DreadXP has announced it's publishing a new horror game from Brazilian Studio Games From the Abyss called The Lacerator, and it's a wilfully old school survival horror experience. As the mature content description on its Steam page warns, "This game contains scenes of explicit violence and gore, also contains sensitive themes and tank controls".
An escape-room action puzzle where you're trapped in a psycho's Saw-style labyrinth, The Lacerator's big selling point is limb removal. You can easily end up losing an arm or a leg without a game over, instead having to escape in more inventive ways the more limbs you lose. The trailer shows a stuck door that can only be opened if you've got two arms, and according to the press release, "There are multiple main escape routes, but depending on your remaining limbs you lose access to some of these paths. Each of these present a different narrative branch that will provide answers not available in the others."
The Lacerator is a low-poly affair with the blurred textures of a PS1 game, which I suspect the graphics options won't let you mess with too much. It's designed around a fixed camera and tank controls, and enemies who come out of the walls at you like you're back in Derceto's mansion from the original Alone in the Dark.
There's a definite tone to The Lacerator, whose protagonist is a porn star and whose villain sometimes comes at you in a skimpy leather two-piece. It takes the fetishcore subtext of Resident Evil 2 and makes it text, and much as I like a '90s throwback I don't know if that's really my vibe. The Lacerator is due out in 2025, as is another DreadXP-published joint I suspect will be more my cup of tea. That's Heartworm, which is about dealing with grief by traveling to somewhere spooky in the middle of nowhere as God intended.
If you want to try The Lacerator for yourself, it's got a demo you can find on Steam and itch.io.
