DEVOUR

I went in expecting another cheap jumpscare mill cynically riding the Phasmophobia wave. What I found instead was a small, focused horror experience from a two-person studio that clearly understood one thing: dread works best when your friends are screaming beside you. DEVOUR was built by Joe Fender and Luke Fanning of Straight Back Games, and the handcraft shows in ways that a bigger team would probably have smoothed away into corporate blandness. The core loop is deceptively simple. You and up to three friends play as former cult members trying to undo a catastrophic ritual. Each map tasks you with locating and completing a specific sacrifice sequence while the primary demon hunts you relentlessly. On the original Farmhouse, that means rounding up goats and burning them at an altar, keys in hand, while Anna stalks every corridor. Each sacrifice makes her faster and angrier, so the back half of every run spirals into raw panic. Your only real tools are a UV flashlight that can stagger her temporarily and destroy lesser fiends, medkits to revive downed teammates, and batteries to keep your light charged on Nightmare mode. There is no fighting back in any meaningful sense. You survive, or you don't. That asymmetry is exactly where the tension lives. The map roster has grown steadily since launch through free updates, adding the Asylum with its rat-themed horrors and possessed inmates, a Japanese inn crawling with body-horror imagery and spider-legged minions, a sprawling Town, the Slaughterhouse, and The Manor for those who wanted a proper haunted house chapter. Each introduces a distinct demon and a different ritual mechanic, which genuinely refreshes the atmosphere even if the underlying gameplay loop stays familiar. Later maps also introduced a twist for downed players on The Town and The Slaughterhouse: instead of crawling helplessly, dead players get banished to a demon dimension and must fight their way back. That change alone added real stakes. A progression system with Cult Ranks, Ritual Tokens, and unlockable Perks adds a thin but welcome layer of meta-growth across sessions. Here is the honest warning: DEVOUR has a shallow ceiling. The positional voice chat is a nice touch, and the environmental audio design is genuinely good at conjuring unease with distant whispers and footsteps. But once the jump scares become familiar, the horror fades into routine, and the maps can feel repetitive to anyone grinding past their first ten or fifteen hours. Solo mode exists but it is a punishing outlier, and the game never pretends otherwise. This is built for a group. The maze-like level design that makes chases thrilling on your first run can become navigation headaches on your fifth. Community sentiment has stayed broadly positive across over twenty thousand Steam reviews, but the ceiling on long-term replayability is real and worth naming plainly. What lingers with me is how confidently this small team committed to a singular, uncompromising mood. The atmospheric audio does more heavy lifting than the visuals ever could, and the escalating difficulty curve gives every run a genuine climax. It is not a long game and it was never meant to be. It knows exactly what it is: a focused horror night with friends, priced like a round of drinks.

Kai · Scout Team

Indie & narrative

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