Post Trauma Hands-On Preview – What’s Old Is New Again
[summaraize]
At a recent Raw Fury event earlier this month, MP1st managed to get our hands on developer Red Soul Games’ upcoming survival horror game, Post Trauma. Do we think this game has what it takes to scare us into keeping the lights on? We ventured tepidly into the nightmarish dimension the game takes place in, and have our impressions ready right now.
A Long Time Coming
Originally set for release on October 29, 2024, back on October 3rd, Red Soul Games made the decision to delay Post Trauma until 2025. Considering some of the screenshots we were sent were dated from December 2022, this project has been several years in the making, so while a lengthy delay isn’t exactly the news most gamers are looking for, it is good news as it speaks to the level of quality that the developer and publisher hope to achieve when they feel the game is ready for release. It is better to not rush things in a genre that is difficult to crack into.
Post Trauma has all of the hallmarks of survival horror. There are mutilated corpses, reanimated corpses, otherworldly enemies to encounter, and occasional oddness such as mannequins that hinder your progress at certain points. Fixed/slightly rotatable camera angles are also used here, to help add to a feeling of claustrophobia/helplessness that the older games in this genre, such as Resident Evil, used to great effect back in the day. However, while this mechanic was used partly because of the nature of those games’ pre-rendered backgrounds which could not react to a dynamic camera, here the decision is an artistic one.
In fact, Post Trauma utilizes the Unreal Engine 5, and it looks great no matter the camera angle, partly because the engine uses modern rendering methods. While we were running the game on newer hardware, the minimum requirements aren’t very steep: You’ll only need a 3rd-generation Intel i3-3220/AMD FX-6100, paired with a GeForce GTX 650 Ti/Radeon R7 360, with 2 GB of VRAM, or newer chips, to be able to run the game at a decent clip at least. It should be noted that a minimum of 12 GB of RAM is listed, which isn’t that high these days, but is higher than some games’ minimum requirements. Naturally, Post Trauma is also being released on the PS5 and Xbox Series consoles.
Investigation Needed
During our brief hands-on time with Post Trauma, we were injected into the game without much setup – a lot of things had already gone wrong during protagonist Roman’s day to get us to where we were: a dark subway tunnel, in a stopped, unlit, unpowered train. Roman is a middle-aged train conductor, who has suddenly found himself trapped in a surreal, hellish dimension full of otherworldly horrors. Here, the game set the mood with a creepy, reactive soundtrack, and unsettling noises. I walked around as I figured out the game’s control scheme, which also includes a “tank” option for those who enjoy the older control style of games of that era. Flashlight in-hand, I walked from one end of the train to the other, encountering an occasional mannequin at first, then some increasingly disturbing sights the deeper I ventured into the train.
Throughout each train car, posters, maps, and other things could be looked at, with Roman giving his thoughts on what he was seeing. I noticed some shapes scrawled into the floor (made with blood or some other disturbing substance, naturally), and began to put together the clues these markings represented. Combined with pieces of a map I saw on some of the train’s windows, I could eventually figure out the combination to a lock hindering my progress. It felt like just the sort of puzzle you’d expect to see during a horror game’s downtime.
From this initial claustrophobia-inducing setting, we could now explore our surroundings a bit – a simple train/subway station, which was at least partially powered, yet seemingly devoid of life. Red Soul Games was still busily putting bits of even this early section together, or perhaps they were adding more to it thanks to the extra development time they’d been granted, because some captions were still placeholders, or referenced audio/text bits that were not yet included.
Great Promise From a Young Studio
While Post Trauma automatically saves your game at certain points, those are few and far between – after walking for a little while, I came upon a manual save spot, which I decided not to use for some reason. The very first enemy I encountered killed me, which I blame on it being early in the morning, and the game’s tutorial having been skipped, because we had started our demo after that point. Since I didn’t use the save point, that meant I had to start the demo all over again, initial puzzles included. So, this is one part of older horror games that might irk younger or inexperienced gamers, but so long as you always use the save points when you find them, you probably won’t have to do much backtracking.
The second time around, I knew where everything was, and didn’t lose much time in the process. Now that I was used to the controls, I could much more easily take on this first enemy, and killed them without taking much damage. Combat in our demo was melee-only, and we should expect a lot of close-quarters fighting in a game like this. That lone enemy was the only one I faced in this area, and now I was tasked with fixing a power generator. This involved investigating the area, finding various tools I would need to access a locked-off room which housed a fuse I’d need for the junction box I walked by earlier. This section felt like typical stuff as seen in other games in the genre.
Post Trauma passes the vibe check of the many horror games upon which it derives its inspiration. Time will tell if Red Soul Games has found the right mix of jump scares, creepy ambiance, old and new horror game mechanics, to produce a noteworthy game that can stand apart from its peers. But so far, it is already an impressive showing, especially as the debut effort from a new studio. Be on the lookout for Post Trauma when it releases on Steam, PS5 and Xbox Series consoles later this year.
Stay connected to MP1st and the latest news by following us on Bluesky, X, Facebook, TikTok, YouTube, and Google News.
