Anomalith Review – Survival horror meets Backrooms dread

I have such a soft spot for Japanese third-person shooters. Sometimes, they’re absolute classics, from the survival horror of Resident Evil to the stealth action of Metal Gear Solid and even the high-octane mecha action of Lost Planet. Sometimes, they’re not so great. Clunky controls, frustrating enemy design, confusing map layouts, funky graphics, and more. Even with all these flaws present, though, it’s hard to resist the charm and the soul that’s evident in them. I’m enough of a sucker for gun combat and third-person exploration that I can look past some rough technical issues if a game has a really unique aesthetic or really vivid, wild character designs. Anomalith, for all its flaws, is full of soul.

It’s impressive seeing the world of SCP monsters and ARG horror crawl out of the internet and into the world of gaming. Anomalith carries some Backrooms DNA but gives it a strong sci-fi spin that I really love. In Japan, strange anomalous zones are popping up all over, creating unexplainable labyrinths that are small on the outside but expand endlessly on the inside. Innocent people are getting caught in these, and grotesque monsters are popping up inside them as well.

It’s gotten to the point that the Japanese government has set up an official Anomaly Zone Countermeasures Office unit, and protagonist Reona Minazuki joins them as a Diver in one of their less-than-reliable divisions. Her job as a Diver is to enter anomalous zones, map them out, and collect rare materials. Escape, as far as the government is concerned, is never guaranteed nor required.

I love the setup for the game so much, it’s just full of really unique world-building that feels like it’s own spin on some familiar internet horror ideas. Backrooms games and SCP games are a dime a dozen, but Anomalith creates a really unique setting only loosely inspired by those concepts that I came to love. The main story isn’t incredibly dense.

You’ve got a lot of great supporting cast members, and everything plays out in visual novel segments that slowly build out the circumstances of the story and our protagonist’s mysterious background. The story does crescendo into a really awesome finale that brings things to a head in a cool way, but the pacing on the way to those late-game moments can definitely be on the slower side.

You might look at Anomalith and expect it to be a traditional sort of linear survival-horror experience, and it sort of is. But it’s also got some ideas from extraction shooters and roguelikes sprinkled in that pleasantly surprised me. You aren’t dealing with seasonal server wipes or progress-resetting runs or any sort of PVP. But essentially, instead of playing through linear levels or slowly mapping out one huge map, you unlock a handful of medium-sized locales throughout the main story, and you’ll revisit them multiple times through your main missions and side missions.

The main story might only take you through certain sections of the map, but revisiting it for side missions will bring you to new areas you didn’t have access to previously. The level design can be pretty basic, and for a horror-adjacent game, there really isn’t much tension as you explore them. What I do love, though, is how they’re designed visually. You’ll travel through twisted corridors warping in impossible ways, or navigate strange brutalist architecture that gives off heavy Control vibes. Even if the maps are simple, they’re downright gorgeous.

On missions, you’ll gather resources, materials and ammo in the environment. It isn’t exactly as in-depth as the usual loop of resource-gathering goes for extraction shooters. You aren’t eyeballing specific materials in the environment and finding them based on their natural locations, but instead you’ll just sort of open identical lockers and boxes and acquire whatever random items are within. Even though the item-gathering is pretty simple, there’s a load of options for how you spend those resources and customise your loadout.

The game has five different core gun categories and a bunch of options within each one, and you can upgrade and visually customise the weapons you lean toward the most. I’m a sucker for costume customisation, and this game also has loads of options for mixing and matching your outfit. The pieces you equip contribute to your stats, but the game also smartly provides a cosmetics layer so you can coordinate a sick outfit and equip the optimal gear.

Anomalith isn’t very hard, unless you choose to make it so. With five difficulty options available, it’s easy to tailor the experience, but none of them ends up feeling quite right. Standard difficulty can be mind-numbingly simple once you invest in some smart upgrades, and the hardest difficulties can be kind of unfairly brutal in how they ramp up enemy damage. In a pinch and when you’re low on ammo, you can utilise special monstrous melee abilities to parry enemies and dish out heavy close-quarters attacks. It’s really only during boss fights that I ever felt any sense of urgency in the game.

But even though the gameplay mechanics and the combat balance don’t ever fully come together, I still think the game is just very, very cool. The vibe of the world is so unique, and there’s so much care put into the writing and localisation that makes every conversation flow so well, and every character feel so fully realised. There was rarely a story moment I was gripping my seat to get to, or a combat challenge I was in love with, but I still found myself so naturally exploring every nook and cranny of the game simply because it’s such a cool world to exist in. If you can forgive a flawed game and appreciate the style and energy it’s got, you’ll find plenty to enjoy in Anomalith.

Tags: Anomalith