What do you do when the center of your world is taken from you? Could you simply move on and live your life, feeling the ever gnawing presence of a void that cannot be filled? Some are able to find a way to continue forward, even though a piece of them is forever darkened, a mark on the soul that can never be repaired. For others, it becomes the focal point of their being: all decisions, all risks hinge around what life may or may not be like without a missing piece. In Incantation, the depths of despair drives a parent to the extremes in hope and possibility that her child may still be alive, somewhere, and nothing else can matter. Not her own safety, not the supernatural forces that conspire against her, and, apparently, not even the will of the gods among us.

Oh, wait: it’s clearly labeled. Sorry, everyone, guess this rescue mission is off.

Incantation is based loosely on the events of the 2022 Taiwanese horror movie of the same name, with some of the major plot points of the film being integral to the ending of the game. If you’ve watched the movie, congratulations, you’ll have a slightly better idea of what’s going on around the protagonist, but it certainly isn’t the same cast of characters nor trajectory for the game’s beginning. If you’re totally unfamiliar, that might actually be better. The game begins with a mother searching for her abducted child who disappeared six years ago, and then suddenly gets a clue that the lost baby might be in a remote village in China. It’s got real Silent Hill vibes from the very beginning, and it never quite loses that edge even as aspects of the movie’s shocking twist become incorporated into the gameplay.

As a first person survival horror game, Incantation has a bit of a balance problem from the get-go. Your character has to navigate a lot of deeply upsetting locations, like a home filled will mannequins to stand in for lost family members, or a city hall where the former mayor’s mouldering corpse still rots in the office. For the most part, your role in the game is to investigate and interact with everything that has a marker on it that allows you to do so. There is some light puzzling, but most of it is just narrative gameplay with the occasional QTE to stay alive. As you’re delving into a location far removed from society, your role as an outsider draws ire and sometimes violence from these folk who may or may not be in a cult (they’re definitely in a cult). 

If my kid made this drawing at any point, I would have looped in an old priest and a young priest immediaely.

The result is a lot of walking around with some survival moments, but they’re fairly few and far between. Early on, I wasn’t even sure if you could be killed because of the number of times that a potential threat was either an anticlimax or something easily disarmed, like pressing the A button really fast when an aggressive, mostly naked old man attacked me. It wasn’t until I had a puzzle regarding turning on lights and getting murdered for doing them in the wrong order that I saw a game over screen, and that was pretty shocking after so much dead air of merely being terrorized at the very being of my soul. This, unto itself, expresses the strengths and the weaknesses that make up a lot of Incantation’s appeal.

For example, though the game hits you with a couple of jump scares pretty early on, they become fewer and further between, eventually hitting a point where it seemed like they only occurred when you wander into places you shouldn’t be. It almost felt like the game used the jump scares as course correction: don’t head into that person’s house, they’ll attempt to strangle you in order to express their displeasure at your trespassing. This never completely goes away, and there are even a few P.T. adjacent moments where doors seem to close suddenly on their own accord that really get you deep down in the cockles of your heart. Plus, you get to have the relief and the rush of embarrassment and anger when you get startled by something that shouldn’t scare you, like your flashlight flickering.

Before I get too much deeper into the review, I should mention that I played the Switch version, which was definitely a choice that led to some interesting results. I appreciate the development team making a version of this game that is both playable and competent on the now decade-old system, which was underpowered from inception and continues to chug across the finish line for anything that isn’t pixelated. But there comes a cost from making it playable, which is that it looks incredibly dated and ugly. The level of detail for human facial movement and clothing/skin detail is wildly low, which takes away from a lot of the horror factor that appears within the game. While the grainer texture might be okay in dark rooms, it blurs the finer points of things like picture frames, documents or found items.

“Shhhh, don’t tell them I ate all the pixels.”

Also, besides looking substantially worse than it must on other systems (according to the stock photos), there are graphical glitches and performance issues that cause the suspense to fall into a quagmire. Opening a door is always a bated breath moment, but, more than once, I opened the door, saw a human sprite standing there, and then it suddenly remembered it was supposed to rush me. It didn’t have a delayed scare moment, it felt like a Halloween Horror Night employee who missed their cue and is trying to act like no one noticed. And some things do behave too erratically, like when the young child is leading you around the village and will just do donuts around a dead body, or zip back and forth like a corgi who needs to go for a walk. It’s silliness that threatens to dilute the scary.

Thankfully, Incantation has a few things going for it that keep it in the pocket and maintain the atmosphere. For one, the audioscape is incredibly well done. There’s a deeply unsettling silence that is constantly but erratically punctured by sounds and groans that come from nowhere. I tried to open a door once and found that it was not only locked, but trying to open it triggered a screaming, hysterical man on the other side. My English is great and my Japanese has gotten significantly better, so having the haunting, foreboding dialogue spoken in Chinese gave me an extra thrill that I don’t often experience. Not since The Hungry Lamb have I been so upset by a game set in China, and this one has the benefit of not sexualizing children! I can’t believe I have to list that as a plus!

You know what, y’all look busy, I’ll come back later.

Plus, it really takes the walking simulation genre in a better direction. Rather than constant fear or constant calm, the unbalanced nature of fluctuating from “oh God I’m gonna die” to “this room is painfully quiet but maybe safe” keeps you positively locked in. The narrative of Incantation takes priority over everything else, even more “entertaining” gameplay moments. There’s an instance where you wake up and everyone appears to have left, but all the doors will not open. The only way to move things along is to eventually see a photograph (that you may have already looked at previously) and engage with it, at which point a character seemingly materializes out of nowhere to move things along. I should be annoyed that I’m kept in suspended animation, but I’m honestly just fascinated that the game is determined to sit me down and tell the story, at their own pace.

The story is one that gets incredibly grim and unpleasant at times, so I’m somewhat thankful to be playing on the classic Switch hardware. Incantation comes with its own content warning, but here’s a fun list of things you’ll encounter over the course of the game. If you’re uncomfortable with dessication, suicide, uncanny valley, wanton violence, torture, brutal murder, conflagrations against people, blood, child abuse, mutilation, body horror or just new kinds of creepy, be very, very aware those are all in this game. Seeing it in slightly lower resolution helped somewhat, but it was a really detailed and unflinching ride through a village that’s clearly lost its mind. Old heads with horror games will probably scoff, but I like my spooky games few and far between, and Incantation definitely stirred something up in my stomach. That’s praise, but I don’t think I’ll be doing it again.

Except for a bit of the disarray, I’ve been in rooms almost exactly like this.

Still, it’s a phenomenal experience, one set with plenty of indepth analysis of what it means to love, to believe, to have ideas and hopes and wild convictions that set you down the path of destruction. It’s got some flaws, but so does the human experience, and Incantation embraces the madness, the terror and the very real sense of trying to save someone who may be beyond saving. It’s scary, it’s stressful, and it’s got moments of sad beauty that keeps you invested in the story until the brutal end. People who’ve watched the movie will have a fantastic new perspective, but those coming in cold will still find a tense, upsetting experience that really makes you question: what cost is too great?

Incantation is available now on Steam, PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X/S and Nintendo Switch.

Reviewed on Nintendo Switch.

A copy of Incantation was provided by the publisher.