Belladonna

My first thought sitting down with Belladonna was that somebody had genuinely loved a very specific stack of books, Shelley, Poe, Le Fanu, and decided the only proper response was to make a game about them. That quiet sincerity comes through in every hand-drawn backdrop of the crumbling von Trauerschloss estate. The sprite work is unhurried and detailed, and the opening scene, where your protagonist wakes on a slab with a clockwork key still turning in the back of her skull, has a stillness to it that a lot of bigger-budget horror games would kill for. Swedish solo developer Niklas Hallin (Neckbolt) did this entirely alone, and that matters: you can feel the care in individual rooms, in the way ambient sound shifts between the greenhouse and the crypt, in a haunting score whose loops are blended so gently you won't catch the seam. The story is the reason to be here. Doctor Wolfram von Trauerschloss, a mad scientist straight out of the Frankenstein mold, has left behind a manor full of journal pages, all 18 of them, that gradually assemble a portrait of grief, obsession, and a quietly devastating LGBTQ love story between his wife Belladonna and the household maid Klara. The material is genuinely affecting in summary: a marriage destroyed by the death of a child, a husband's descent into reanimation experiments, a clandestine romance that ends in murder. You play as Klara, reanimated and clockwork-driven, piecing together what happened to everyone she loved. Voice actress Tess Baines gives the protagonist warmth and a dry, charming habit of naming things she encounters, which goes a long way toward making the slow walks between rooms feel companionable rather than lonely. Here is where honest advocacy requires honesty about the limits. The puzzle design is the weakest part of the package. Inventory puzzles, combining a rope with a lantern, using a screwdriver on a grandfather clock for clockwork parts, mixing powdered belladonna plant into a bowl of milk, are logical enough but rarely demanding. Solutions are frequently telegraphed by the journal pages in the same room, and there is no fast travel, so you waddle back through screens you have already cleared. The game also ships without an in-game options menu, cannot skip voiced dialogue cleanly, and carries a known bug where pressing F12 (Steam's screenshot shortcut) can delete your save file. These are genuine rough edges, not charming ones. The story itself, for all its rich raw material, tells rather than shows: you learn about characters almost entirely through exposition, and the final act resolves its thorniest moral questions a little too quickly. So who is this for? If your patience for point-and-click adventure games is measured by puzzle challenge, skip it. If you are the kind of person who finds a Frankenstein pastiche with a queer heart and hand-painted backgrounds worth ninety minutes of your evening, and who can tolerate a game that ends feeling like a prologue to something larger that never arrived, then Belladonna will leave a quiet mark. It sits somewhere between an illustrated short story and a proper adventure game, closer to the former, and it knows that. The atmosphere and the artwork carry it further than the mechanics alone would justify, and the score will sit in the back of your head longer than you expect.

Kai · Scout Team

Indie & narrative

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