Beneath (2025): The Review

Overview

Beneath tries to tap into nostalgia, but ends up delivering a headache instead of goosebumps. It’s technically unstable, riddled with bugs, and painfully shallow in gameplay, turning what could’ve been a thrilling descent into a disappointing plunge into missed potential.

Score: 3 out of 10

The Positives ✅

Let’s start with the one thing Beneath genuinely nails: atmosphere. Camel 101, a two-person studio made up of two brothers, somehow captures that claustrophobic, metallic dread of classic survival horror, the kind where flickering lights and creaking pipes do half the storytelling. Steam vents, strobing bulbs, and the muffled groan of metal under pressure make every corridor feel oppressive. For a game clearly built on a shoestring, there’s a strange sincerity running through it. It’s not pretty, but it’s trying, and that scrappy ambition deserves at least a slow clap.

When Beneath works, and that’s a very generous “when”, it gives off real retro horror shooter vibes. The setting, an underwater base filled with flickering lights, echoes FEAR, Resident Evil, and The Thing in equal measure. There’s a grungy charm to its low-budget horror aesthetic; you can almost feel the developers’ nostalgia bleeding through the cracks. The slow pacing, heavy movement, and deliberately clunky combat harken back to a time when the biggest threat wasn’t the monster chasing you, it was your own awkward controls. It’s a deliberate design decision that, at times, almost works in its favor, forcing you to play carefully and take each encounter seriously.

And look, I’ll give credit where it’s due: there’s an idea buried in here. A Lovecraftian descent into paranoia and madness beneath the ocean, with hints of cosmic horror and psychological breakdown, is a killer premise. The story of Noah Quinn, diver, survivor, and poor soul stuck in what feels like a rusted fever dream, could’ve been a haunting, isolated journey into the unknown. Beneath has the bones of something compelling, and if you squint hard enough, you can see the game it wanted to be.

The Negatives ⚠️

Unfortunately, everything else sinks faster than the submarine you arrived in. Beneath is a technical disaster, plain and simple. Textures blur into soup, frame rates tumble into single digits, and half the early encounters feel like they were built on an intern’s lunch break. Keys stop working mid-fight. Interact prompts vanish. Certain doors can only be opened from one side, for no reason. And the cherry on top? A critical bug that literally requires you to kneel before a computer to make it work. Maybe it’s social commentary. Maybe it’s divine punishment. Either way, it’s broken.

Even calling it “retro” feels generous, it’s more like “unfinished PS2 prototype wearing a PS5 price tag.” Combat is a slog: the guns kick like jackhammers but hit like air rifles, enemies either freeze completely or rush you in dumb clumps, and animations loop so badly it’s hard to tell if something’s attacking or auditioning for mime school. The visuals, muddy and over-processed, trigger motion sickness for a worrying number of players, myself included. I’ve played old-school shooters on CRTs that were easier on the eyes.

The deeper you go, the worse it gets. By midgame, Beneath’s AI collapses, the lighting glitches into chaos, and the story’s “mystery” devolves into incoherence. Interaction prompts vanish, computers stop responding, and enemies duplicate like bad Photoshop copies. The Steam forums are full of reports of crashes, unclickable menus, and corrupted saves, and every one of them checks out. Even the most generous reading can’t hide the truth: Beneath feels rushed, unfinished, and oddly indifferent to its own ambition.

And let’s address the elephant in the room, this game should’ve been Early Access. Releasing Beneath as a “finished product” is like serving half-cooked chicken and calling it medium-rare. If Camel 101 had been upfront about its state, players might’ve been forgiving. Instead, we got a title that’s somehow both “nostalgic” and “nonfunctional.”

The Experience 🎮

Playing Beneath feels like discovering an old horror relic from a long-lost timeline, one where every idea is cool, but every execution is cursed. For the first thirty minutes, I wanted to quit. The framerate choked, enemies bugged out, and my PS5 fans started sounding like a helicopter preparing for takeoff. But then… something weird happened. Beneath got under my skin. Maybe it was the setting, maybe it was the flicker of that grimy lighting, or maybe I just started to appreciate its broken charm. Like a haunted museum piece, it’s fascinating precisely because it’s falling apart.

There’s an undeniable nostalgia here, not for its jank, but for what it’s trying to recapture. You can feel the devs’ affection for early 2000s horror shooters like FEAR and Doom 3. You can sense that they love this genre, even if they completely botched bringing it back. But love alone doesn’t make a game playable. What could’ve been a tense, atmospheric descent into madness becomes a stress test for your patience, and possibly your stomach. The nausea from the excessive motion blur outlasts any fear the game manages to create.

By the time the credits (mercifully) rolled, I wasn’t scared, just exhausted. Beneath is a rare mix of passion and dysfunction, a game that wants to honor the classics but ends up reminding you how far we’ve come since them. There’s a good horror shooter somewhere in here, buried deep under performance issues, outdated design, and missing polish, but you’d need a submarine and a prayer to find it.

If Beneath had launched as an Early Access curiosity, I’d say “give it time.” But as a full-priced, finished release? It’s a wreck on the ocean floor. There’s ambition here, sure, but ambition without execution is just a ghost story.