Hektor

My first reaction to Hektor's central conceit was quiet excitement. A procedurally shifting underground facility - corridors that seal off, rooms that swap positions the moment you glance away - sounds like the kind of handcrafted disorientation that a small team could execute beautifully if they committed fully. Rubycone, a five-person Swedish studio, built this as their debut. The ambition is real and it shows. The follow-through is where things get complicated. The setting is a Cold War-era military black site buried under Greenland, and the atmosphere in the opening act is genuinely suffocating. You start with nothing but a flickering lighter pressed into the dark, eventually trading up to a torch. Notes and journal pages scattered across the facility piece together a story of mind-control experiments, institutional cruelty, and one woman's deteriorating sanity - and the writing in those notes is better than the game around it. One standout detail: a character's handwriting literally degrades across the notes as her grip on reality slips. That kind of intentional craft is what I come to small-team horror games for, and for a little while Hektor delivers it. The JIGSAW system - the developer's name for the procedural room-shifting mechanic - is the game's heart and its most stubborn problem. The idea is that the facility responds to your movement, sealing corridors and shuffling rooms to mirror the protagonist's psychosis. In practice, it too often strips exploration of any agency. The level will simply guide you toward whatever item or objective comes next, which hollows out the maze-logic almost entirely. Worse, the JIGSAW system can glitch in ways that are genuinely hard to distinguish from intended behavior: walls closing in, enemies teleporting in front of you mid-chase, geometry locking you in rooms with no exit and no autosave nearby. When a horror game already wants you disoriented, technical failure becomes invisible until you realise you have been looping the same corridor for ten minutes with zero forward progress. There are two enemy types - the Ghoul, a floating creature that screams and hammers your sanity meter without directly killing you, and the Predator, a four-armed pursuer that is the game's sole lethal threat. The Predator, when it works, earns its keep. The Ghoul is mostly an alarm bell. The pill-based sanity system, borrowed in spirit from Amnesia, adds texture when it functions - but multiple reviewers and a fair portion of the Steam player base noted the Benzo supply can feel inconsistent, and the screen-warping psychosis effect is severe enough to cause real motion sickness in susceptible players. The soundtrack, composed by Shaun Chasin and recorded by the Slovak Radio Symphony Orchestra, is the production detail that earns the most consistent praise across the board. For a five-person indie debut, commissioning a live orchestra is a serious commitment, and the music earns it - swelling into a crescendo when the Predator closes in, retreating into murmured dread during exploration. The ambient sound design is equally considered, with distant voices and half-heard cries doing quiet, effective work. This is a game that sounds bigger than it is, and that gap between the audio and the underlying mechanics is Hektor in a sentence. At somewhere between two and four hours depending on how badly the JIGSAW system loses your thread, Hektor knows roughly when to end. The finale lands harder than the journey earns, but it lands. Patience-first horror fans who can forgive a rough procedural engine for the sake of an unusual story structure will find something worth the sitting. Anyone expecting tight chase-horror in the Amnesia or Outlast mold should recalibrate expectations sharply downward - this is a rougher, stranger, less polished thing than either. Also worth flagging: the Mac version has known compatibility issues with newer macOS builds, so PC is the safer path.

Kai · Scout Team

Indie & narrative

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