AMID EVIL

AMID EVIL is a first-person shooter that wears its 90s influences without apology, but the more time you spend with it the clearer it becomes that Indefatigable built something with real intentionality behind the pixel grime and neon lighting. This is not a nostalgia cash-in. It is a game that studied Heretic, Hexen, and Quake and then asked what those games could have been if their creators had another decade of design thinking to work with. The structure is the first thing worth knowing: seven episodes, each one a self-contained world with its own visual language, its own enemy roster, and its own weapon set. One episode might feel like a cold cosmic horror crawl through crystalline voids. Another pushes you through something closer to molten hell architecture drenched in reds and oranges. The variety is genuine. By the time you reach the later episodes you are not grinding through more of the same. You are stepping into a new place that has been thought about carefully. The weapons deserve special attention. The Star of Torment, the Aeturnum, the Celestial Claw - each one has a secondary firing mode and a distinct personality. The soul mechanic, which powers up weapons by absorbing defeated enemies, adds a layer of aggression to movement that pure corridor-shooters often miss. You are rewarded for staying in the fight. For players who grew up with fast movement and no regenerating health, AMID EVIL will feel immediately correct. For players coming from modern shooters, the learning curve is honest but steep. There is no handholding. Secret hunting is genuinely rewarding rather than checklist padding. The level design has a labyrinthine quality that asks you to pay attention to your surroundings, and the game trusts you to do that without a waypoint floating in your eyeline. Performance on PC is solid and the game scales cleanly across hardware generations. Where AMID EVIL occasionally stumbles is in pacing within individual episodes. A handful of maps run long enough that the energy dips before the exit materialises. The soundtrack by Andrew Hulshult is relentless in the best possible way but the game underneath it sometimes needs one fewer room in a stretch. The narrative framing is minimal by design, which suits the genre but means there is no emotional thread pulling you forward between episodes. You are here for the movement and the craft, and the game knows that about itself. If you are looking for story beats or character work, this is not where you will find them. As someone who normally gravitates toward the quieter, more introspective corner of the indie space, I was not the obvious audience for this one. What changed my mind was noticing how much care lives in the details: the way enemy designs feel specific to their episode worlds rather than generic, the way the soundtrack shifts register subtly between areas, the way a secret room feels like a genuine discovery rather than a corridor hidden behind a slightly different-coloured wall. AMID EVIL earns its Very Positive rating because it was built by people who actually love this genre and wanted to make it better. That comes through. It is worth your time if you want fast, punishing, visually striking first-person combat from a team that clearly cared about every room.

Kai · Scout Team

Indie & narrative

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