Caput Mortum review

First-person horror game Caput Mortum is another reminder that "good" controls won't necessarily improve a game. Mouselook or dual analogue control mods can sometimes make a classic more approachable, but other times it's like you used AI to "improve" the Mona Lisa or something. Caput Mortum gets this, and makes the controls one of your primary enemies, elevating a pretty good horror game to a truly memorable one.

Caput Mortum's idiosyncratic controls, partly lifted from King's Field, FromSoftware's pre-Dark Souls first-person dungeon crawlers, had me hooting from the start. It's a "we were still figuring out first-person on gamepad" sort of deal: You look left and right with the triggers and up and down with the bumpers, swiveling your head like you're dialing in a WW2 anti-aircraft gun. The right analog stick is freed up for controlling your character's hand to manipulate objects in the environment, solve puzzles, and aim melee weapons at enemies.

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Caput Mortum warns players that its controls are supposed to make them feel vulnerable, and they manage just that: This deliberate latency as your brain tries to fire off the right commands adds an anxious thrill to encounters that just wouldn't land the same with a more intuitive interface. There's a slapstick appeal to it all as well, a feeling of fun being had at my expense that reminded me of Getting Over It.

Caput Mortum recommends playing with a gamepad, and that's how I went through the game, but I could see the keyboard-dominant option sans proper mouselook offering a similar experience. Either way, the novelty and perfect genre match of this control scheme really set this one apart. There are a lot of first-person indie horror games, but none quite like Caput Mortum.

Caput Mortum sees you exploring a tower built by alchemists, here the medieval equivalent of the Umbrella Corporation's ethically dubious "scientists." In the grand tradition of fantasy spires like Durlag's Tower in the OG Baldur's Gates, the above ground structure is just a pretense for a sprawling underground dungeon, and Caput Mortum has you going down level by level to uncover what those kooky alchemists were up to.

There's a great atmosphere to the whole experience, a sense of isolation and claustrophobia as you delve deeper under the tower, piecing the story together through environmental cues and the genre classic paper trail of journal entries about the affront to god these doofuses were cooking up alchemical-style.

One environmental detail that floored me: You can observe paintings by great masters next to crude, disturbing, impressionistic copies in one area, evidence of the alchemists trying to teach art to the homunculi they created. Later areas make the homunculi's yearning to be fully human more explicit—it gets tragic, even with them being such little freaks.

The vibe is tied together by a grounding in medievalism and alchemy that still feels unique in games⁠—more The Name of The Rose than Dungeons & Dragons. One of the big puzzles involves a quick crash course in the Greek cosmos, for example, an authentic little nugget of the arts and letters in Renaissance France that really added to the setting for me.

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The monsters are more uncanny than horrific, but I really dig the designs. The homunculi are my favorite, and practically a mascot for the game: Eight foot-tall, misshapen, spindly things that look formed out of clay, with bulging eyes and rictus grins. Caput Mortum wrings more tension and scare factor out of Amnesia-style screen blurring and sharp, high-pitched audio when you're looking directly at hostile enemies. It's a cheaper trick to up the fear factor, but I think it works.

There are standard enemies you can kill through melee combat, with Caput Mortum encouraging that Elder Scrolls shuffle of bopping a guy in melee, backpedaling to avoid their attack, then going back in to bop them again. It's a style of melee combat you see in a lot of indie first-person not-shooters, but the deliberate clunk of the controls serves to distinguish it here.

But there's also a selection of big kahunas who can't be killed and will pursue you over the course of an entire level, with your main recourse being surprise puzzles with the hand manipulation mechanic to make them go away for a while. One of these guys, a homunculus in a schoolhouse level of the dungeon, just wants to play a little game of Simon Says with you, prompting you to mimic his hand motions to make him run away for hide and seek.

Of course, he's got a Lennie from Of Mice and Men thing going on, and you're the rabbit⁠—fail to play his game, and he'll rip you apart. My first time running into him I freaked out and tried to go at him with a hatchet, but accidentally matched his hand motions in my flailing, leading him to run away⁠—a moment of horror, humor, and emergent gameplay all wrapped into one.

These guys naturally lose their fear factor after you've swatted them away a few times, but they're quick to deal with once you understand them, and smart pacing further ensured they never became tedious for me. For example, I appreciated that, the one time I was really stumped by a puzzle, the resident evil of the floor was polite enough not to bother me while I was futzing about in the puzzle room.

Speaking of puzzles, I enjoyed the ones in Caput Mortum overall. There was nothing that really fried my brain aside from the one where I missed a big clue earlier in the level⁠—they're mostly questions of connecting environment cues to the big alchemical apparatus du jour. But Caput Mortum gets maximum value out of straightforward brain ticklers by letting you connect the dots yourself. There's no dorky sidekick going "Hm, don't those symbols look like the ones on those jars in the other room?"

Aside from its delightfully weird controls, it's the intangibles that really stole my heart here. Caput Mortum is a game with capital-A Atmosphere, and its strange little slice of renaissance-flavored psychedelia is gonna stick with me for a long time.

If I have one complaint, it's that Caput Mortum left me wanting more, but horror's a tricky genre when it comes to runtime⁠—I was just starting to parse Caput Mortum's creatures more as RPG enemies than unknowable horrors when the credits rolled, and I think it's fairly priced at $12 for what it offers. There's a lot of juice left in this orange, but that's preferable to the alternative: Paying more for something that wears out its welcome.