iREC

My honest first impression of iREC was cautious curiosity: a first-person horror game built around an undercover cop infiltrating a logistics warehouse suspected of drug trafficking, with puzzle-solving standing between you and the exit. That premise has real bones. Corporate dread, fluorescent lighting, the creeping sense that whatever is in those filing cabinets is worse than narcotics, it could work. And for isolated moments, the atmosphere does land. The Unity-built office environments are functional, the lighting keeps things suitably grim, and the opening minutes carry a quiet tension that suggests the developer genuinely wanted to make something unsettling. The problems arrive almost immediately after that opening. The puzzle design is the game's most talked-about failure point, and the criticism is fair. Code-locked computers require a password that the game hides in the pause menu rather than anywhere in the world, a design choice that breaks immersion so completely it reads like a glitch rather than intentional obscurity. A keycard puzzle that stops working for some players entirely, with no clear cause and no in-game workaround, has stranded a notable portion of the community at the same door since launch. When the friction in a 40-to-60 minute game comes from bugs rather than challenge, the short runtime stops being a selling point and starts being a relief. The horror itself is sparse. There are a handful of jumpscare moments involving a gas-masked figure, and the environmental storytelling gestures toward something bigger, but the follow-through is thin. Player reviews note that readable in-world documents, emails, notepads, mostly fail to connect to any meaningful narrative thread. A piece of footage that the game forces you to watch mid-playthrough lands as baffling rather than disturbing. The sound design is similarly half-realized: footsteps are disproportionately loud, ambient sound is either absent or misused, and the result undercuts rather than builds the tension the visuals are trying to establish. The English localization has its own rough edges throughout, which player reviews traced to translation issues from the developer's native Portuguese. That is genuinely understandable for a small solo or near-solo project, but it adds friction on top of friction in a game that needed more polish across the board. iREC reads as an early learning exercise released commercially before it was ready, the instinct to make something atmospheric and strange is visible, but the craft to execute it consistently is not yet there. If you have a specific appetite for very short, very rough-around-the-edges horror experiments and can tolerate the possibility of hitting a progression-stopping bug, iREC offers a glimpse of an interesting idea. For everyone else, the mixed Steam reception reflects a real problem: good intentions and a workable premise do not survive a puzzle system that breaks its own rules and an audio design that works against the mood. The craft simply is not there yet.

Kai · Scout Team

Indie & narrative

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