Forsake: Urban horror

I keep coming back to this one because it does something quietly brave: it builds dread from the ground up rather than leaning on genre tricks. Forsake drops you inside forbidden locations, a psychiatric hospital, a slum, a parking lot and others, with nothing but a loadout of urbex gear and the knowledge that something deeply wrong is already in there with you. The premise is basically urban exploration as a haunting ritual, and the atmosphere committed enough to make it work. The core loop is deliberate and methodical. You comb rooms, crack hidden codes, find keys, pry open walls with a crowbar, and gradually unlock more of the map. Cleared areas grey out on your HUD so you always know where to push next, a small quality-of-life touch that keeps the pacing from collapsing into aimless wandering. The real goal is hunting down three Relics scattered through each stage and placing them in a Ritual circle to lure and exorcise the resident entity. That Ritual mechanic is the tension peak of every run, the moment when you stop hiding and become bait. Seven entities populate the roster, including a Reaper, a Crazy Doctor, a Burned Woman, a Clown, a Brutal Butcher, Twin Dolls, and a Geisha, and each one behaves differently enough that learning their patterns feels like actual survival knowledge rather than memorised trivia. The sound design is the other quiet hero here: the ambient layers carry genuine weight, creaking doors, distant footsteps, the specific silence before something moves. A few of the audio jump-scares lean cheesy, a thunderclap here, a sting there, but the underlying soundscape mostly holds its nerve. The skill tree asks you to commit to a playstyle before you enter: speed, strength, or technique. Three equipment slots let you shape your approach, whether that is stealth tools to slip past entities undetected, intel gear to map threats, or survival tools like flare guns and lightsticks for when evasion fails entirely. Currency and XP trickle in at a pace that feels earned rather than generous, which means early runs teach you to be cautious about what you spend and what you keep. The randomised loot placement and item positions add enough run-to-run variation that repeat visits to the same map do not feel identical, though after several hours the underlying skeleton starts to show. Solo play is viable, and the game is friendly enough in its tutorials to let newcomers find their feet without frustration. That said, Forsake is plainly built around company. Some equipment loadouts only make sense when coordinated across a squad, and the proximity voice chat, which pipes your voice only to players physically near you in-world, is the kind of design decision that makes a good session feel genuinely cinematic. On harder difficulties, the entity AI sharpens and the margin for error narrows considerably, which is where the co-op synergy between loadouts really starts to matter. The repetition critique is real and fair: the gameplay loop does not expand dramatically over time, and solo players will feel the edges sooner than group ones. For what it is, a compact, atmosphere-first indie horror from a small developer with a clear creative focus, Forsake earns its place. It is not trying to be Phasmophobia or Devour, even if it shares their DNA. It has its own quieter identity, and the six locations it offers are crafted with enough care that the smaller scope reads as intentional rather than incomplete.

Kai · Scout Team

Indie & narrative

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