Uriel's Chasm

I sat with Uriel's Chasm for an evening and I still am not entirely sure what Welsh developer Dylan Barry wants me to feel, which is probably the whole point. This is a micro-length shmup-slash-platformer built around Sister Tabitha, an intergalactic nun dispatched to investigate a vanished orbital monastery called Enoch's Hope. That premise sounds pulpy and fun. The delivery is something else entirely: deliberately hostile, fascinatingly broken at the edges, and clocking in somewhere between 30 and 60 minutes depending on how long you stare at the screen wondering what you are supposed to do. The structure splits into four short chapters. The first has you piloting a ship from a top-down perspective, collecting bibles from asteroids to raise your faith meter above that of a lurking cosmic threat, while managing fuel and ammo at the same time. Chapters two and four return to shoot-em-up territory with their own warped rule sets, and chapter three breaks things up with a side-scrolling platformer section where the threat of death actually disappears, replaced by a disorienting rotating level. None of these chapters hold your hand. There is no pause key. Pressing Escape restarts the entire game. The UI is enormous and neon and deliberately unpleasant to read, with text that cycles colors every second. These are not bugs. Rail Slave Games meant every single one of them. Between chapters, interlaced FMV footage interrupts proceedings. Two young women who call themselves the Shovelware Queens appear on screen and react to the game you are currently playing, at one point calling it exactly what most Steam reviewers called it. That recursive self-awareness is either the cleverest layer to the whole project or an elaborate excuse for the mess underneath, and deciding which one is, genuinely, a large part of the experience. The game was a TIGA "game with a purpose" finalist in 2014. Critics from Kill Screen found it worth championing. The majority of Steam users disagreed, and that tension is baked right into what Uriel's Chasm is. As something to play straight, for the satisfaction of tight controls or a rewarding loop, it mostly fails on its own terms. But as a micro-artefact of a very specific moment in early Steam history, as a provocation about what shovelware means, as a thing that features narration by no-wave vocalist Jarboe and a spaceship that mines bible verses from meteorites with a hallucinogenic laser, it occupies a lane that nothing else does. The MIDI-rooted soundtrack is genuinely decent, the pixel work has a grimy retro coherence to it, and the whole thing ends before it can fully exhaust your goodwill. I would not recommend this to someone who wants a game. I would hand it to someone who collects strange small experiences the way others collect outsider art, someone who can appreciate that a 30-minute provocation with a no-pause restart button and FMV self-critique might be doing something intentional rather than accidental. That person exists. You probably already know if you are them.

Kai · Scout Team

Indie & narrative

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