Seum: Speedrunners From Hell

My first session with SEUM lasted about forty minutes before I realised I'd forgotten to eat lunch. That's the pull. Each level is a bite-sized gauntlet of platforms, bounce pads, spike walls, saws, and lava drops, and the only objective is to hit the blue exit portal before the timer says you failed. Restart is instant. No loading screen, no lives counter, no friction between you and the next attempt. That single design choice is responsible for most of the Very Positive rating sitting at 95% on Steam, and honestly it deserves it. The game sends you through nine floors of hell, with nine standard levels plus a boss level per floor, and hidden beer cans scattered across each map that unlock bonus stages if you collect enough. Your toolkit grows as you descend: fireballs shot from a grafted demon arm light switches and activate gates, a teleportation ball lets you bypass gaps entirely, and later floors layer in gravity reversal and time manipulation. None of these abilities are complicated to trigger, but knowing when to chain them for a clean, fast run is where the skill ceiling lives. Levels that take a competent player eight seconds to complete can eat thirty minutes of failed attempts when you're still figuring out the optimal line. That loop, frustrating and then suddenly satisfying, is the entire product. There is no multiplayer, no couch co-op, no versus mode, which I'll be straight with you about: if you came here looking for something to run on a second TV at a house party, SEUM is not that game. It's a solo time-attack experience. The aesthetic leans hard into 90s arena shooter territory, deliberately evoking Quake's geometry with a hellish red-and-black palette and a metal soundtrack chugging along underneath. It's not going to impress anyone graphics-wise, but the old-school look loads fast and keeps performance smooth even on modest hardware, which matters when you're restarting a level fifty times in a row. The controls on PC with keyboard and mouse feel responsive enough for the precision the game demands. If you prefer a gamepad, know that the analog input was reportedly rougher on console versions, so mouse aim is the recommended path for tight leaderboard times. Where SEUM earns its reputation is in the global online leaderboards. Every level has one, sitting in the top-left corner of your screen while you play, quietly daring you to shave another half-second off. There is also a dedicated Speedrun Mode that lets you replay an entire floor or the full game for a combined time, and an Endless Mode for pure survival distance runs. A DLC chapter called The Drunk Side of the Moon adds further floors for players who clear the base campaign and want more. The active community even maintains a Discord with a leaderboard bot and a Velocitymeter mod to track your stats in detail. For a game released in 2016, the community staying active enough to pin that kind of resource in 2021 says something real about the replay depth. Be honest with yourself before picking this up: SEUM rewards patience and repetition. Casual players will hit a wall around floor four or five as the par times tighten and the obstacle combinations get meaner. The difficulty curve is real, and some later levels genuinely require scouting a route before you can execute it cleanly. There are occasional clipping issues on corners and gates that can rob you of a good run at the worst moment. But if the idea of shaving 200 milliseconds off your personal best on a ten-second level sounds like a good evening, you are exactly the target audience, and this game will hold you for far longer than the price suggests.

Riley · Scout Team

Sports & racing

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