Hegis' Grasp: Evil Resurrected

My first impression of Hegis' Grasp was that quiet, slightly eerie feeling you get when a small team clearly cares about something most studios wouldn't bother trying. Odd Branch Studio built this around 1896 Great Britain, dropping journalist Henry Wood into the village of Hegis after rumors of a Daemonis curse start filtering through the press. The Victorian framing is genuinely uncommon in survival horror, and the setting earns the game some goodwill before a single enemy appears. You piece together the backstory through scattered notes as you move through the village and its surrounding region, which shifts across weather states and times of day. That environmental layering is one of the more quietly ambitious things the game attempts. The campaign runs across six chapters with varied scenarios and settings, and the weapons lean into the period with historically grounded guns and melee options. There is also a wave-based survival mode across three maps, which gives the experience some legs beyond the story. Two in-game endings add a reason to pay attention to your choices, and a separate written-story DLC expands into what the developer calls the "real" ending, threading the narrative out into a companion novelette. That is an unusual creative choice and, for lore-hungry players, a worthwhile one. The soundtrack reportedly lands well enough to show up as a notable community tag, and I can hear the intention there even without having the headphones on myself. Here is where honesty matters, though. With a Steam rating sitting at a flat 50 percent across 54 reviews, this is a genuinely divisive release. Community threads flag post-launch updates introducing bugs serious enough to break the game on Linux entirely for some users. Saves have been wiped across certain chapter updates. These are not cosmetic complaints. For a small studio pushing a story-driven experience, technical fragility is the kind of thing that cuts the legs out from under an otherwise earnest project. Players who caught it in a stable window tended to connect with the atmosphere; players who hit the bugs unsurprisingly did not. Who is this for, then? Honestly, it is for players who grew up with Silent Hill 2 and Clock Tower on PS2 and want to support a solo or near-solo team trying to carry that torch into a Victorian setting. The ambition is real. The Daemonis curse mythology, the note-based world-building, the dynamic weather across the Hegis region, the multiple-ending structure - none of that is filler. But you should go in knowing the execution is uneven and the technical state has a documented history of instability. If you can tolerate rough seams in exchange for genuine atmosphere and a studio that clearly meant every frame of this, there is something worth finding inside that cursed village.

Kai · Scout Team

Indie & narrative

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