This is the Zodiac Speaking

My first hour with This is the Zodiac Speaking kept nudging me toward something I genuinely wanted: a quiet, fog-heavy psychological thriller set against the unsolved dread of one of America's most mythologized killers. The premise is unusual and personal. You play as Robert Hartnell, a journalist whose name echoes a real-life Zodiac survivor, a man processing trauma through a form of experimental dream therapy conducted by the suspicious Dr. Landau. Those dream sequences drop you into reconstructed crime scenes, including locations tied to the murders of Cheri Jo Bates and Cecelia Shepard, where you gather clues, arrange a timeline of events, and track down a cipher to exit each level. The loop has an eerie, almost séance-like quality on paper. The execution, unfortunately, chips away at that atmosphere almost immediately. The structure alternates between two spaces: Robert's house, where you hunt for scattered objects and piece together his home life, and the dream worlds, which are the mechanical and emotional core of the game. In the dream levels, the Zodiac himself stalks the map, and you must crouch, peer around corners, and keep your stamina reserves in mind to avoid him. There is a certain initial chill to hearing his footsteps somewhere in the fog. That chill does not last. The stealth is barebones and inconsistent, with the killer's detection range behaving unpredictably and his ability to teleport toward the player when distance grows too large making the whole thing feel less like tension and more like an arbitrary tax on your time. The good news: a dedicated story mode removes the Zodiac from the investigation sequences entirely, letting you explore each scene without interruption, and honestly that version of the game is the more coherent one. If you buy this, go straight to that mode. The script was co-written by acclaimed Polish author Lukasz Orbitowski, and you can feel the literary ambition in the setup. Where the game unravels is in delivery. Dialogue options are reduced to single-word prompts that give no real indication of what Robert will say, voice acting is fitful and sometimes clearly stitched together from separate takes, and the narrative jumps between scenes without the connective tissue needed to make the emotional beats land. The therapy sessions with Dr. Landau, which should be the psychological spine of the whole experience, are the weakest writing in the game. The historical research underneath it all is genuinely commendable, though. Real crime scene details, authentic cipher reproductions, and accurate location references to places like Mount Diablo are all present, and for players already deep in the Zodiac rabbit hole, these touches carry real weight. Visually, the low-poly stylized aesthetic has moments that actually work. The fog-draped dream environments carry a cold, Fincher-esque color palette, and when the lighting clicks, the atmosphere punches above the budget. The film-like soundtrack aspires to something unsettling and occasionally gets there. But the technical side stumbles: environmental geometry pops in and out, menus behave erratically, and frame rate dips undercut the atmosphere the art direction worked hard to build. The whole project sits at about five to six hours in the stealth mode, closer to two if you play without the Zodiac encounters. For a game that runs this short, the pacing still finds ways to feel padded. This is a title for a specific, forgiving player: someone obsessed with the Zodiac case who will extract value from the historical fidelity alone, or a walking-sim fan who can appreciate a genuinely unusual structure even when it misfires. For anyone else, the gap between what this game wants to be and what it manages to deliver is just too wide to overlook at any price above an impulse buy.

Kai · Scout Team

Indie & narrative

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