My Bones

I want to be the person who finds the quiet soul inside a janky micro-horror and tells you it's worth your time. With My Bones, I genuinely tried. The setup has real weight: a man claws out of his own grave in a cemetery, darkness pressing in on all sides, a distant church the only landmark in the emptiness. That image alone carries a certain grim poetry. The moral premise underneath it, a man wrestling with the evil he committed against his own family and forced to choose between redemption and damnation, is the kind of thing I'd usually defend at length. But good intentions and a compelling premise only carry a game so far when the execution undermines them at almost every step. What you actually do in My Bones is walk slowly through 3D environments, search for keys, pick up a handful of scattered notes, and eventually trigger one of two endings based on the choices you make. The whole loop runs roughly ten minutes, which is not automatically a problem. I have loved six-minute games that burned themselves into my memory. The issue here is that almost none of those ten minutes feel authored. The environments are built from stock assets, darkness used less as atmosphere and more as a way to obscure limited geometry, and the note-based storytelling is undercut by significant spelling and grammar errors throughout. When text is your primary vessel for dread and moral weight, broken language pulls you out of whatever spell the game is attempting to cast. Community threads from players going back years flag the same problems: pitch-black areas with no light source guidance, launch-era crashing issues, and loading times that dwarf the runtime of the experience itself. The dual-ending structure is the game's most interesting design choice, and even there the ambition outpaces the craft. The idea that your actions shift the protagonist between a path of grace and one of damnation is genuinely evocative on paper. One reviewer from the Remastered release noted that the developer seemed to be reaching toward a philosophical conversation about taking life for granted, and I believe that reading. I just wish the original release had the tools to make that conversation land. The moral fork feels underdeveloped, a binary switch rather than anything that makes you sit with the weight of the choice you've just made. For context, GDNomaD released a full Remastered version years later on a different engine, with improved visuals and stability, and even that release landed in mixed-to-negative territory. The original version you're looking at here predates those fixes and carries all of the foundational problems. If you're a collector of outsider-dev curiosities, or if you enjoy watching a developer's earliest public stumble as a piece of game-history documentation, there's an anthropological interest here. As a horror experience meant to unsettle and move you, it doesn't reach that bar. The premise deserved a steadier hand, and I hope GDNomaD kept building, because the instinct for dark, morally fraught storytelling is genuinely there underneath the rough edges.

Kai · Scout Team

Indie & narrative

Be the first to comment on My Bones.