10 Dead Doves

I went into this one expecting a scrappy low-poly curiosity and came out genuinely unsettled for reasons I was not prepared for. 10 Dead Doves is a fixed-camera, tank-control psychological horror adventure set in the Appalachian wilderness in 2004, made by a three-person Nashville studio whose leads voice, name, and physically resemble the two main characters. That kind of personal investment bleeds through every scene. The story follows Mark Stetson, a terminally ill and emotionally avoidant hiker who convinces his best friend Sean to hunt down an urban legend called the Ant Farm. What starts as a buddy-comedy road trip into the woods quietly becomes something much heavier, a portrait of regret, fractured relationships, and what it costs to keep running from the things you owe people. The moment-to-moment structure draws obvious comparison to classic Resident Evil: fixed camera angles frame each environment like deliberate movie shots, you carry an inventory with no quick-equip slot, and environmental puzzles require you to find a key, a code, or a way across a broken bridge. The Wren, a tall bird-like figure who types at a tiny desk somewhere inside Mark's narcoleptic episodes, delivers cryptic dream sequences that shift the geometry of the world into pure abstraction. These are where the game earns its strange soul. Locales include an abandoned water park, a towering radio station, and shadowy woodland stretches that the flashlight barely dents. Certain levels swap to a third-person over-the-shoulder view or a first-person horror segment, keeping the pacing varied enough to stay interesting through the middle act. The cracks are real and worth knowing about before you commit. The first third of the game is genuinely rough: the opening forest section is difficult to navigate with tank controls, fixed angles can conceal objects you need, and the absence of a usable map means you may spend twenty minutes convinced you are broken when you are just bad at the layout. Some chase sequences in the third act become repetitive to the point of fatigue, particularly when the camera cuts work against rather than with the tension. Voice acting lands unevenly outside the big emotional beats, though when those beats arrive, they land harder than you would expect from a project at this scale. A post-launch achievements update added 24 Steam achievements tied to endings, choices, and even trash collection, which is a small touch that shows the team still cares. The sound design deserves more than a footnote. Quiet ambient forest audio punctuated by the Wren's typewriter, the understated original score, and a spatial awareness in the sound mix that makes dark corridors feel genuinely inhabited, this is a game that rewards headphones. The early 2000s low-poly aesthetic is not nostalgia bait for its own sake; the deliberately uncanny face textures, the stop-motion-like character expressions achieved through photo reference and texture scrolling, all of it serves the horror in ways that a higher-fidelity style probably would not. Steam user reception sits at Very Positive, and the game earned a Best Narrative nomination at the 2025 Horror Game Awards. For a debut title funded by 285 Kickstarter backers, that is a meaningful signal.

Kai · Scout Team

Indie & narrative

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