ALPAGES : THE FIVE BOOKS

I want to be honest with you the way I'd be honest with a friend who just bought this: ALPAGES: THE FIVE BOOKS is a curiosity, a single-developer micro-project that wears its roughness like a badge, and you should know exactly what you are getting before the loading screen fades in. This is a short arcade horror FPS where the entire objective is to collect five books scattered across a foggy, grimdark landscape before a witch, a psycho clown, zombies, infected animals, a two-faced teddy bear, and a rogue plant creature collectively tear you apart. The premise has a certain trashy charm. The execution is another conversation. The moment-to-moment loop is simple to the point of being almost skeletal. You load into a bleak open field shrouded in fog and start running. Four of the five books sit out in the open, meaning you grab them quickly enough with a bit of route knowledge. The fifth is tucked into a maze of barbwire-lined walls, and that one genuinely produces a pulse spike or two when the clown cuts off your exit. Each book you collect releases another enemy type into the world, which is a decent escalation idea, and when you finally hold all five, the goal shifts to shooting the witch to trigger the win condition. A slow-motion flourish plays, enemies mill around uselessly, and then the title screen reappears. The whole thing can be over in minutes if you memorize the book locations, and memorization is a meaningful portion of the skill ceiling here. The atmosphere actually does something right in the opening seconds. The color palette is genuinely oppressive, all washed grays and dead browns, with fog that convincingly smothers any sense of safety. For one brief moment before the first zombie wanders into frame, the world reads like it could belong to something special. That window closes fast. The enemy roster leans hard on genre staples, and the FPS controls, while functional, feel like they were assembled in a weekend. There is no plot framing, no environmental storytelling, no reason to linger. The soundscape has scattered moments of unease but nothing that lingers the way a good horror game should. Community reception landed at roughly 34% positive across a modest review pool, and that number tracks with the experience. Where I will give Nicolas Bernard credit: the escalating enemy unlock system as you collect each book is a structurally sound horror idea. Someone with more time and resources could build something genuinely tense around it. As it stands, the game does not have the polish or the content depth to sustain even the short runtime it commits to. The median playtime sits well under half an hour. There is no difficulty setting, no alternate mode, no reason to replay once you have cleared it. If you are drawn to lo-fi horror experiments and genuinely enjoy watching one person try to make something frightening with limited tools, there is a sliver of interest here. Everyone else will feel the loop has already exhausted itself before the witch hits the ground.

Kai · Scout Team

Indie & narrative

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