Coma: Mortuary

I want to be a defender here - I really do. A first-person wander through the world of the dead, a nameless man in a coma whose soul is trapped between existence and oblivion, lore about fallen angels and castes of souls and a kingdom that lost its keepers: that premise has teeth. Coma: Mortuary dangled something genuinely strange and sorrowful in front of me, and then spent its entire runtime refusing to follow through. The structure is pure walking sim, leaning closer to early Dear Esther than anything with a horror pulse. You follow lit paths through dark crypts and corridors, occasionally stop to pull a lever, and listen to the protagonist narrate the history of the afterlife in a voice that the community charitably calls "serviceable." Shadows and mummy-like figures appear and vanish around you. There are two chase sequences in the game: one that kills you without explanation, and one that pairs a memorize-the-path maze with what can only be described as a death metal soundtrack drop so tonally mismatched it borders on surreal comedy. The flashlight illuminates only what is immediately in front of you, which suits the mood but also exposes that there is not much to actually see. Level art and engine visuals - Unreal Development Kit - carry a certain gloomy grandeur, but texture detail collapses on closer inspection and the constant motion blur is genuinely uncomfortable. What hurts most is the pacing of the story. The lore being delivered through voice narration could work if the action on screen connected to it in any meaningful way. Instead, you walk empty halls while the protagonist describes a cosmology of the dead that has no visible relationship to the empty halls you are walking. Crypts give way to sewers give way to houses with no connective tissue, no in-world logic to the transitions. Reviewers across the board noted the same thing: the plot begins to cohere right as the final cutscene rolls, which means the game ends precisely when it finds its footing. The promise of a trilogy never materialized in any meaningful sequel, so that final-scene payoff leads nowhere. There is atmosphere here. Genuinely, on a moment-to-moment level, the game creates a feeling that something terrible is just around the next corner. The problem is that nothing ever is. For a horror-adjacent experience, the absence of actual threat becomes its own kind of punishment - not the productive tension of Amnesia, just silence and footsteps and the creeping sense that the budget ran out before the design did. Controller support is listed but broken for anything beyond movement and looking around; the pause menu runs the game in the background; these are not minor oversights, they are the texture of a product that shipped before it was ready. If you have a high tolerance for atmospheric walking experiences with no mechanical depth, a fascination with unpolished afterlife mythology, and genuinely nothing else in your queue, Coma: Mortuary is a ninety-minute oddity that might just about justify the lowest-tier sale price. Anyone else should save the slot for something that knows what it wants to say. Kai, Scout Team

Valve rates this game Steam Deck Playable. Playable on Linux with some workarounds. Based on 4 ProtonDB community reports.

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