Eleusis

Adventure games have to use different techniques to relay suspense, since they are mostly story-driven tales that focus on puzzle solving and various platforming challenges. However, the survival-horror genre has been quite successful in creating the perfect conditions for you to feel uneasy, thanks to titles like Silent Hill or Penumbra.

Eleusis tells the story of a village that appears to be abandoned and serves as a refuge for the main character, who is obviously played by you. As you try to make yourself comfortable, you realize that the village is far from abandoned and is actually home to a weird cult that's using powerful magic in order to unleash some dark forces into the world. Naturally, you become involved in the situation and you soon find yourself trying to disrupt their plans by any means necessary.

Since the game is a first-person adventure at its core, most of the mechanics rely on your ability to figure out puzzles and find clues, which means that your time is spent exploring the village in the search for things to help you in your quest. While the puzzles are not very hard to begin with, they do get substantially more difficult as you advance through the story, requiring more and more ingenuity to solve.

As the whole abandoned village and evil cult theme practically begs for some horror elements, the game puts you in some scary situations as well, in which you have to hide and survive through dangerous events. The atmosphere is very creepy as well, thanks to the nicely modeled environments and the disturbing sound effects in the background. The major downside comes from the fact that the horror elements are very badly implemented. Whenever a scary thing is about to happen, control is taken from you and the game presents you with a cutscene instead, with ruins the entire atmosphere and basically eliminates the 'survival' part from the game.

Because the game uses the Unreal engine to render the environments, you can be certain that the graphics are exquisite, especially when it comes to illumination effects and shading, not to mention the high-resolution textures and the nice special effects. However, the game might also require a bit more computing power to run properly, especially since there are some optimization problems as well.

While Eleusis may not revolutionize the genre in any way, it is a welcomed sight on the market, since adventure games are rarely released nowadays. The hint of survival horror should make the game even more attractive, especially if you are on the lookout for a thrill.