EMPTY SHELL

I have a soft spot for small studios that commit completely to a visual language, and CC ARTS commits hard. EMPTY SHELL runs entirely in black and white, filtered through what feels like a decaying CRT monitor, and that single artistic choice does more atmospheric heavy lifting than most horror games manage with a full lighting budget. The facility corridors press in. The quiet is deliberate. When something moves at the edge of your vision, your pulse does actually tick up. Mechanically this is a twin-stick shooter wearing survival horror clothes. You manage limited ammunition across rifles, shotguns, and whatever improvised melee weapon the run hands you - a shovel, an iron bar, whatever survived the last volunteer's death. That rotating cast of expendable characters is a lovely structural detail: each new run gives you a fresh name, age, and height for your doomed contractor, just enough identity to make losing them sting a little. The maps are procedurally generated each run, door codes change, and scattered notes serve double duty as lore fragments and survival-critical information. Ignoring the documents is not just a narrative loss; it will get you killed. The comparison critics reach for is Hotline Miami, but the pace here is entirely different. Where that game rewards fast, twitchy reads, EMPTY SHELL wants you slow and cautious. Ammo is scarce enough that melee becomes a genuine first resort, not a panic button. The difficulty is steep, and a recurring criticism worth flagging is that the all-grayscale palette - while absolutely the right aesthetic call - can make it hard to read enemy types at a glance. Exploding creatures, riflemen, and fast-moving horrors can blend together until you have already taken damage learning to identify them. That is a real friction point, especially in the first few runs. A companion frustration is the absence of a traditional soundtrack: the ambience is eerie and well-crafted, but players who want a score to carry them through will find the silence demanding rather than atmospheric. What holds the whole thing together is the environmental storytelling. Lore lives in logs, terminal codes, and the geometry of rooms that clearly went wrong in specific, thought-about ways. The story of what happened to this facility in the 1950s is predictable in its broad strokes - corporate negligence, containment failure, bodies - but the texture around that skeleton is genuinely interesting, and the roguelite structure means each run peels back another layer. There is a New Game Plus mode for players who clear the main experience and want the layout to fight back harder. For a debut-adjacent project from a small studio, the level of craft here is notable. If you are a horror fan who prefers dread over jump scares, can tolerate losing runs to enemy misreads, and finds merit in a game that treats silence as a resource, EMPTY SHELL will hold you. If you need a forgiving difficulty curve or a propulsive soundtrack, this one will push you away quickly and you should know that going in. Kai, Scout Team

Valve rates this game Steam Deck Verified. Runs flawlessly on Linux out of the box. Based on 7 ProtonDB community reports.

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