Kaet Must Die! Demo

No one says it’s easy to create a compelling horror game, but there are a few easily avoidable pitfalls when it comes to gameplay mechanics and the atmosphere. Hence, jump scares only work if there are as few of them as possible, otherwise players start to expect them. You must feel at least somewhat powerless in front of the horrors you have to face, so shotguns and rocket launchers are out of the question.

Kaet Must Die! is a first-person horror game with cyberpunk influences, in which you play a character with psionic powers. The goal is to make it out alive from a sewer infected by zombies and many other horrors, all while slowly regaining your psionic powers along the way. However, the demo at hand delivers a very underwhelming experience in terms of atmosphere and even gameplay.

To begin with, nothing is explained regarding the gameplay or the controls, which is why you die to seemingly random events in the first few minutes. After you realize that going too close to sleeping zombies causes them to attack you, things get a bit easier, but not by much. Other enemies make an appearance as well, and there is no way to avoid them sometimes, given the lack of stealth mechanics.

Although you are supposed to sneak around in the beginning to avoid unkillable monsters, there are no functions to allow that, so you are stuck semi-running all over the place. You cannot walk silently or crouch, so it all depends on luck sometimes, because the enemies roam the map at random. This is as frustrating as it sounds, because the game stops being scary after the first handful of jumpscares.

As for the graphics, the game uses Unreal Engine 4, so it certainly looks nice, especially in terms of lighting and textures. The character models are not bad either, but that matters very little in a horror game. The sound effects are designed to creep you out, but they get extremely repetitive after you go through the same area multiple times after dying too many times to random things.

This demo shows a very unrefined game, especially in terms of atmosphere and gameplay. However, Kaet Must Die! can still be fixed with a bit of tweaking, so we can only hope that the full version is going to be a lot better.