Uriel's Chasm 2: את

I want to be honest with you before you click anything: את (pronounced "et") is not a game that will meet you halfway, and that is precisely why I find it worth talking about. Rail Slave Games, the one-person operation run by Welsh developer Dylan Barry, has built a small, strange universe out of religious imagery, lo-fi pixel aesthetics, and genre collisions that have no business existing alongside each other. This entry mashes together a proto-bullet-hell boss rush, a gardening-and-water-management stage reminiscent of early home computer titles, and sequences that evoke the surreal rhythm of 16-bit era multi-genre carts. You play as a young girl sent into another dimension as a sacrificial offering, adopted by a cryptic entity called The Abstraction, and charged with cultivating a garden paradise in the middle of space while a figure named Mayim circles the edges of your reality like a glitch that has learned to want things. That premise sounds like word salad until the pieces start to resonate with each other, and when they do, they resonate hard. The bullet-hell section carries its own mechanical wrinkle: grazing fruit fills a rainbow anti-matter launcher, and moving closer to projectiles raises a risk bar that feeds into a fruit-machine spin mechanic. None of this is explained with any comfort. The game drops you in and expects you to feel your way through it, which is either a feature or a flaw depending entirely on your tolerance for opacity. The gardening mode, by contrast, is slow, tactile, and quietly tense as you manage water and dodge fire sprites to keep trees alive. Together the two modes create a rhythm that mirrors the allegory itself: devotion and danger cycling without clear reward. The soundtrack is worth flagging separately. Built on Yamaha FM synthesis close to the actual hardware it is imitating, it moves between Indian Bhangra textures and Technosoft-influenced FM thunder in a way that sounds genuinely handcrafted and more confident than the game's budget has any right to produce. Here is where I will be direct about the friction. There is no save system worthy of the name, and a game over sends you back to the beginning. Controls are non-obvious enough that some players have reported needing to press every key on the keyboard just to find the start input. Unskippable intro sequences compound the irritation when you restart. Community reception sits at a rough split: about half of the small reviewer pool found it worthwhile, and the rest found it an incomprehensible obstacle course. The Unwinnable review called it something that tore the writer's heart apart; a Steam user called it not worth zero dollars. Both reactions are honest, and both are available to you depending on what you bring to it. Who is this for, then? Collectors of alt-games and outsider software. People who treat game-as-art as a genuine category rather than a marketing phrase. Fans of the Rail Slave universe who want to see how the Nauseous Pines lore expands and bends. Players who remember when a rom hack could feel like a haunted object. If you want clear tutorials, genre consistency, and sensible save checkpoints, this will wear you down fast. But if you have ever finished something obtuse and obscure and felt the specific satisfaction of having earned its meaning rather than been handed it, את has a particular frequency that may catch you.

Kai · Scout Team

Indie & narrative

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