Glimmers of greatness, marking Mike Klubnika as one to watch out for.
Anthology collections are always going to be a bit of a mixed bag. I don’t think I’ve ever seen one that stayed at a single level of quality throughout; Magnetic Rose from 1995’s Memories — one of the most beautiful pieces of animation I’ve ever seen — is only the first part of the collection, and is immediately followed up by Stink Bomb, which is roughly thirty minutes of a guy who can’t stop farting nerve gas. Stink Bomb isn’t bad, but holy fuck, is it no Magnetic Rose. Unsorted Horror is similarly not immune to anthology syndrome, and excellent pieces like the perspective-swapping Concrete Tremor sit a bit awkwardly next to Control Room Alpha’s core theme of “big spiders are scary”. Despite some inconsistencies, however, Unsorted Horror is still a collection that shows a lot of latent potential peeking through the cracks.
The Other Side was the first game offered to me, and it’s the first PAYDAY 2-themed horror game I’ve seen; you’re tasked with maintaining the biggest piece of shit drill ever engineered to put a hole through through a vault door, constantly topping it up with coolant, oil, fresh batteries, and new bits. It’s a lot of blind fumbling around to figure out what goes where and how it all works together, much in the same vein of a personal favorite like Nauticrawl, but it’s not especially polished; I managed to get softlocked the first time I needed to take the drill down for repairs, and that’s not very impressive for a game that’s only about fifteen minutes long. The ending is also pretty silly, culminating in the classic indie horror final shrug of “spawn a scary PNG that moves toward the player and then cut to credits”. It feels distinctly amateurish, and it’s not a great first step forward into the collection.
Control Room Alpha is next, and similarly fails to impress. The core conceit hinges almost exclusively on whether the player is scared of spiders; if you aren’t, then this is mostly just going to be you fucking around with a dipstick for a few minutes before a big spider jumps at you. There’s certainly something admirable about the way that Klubnika tries to build tension here, especially given how short of an experience it is — wandering outside to the spider pit when the equipment fails, having to very carefully move the samples while insects skitter around your station — but, again, if you aren’t afraid of spiders, then this isn’t going to do much for you. There’s another equally cheap jumpscare at the end of this one, too, and I was afraid we were going to fall into a pattern with the remaining three games.
Not the case, luckily! Carbon Steel is the third entry of the collection, and it’s far more feature-complete and engaging. I used to daydream about being a lab technician when I was younger, just getting to work as some sort of scientist; it was a pretty simple imagining of how such a job would function, given that I was a child who thought scientists were just people like Doc Brown or Dexter who fucked around with machines and chemicals all day, but it was something I fantasized about all the same. While real lab techs do boring shit like crystal chromatography, Carbon Steel lets you run experiments on live sea monsters that are constantly threatening to break out of their rusty tubes and savage you for your hubris. Sick. There’s a neat little plot running through this that gives a bit more context and worldbuilding than I was expecting from such a breezy title, and it provides a lot of motivation to do things properly. Or really, really wrong. Your choice. Things were starting to look up.
Concrete Tremor is next, and it’s the easy stand-out of the lot. Multiple perspectives, a slowly-unfolding story, and some truly chilling moments make for a wonderful piece of dream-like horror. The Battleship game that goes down at the end gives you the opportunity to get a phone call from someone in a group of people you were playing as earlier, and there’s an exchange between your old character and your new one that actually managed to get an audible reaction out of me. It’s my understanding that this one is actually offered as a standalone title, along with every other game I’ve mentioned previously, and I’d seriously suggest just getting this one if you aren’t in the mood to play through the entire collection.
We round things off with The Tartarus Engine, which was created exclusively for this anthology, and it shows; it feels the most obviously like the sum total of Klubnika’s talents, mixing a lot of systems and knowledge together into something that feels remarkably cohesive. He’s gotten a bit better at writing, a bit better at coming up with diagetic ways to convey information to the player, a bit better at constructing level layouts, a bit better at creating a consistent art style. You can see a lot of elements of the other works present in Unsorted Horror cropping up here, and it makes you feel like something of a proud parent to see the developer applying all of his learned talents at once. That said, Tartarus Engine isn’t my favorite of the lot — that still goes to Concrete Tremor — but it’s easily the piece that shows the most promise for Klubnika’s future work. Frantically checking your watch as the time you have to hack into the machine slowly ticks away is a wonderful little mechanic, and it fits the short runtime perfectly.
Unsorted Horror is a bit of a mixed bag, but the title should have given that much away. While it’s certainly not going to be winning any awards, this is still a nice portfolio to show off a lot of little, unique ideas. The indie horror scene is currently going through some weird growing pains, with a deluge of scary children’s mascots designed purely for the sake of having Game Theory videos made about them and liminal space walking simulators where a scary monster eventually jumps out at you and screams until your speakers pop; anything being made today that can break free of these amateur trappings is deserving of your attention. Going off of what’s here, you’d be smart to keep an eye on Klubnika from here on out. He’s gonna make something truly spectacular sooner rather than later, and you won’t want to miss it when he does.
Anthology collections are always going to be a bit of a mixed bag. I don’t think I’ve ever seen one that stayed at a single level of quality throughout; Magnetic Rose from 1995’s Memories — one of the most beautiful pieces of animation I’ve ever seen — is only the first part of the collection, and is immediately followed up by Stink Bomb, which is roughly thirty minutes of a guy who can’t stop farting nerve gas. Stink Bomb isn’t bad, but holy fuck, is it no Magnetic Rose. Unsorted Horror is similarly not immune to anthology syndrome, and excellent pieces like the perspective-swapping Concrete Tremor sit a bit awkwardly next to Control Room Alpha’s core theme of “big spiders are scary”. Despite some inconsistencies, however, Unsorted Horror is still a collection that shows a lot of latent potential peeking through the cracks.
The Other Side was the first game offered to me, and it’s the first PAYDAY 2-themed horror game I’ve seen; you’re tasked with maintaining the biggest piece of shit drill ever engineered to put a hole through through a vault door, constantly topping it up with coolant, oil, fresh batteries, and new bits. It’s a lot of blind fumbling around to figure out what goes where and how it all works together, much in the same vein of a personal favorite like Nauticrawl, but it’s not especially polished; I managed to get softlocked the first time I needed to take the drill down for repairs, and that’s not very impressive for a game that’s only about fifteen minutes long. The ending is also pretty silly, culminating in the classic indie horror final shrug of “spawn a scary PNG that moves toward the player and then cut to credits”. It feels distinctly amateurish, and it’s not a great first step forward into the collection.
Control Room Alpha is next, and similarly fails to impress. The core conceit hinges almost exclusively on whether the player is scared of spiders; if you aren’t, then this is mostly just going to be you fucking around with a dipstick for a few minutes before a big spider jumps at you. There’s certainly something admirable about the way that Klubnika tries to build tension here, especially given how short of an experience it is — wandering outside to the spider pit when the equipment fails, having to very carefully move the samples while insects skitter around your station — but, again, if you aren’t afraid of spiders, then this isn’t going to do much for you. There’s another equally cheap jumpscare at the end of this one, too, and I was afraid we were going to fall into a pattern with the remaining three games.
Not the case, luckily! Carbon Steel is the third entry of the collection, and it’s far more feature-complete and engaging. I used to daydream about being a lab technician when I was younger, just getting to work as some sort of scientist; it was a pretty simple imagining of how such a job would function, given that I was a child who thought scientists were just people like Doc Brown or Dexter who fucked around with machines and chemicals all day, but it was something I fantasized about all the same. While real lab techs do boring shit like crystal chromatography, Carbon Steel lets you run experiments on live sea monsters that are constantly threatening to break out of their rusty tubes and savage you for your hubris. Sick. There’s a neat little plot running through this that gives a bit more context and worldbuilding than I was expecting from such a breezy title, and it provides a lot of motivation to do things properly. Or really, really wrong. Your choice. Things were starting to look up.
Concrete Tremor is next, and it’s the easy stand-out of the lot. Multiple perspectives, a slowly-unfolding story, and some truly chilling moments make for a wonderful piece of dream-like horror. The Battleship game that goes down at the end gives you the opportunity to get a phone call from someone in a group of people you were playing as earlier, and there’s an exchange between your old character and your new one that actually managed to get an audible reaction out of me. It’s my understanding that this one is actually offered as a standalone title, along with every other game I’ve mentioned previously, and I’d seriously suggest just getting this one if you aren’t in the mood to play through the entire collection.
We round things off with The Tartarus Engine, which was created exclusively for this anthology, and it shows; it feels the most obviously like the sum total of Klubnika’s talents, mixing a lot of systems and knowledge together into something that feels remarkably cohesive. He’s gotten a bit better at writing, a bit better at coming up with diagetic ways to convey information to the player, a bit better at constructing level layouts, a bit better at creating a consistent art style. You can see a lot of elements of the other works present in Unsorted Horror cropping up here, and it makes you feel like something of a proud parent to see the developer applying all of his learned talents at once. That said, Tartarus Engine isn’t my favorite of the lot — that still goes to Concrete Tremor — but it’s easily the piece that shows the most promise for Klubnika’s future work. Frantically checking your watch as the time you have to hack into the machine slowly ticks away is a wonderful little mechanic, and it fits the short runtime perfectly.
Unsorted Horror is a bit of a mixed bag, but the title should have given that much away. While it’s certainly not going to be winning any awards, this is still a nice portfolio to show off a lot of little, unique ideas. The indie horror scene is currently going through some weird growing pains, with a deluge of scary children’s mascots designed purely for the sake of having Game Theory videos made about them and liminal space walking simulators where a scary monster eventually jumps out at you and screams until your speakers pop; anything being made today that can break free of these amateur trappings is deserving of your attention. Going off of what’s here, you’d be smart to keep an eye on Klubnika from here on out. He’s gonna make something truly spectacular sooner rather than later, and you won’t want to miss it when he does.