Fears to Fathom: Ironbark Lookout asks an important question: what if public bathrooms didn’t have any toilets? What if there was instead a room where everybody has to piss on the floor?

…Playing this game before there were any patches was maybe not the greatest idea. In addition to the restaurant piss room mentioned above (where the toilet I was meant to pee in did not have a visible model), my playthrough was fairly marred by glitches and other technical issues. On the default graphics settings the game can’t handle itself: things slow to a crawl, and there’s this motion blur when looking around which is rather sickening to have to deal with. Setting them lower doesn’t help, either: all it does is make the lighting so bright as to be painful, and the game still didn’t seem to be capable of handling its rather expansive areas. Not to mention the glitches: how I got softlocked at one point because my attempt to put down something it turned out I’d later need clipped through the floor and out of bounds, and how you’re not fast enough to be able to clear the final chase… unless you move diagonally, zigzagging somehow being faster than just… running normally. I was excited to play this game upon its release — as I’d really liked the previous games in the series and wanted to go into one of them blind — but I think, maybe, I needed to wait a bit longer, because the issues that hadn’t been patched out yet were enough to effect my overall enjoyment of the game.

Which is a bit of a shame, because otherwise I liked a lot of what this game had to offer. What this series in particular excels at is managing to capture how it feels to be where you are: both the natural horror that can come out of the situation you’re in… and also the serene, the pretty, the parts that… almost feel like home. Namely, I’m struck by the picture it captures of national park life: all the routines you have to go through each night, all the times you have to upend everything because somebody in the park did something they’re not supposed to, becoming friends with a disembodied voice on the radio, and how you slowly make your assigned firetower yours: opening and closing the shutters each night, throwing all your shit through the floor across the place, and slowly getting a familiarity of the space around you as the days go by. It’s a surprisingly comfy game, even as things start building up around you, and frankly it made me wonder if I’d personally be into the park ranger life. It plays well with the horror aspects, as the intrusions on your idyllic park ranger life turn from normal to absolutely not, and even if… I do have some questions about whether this really is a true story somebody sent in, I can’t deny that it otherwise works. Even if I should’ve waited before I otherwise experienced it for myself. 8/10.