate but gaudy, restrained but excessive, fluid but deeply static. I find it so goddamn boring.

It asks me to admire it. Insists upon it even. But I don’t. My breath is untaken, my awe uninspired. It’s all so monotonous and hollow. It tells me to feel, but I do not feel. What a terrible thing: assumed feeling unfelt.

There is nothing to hold onto here. It strikes the most self-serious art game pose — I Am Become Grief, Destroyer of Girls — but dodges all specifics. Yet grief is always specific. Trauma is always specific. Depression too, even when it feels absolutely diffuse and general. Each is rooted in a specific self. But Gris ditches the self and gives us instead the everygrief. Or is it the everytrauma? There’s no telling

We cross tiresome landscapes, past uninspired iconography, through bland mechanics, and nothing lands. Nothing lands. The game just sits there, faceless and cool, daring you to question its beauty.