Visceral Cubes Review

Ominous Entertainment takes Minecraft’s aesthetic and throws in a healthy dose of exploding space zombies with their new title Visceral Cubes. The chance to explore an abandoned space station might seem like a thrilling experience, but what is present here is far more frustrating than fun.

Visceral Cubes Review

Visceral Cubes takes players to a space station on Mars, tasking them with finding “Sample-451,” also known as “the vial.” Upon arriving, the station has gone into hibernation mode, and the informant you were supposed to meet up with said that most of the crew has become infected. With everything on lockdown, it’s up to players to open the way to the vial, retrieve the sample, and get out in one piece.

Sounds cliche, right? Not much thought was put into the story, with the story told via a text opening and through logs found lying around. There’s no voice acting, no characters to interact with, and no environmental elements that tell a tale. As a result, it feels like the entirety of the game is just a generic sandbox, one created without much care.

This extends to the gameplay too. Visceral Cubes, despite its name, does not become visceral due to its action. The only way to survive is to either run or hide, with only an indicator telling you what your status is. It leads to a feeling of helplessness, sure, but it is designed poorly. The space station present here was not designed well – there are far too many dead ends and narrow corridors to adeptly hide from zombies. In addition, all zombies explode after a set period of time. One strategy could be to run for your life and wait for them to off themselves, but between the oddly designed rooms and the speed of the zombies, this often seems like a losing battle. Death is always imminent, and though checkpoints are plentiful, it gets frustrating fairly quickly.

The layout of the space station certainly adds to the frustration as well. Players will progress by flipping switches and opening doors, but everything starts to look the same after a while. It can be hard to figure out what opened up where, leading to a lot of aimless wandering. Zombies often come in multiples too, so lazy wandering will often lead to failure. The entire game has a bland, low poly look that doesn’t make anything stand out, and works against the game.

It’s not like this is the longest game around either. Despite stumbling through Visceral Cubes, we were able to finish it in less than an hour. Don’t expect much fanfare though – the game ends with the lights going out and “To Be Continued” displayed on the screen. This would normally be considered a spoiler alert, but it might be best to know about it in advance to avoid disappointment. A DLC option is on the menu, but we did not purchase this content for our review.

Visceral Cubes is a horror game that lacks soul. Not much effort was put into its world, making it an easy pass for even the most diehard fans of the genre.

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