Acanthoceras

I want to like Acanthoceras more than I do. There's a specific itch.io-bedroom-dev energy to it that I genuinely respect - one person, a low-poly abandoned hospital reeking of dread, a commissioned soundtrack from Tom Morel, and an actual movement vocabulary that goes beyond walking: charged jumps, wall runs, slides, dashes, front flips triggered by double-tapping a direction. Solo developers who bother to build a proper parkour toolkit deserve credit. Amaury Hyde clearly had a vision here, even if the execution leaves the vision more than half-buried. The loop itself is simple and honest about its simplicity: hunt for keys, avoid the monsters, read scattered floor papers for lore scraps, and try not to fall into pits or catch yourself on steam vents. You also collect blood bags to restore health - there's a suggestion you're something other than fully human here, and the atmosphere does lean into that. The hospital setting, puppet pieces left on the floor, a disembodied voice welcoming you back like it owns you - there's mood. When the soundscape and the lighting align, the game earns a genuine chill. That happens occasionally, and those moments are worth noting. Tom Morel's score in particular has a creeping, low-frequency quality that suits the nightmare framing well. For a sub-two-dollar experience, the auditory craft punches above what you'd expect. The problems are real though, and I'd be doing you a disservice glossing over them. The parkour - the centrepiece mechanic - is inconsistent. Wall runs and flips sometimes simply don't register, which in a horror game built around precise movement is exactly the kind of failure that tips tension into frustration. The controls cannot be remapped in-game (there's reportedly a launcher workaround, but it isn't obvious), which matters especially for AZERTY keyboard users. There's no tutorial explaining what's killing you, no checkpoint communication, and random death moments that feel more like bugs than design. The Steam review split, sitting roughly half-positive from a very small pool, reflects a community genuinely divided between people who picked up what the game was going for and people who bounced off its rough texture immediately. Where I land: Acanthoceras is a proof-of-concept with a few real sparks. It belongs to that category of solo-dev experiments where you're partly evaluating the ambition of the person making it rather than a finished commercial product. If you've got a high tolerance for rough movement games and a soft spot for micro-budget horror atmospherics, there's something here worth experiencing once. If unpolished controls break your immersion instantly, this one will lose you in the first corridor. It also exists in the same universe as Hyde's other projects, which suggests this world has more to say if the developer keeps building. As a standalone experience right now, though, it's incomplete - more a mood than a game.

Kai · Scout Team

Indie & narrative

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