I’ve never met someone who asked why I don’t use Coca Cola to paint landscapes. This is because I’ve made a point not to hang out under bridges at night, or on the New York subway after 1:00 A.M. I love Coke: it’s easily one of my most imbibed drinks after water and gasoline, and equally as corrosive. Yet it’s never crossed my mind to take the caramelized version of paint thinner and use it to try and emulate my inner Bob Ross. This is because I understand, inherently, that some mediums cannot cross streams and have good results. You use clay to mold statues, not fill in cavities. You write your homework with a pencil, not a badger. And you watch “analog horror” animations on TikTok, you don’t bring them into the gaming sphere and try to cash in. But here we are, dealing with Angel Engine.

Oh cool, a console in a dark area where weird things are happening. Let’s do this dance again!

Never heard of it? Neither had I till I was forced to do research and figure out what I was missing. Turns out it’s a series of grotesquely made videos that got popular on TikTok as a sort of Lathe of Heaven knockoff concept. A doctor named Geoff has successfully captured an angel, of the biblical variety, and is actively using its lifeforce to perform miracles on Earth. I don’t care to get into all the “holy shit this is a bad idea” degree of what’s happening, but younger people are getting into this due to the sacrilege, upsetting animation, and the idea of analog horror, or basically something is scary because it looks like it was recorded on a VHS tape. I tried watching some and immediately realized that I have too much that I’d rather do with my life than watch creepypasta in animated form.

So that brings us to the game. In the game, it’s sometime after or in parallel to the events of the series, and you play an aspiring intern who will be operating on artificial angels (what?) that have been captured. It’s important to do the surgeries as quickly as possible, because they’re anesthetized and generally hate and want to kill you for doing invasive, involuntary surgery. How unreasonable! Don’t these angels realize that, by mutilating their forms and directly defying the will of God, we can channel the divinity to make a third season of Better Off Ted?  Not only are the angels on the table liable to wake up and destroy you, but there’s always the chance of the hardware in this tower (named Babel Two) overheating and then, surprise, angel murder. Oh, and the hardware itself is utter crap, so it may fail at any moment.

I like that “shadowing our staff” means “do all operations immediately.”

Thankfully, Angel Engine doesn’t just want the player to merely do horrific crimes literally against God by going through the motions. Absolutely not! Everything is done as an overly simple yet somehow complex minigame. Like most of the operations are a series of quick and dirty memory puzzles or quicktime events that let you successfully do some unholy act on the angel. Or when an angel is about to break in, you can quickly turn around and do a bunch of ridiculous button presses and a fast minigame to survive. Is the machine malfunctioning? Open up the fuse box and swap things out! Needs calibrating? Run to another screen and match up pieces and colors. Nothing else works? Take out a stick to bless the equipment because the covenant no longer exists and the line between soul and steel is indistinguishable!

Wait a minute…a time management game where you have to continually do a bunch of menial tasks with less and less forgiving circumstances that ends in a jump scare when you inevitably mess up? This sounds like every knockoff Five Nights at Freddy’s game that was plaguing the Steam storefront for the better part of the 2010s! And, in fact, it is. Angel Engine is a game that’s meant to get players to stream it, get some quick laughs from the audience because they aren’t the ones living through the stress, and then finish the entire ordeal in under three hours. It’s also meant to get some quick sales because it’s based around a web series that is either reviled for being AI generated, or exalted because it does the weird lore thing where teenagers get so involved in the events they believe it’s true and then commit crimes.

There’s even some dude just handing off the reins of death to you. It’s textbook!

For what it’s worth, the world of Angel Engine is a bizarre and dark one, and it’s certainly unique in presentation. From what I could learn from information drops on the in-game PC between operations, there’s some really disturbing concepts being floated around. Like…they tried to make an angel. These people are operating a machine they don’t fully understand, to commit atrocities against abominations that defy reality, in order to perform miracles that are, in no way, explained. It’s got that fever dream pitch of something that only people who spend too much time online can sustain, and it’s got that “God’s dead!” edge that every wannabe Nihilist embraced after a rough time in eighth grade. If this is your cup of tea, Angel Engine does a solid job of delivering enough to keep you attached, but not enough to take away from the attention the video series receives.

The problem, however, is the game itself. On the one hand, the grittiness of the reality within Angel Engine works well with the medical bunker where you’re performing all these tasks. It’s cramped and asks SO much in a very limited amount of time, and none of the buttons feel natural or intuitive. For example, there’s so many times where directionality is attached to buttons, not the joystick, but then you also need to use the joystick for different movements. It’s rarely consistent across operations and it definitely isn’t across tasks, so, if you need to quickly jump out of the operation in order to secure the door, it takes a split second to reset your brain into the proper way to move things, which is a critical amount of time when you’re trying not to die.

Yes, it’s true. This man has no dick!

I think that people looked at how Overcooked managed to successfully stress everyone out and still do it in a fun way, and decided that players enjoy being stressed out, which is a hell of a takeaway from a co-op game. Stress is not fun, at least not for me. Before you can even finish the first operation, you usually need to do every one of the mini games at least once, including the one to make sure the containment door stays closed. There is so much to juggle from the very start that the intensity, not the difficulty, stays permanently spiked. You have no choice but to memorize split second button reactions to toggle between different zones, actions and places. This is hard enough when the game is working, but it’s seriously a major problem when it doesn’t.

Remember how I griped not so long ago that not every game needs to be ported to the Switch? It’s my firm belief that, if you’re going to make the port, you have to make sure the goddamn game actually works. Inexplicably, Angel Engine has errant, unpredictable and baseless bugs like an indie PC title might. I thought it didn’t work on the Switch 2 at all because, on my first play, the right joystick didn’t respond, so I couldn’t even start the gameplay. On subsequent expeditions, it was a mixed bag of games not responding or, more often than not, deciding I was wrong. When I couldn’t get the Injector minigame to clear, I gave myself a mental slap and decided I was clearly just terrible at the game. But when it kept saying I failed at the frigging saw? That was when I knew something was up.

SCREW. YOU. IT’S. IN. THE HOLE.

Perhaps most baffling of all is the fact that the touchscreen works sort of. It goes to show I know nothing of gaming, because, from my stance, it would make the most amount of sense to have zero touchscreen capabilities whatsoever. Instead, you can look around the main operating theater and that’s it. You can’t select anything, move anything, do literally anything but vaguely, slowly pan around while staring at the abomination before you. It’s so wildly illogical that I’m almost impressed they baked it into the game. It would be like you were trying to build a car, and you barely got four tires lashed to a single seat with a ship’s wheel to control and an engine that was stolen from a moped, but then you also installed Sirius XM. Someone on your team needs to prioritize.

Look, if you’re all in on the whole Angel Engine thing and you want to be a part of the jumpscare universe, alright, get the game. But everything in me screams to get it on PC where the mouse and keyboard controls for all these twitchy little movements probably makes more sense. The bindings on a controller are whack and the hiccups of competent gameplay make it so very, very unenjoyable. And honestly, if your kid wants to giggle while they pee their pants, there are better games that do this and have storylines that aren’t brazenly for shock value. At the very least, I hope it gets patched so it doesn’t arbitrarily fail you, because the annoyance at “losing” is far worse than the two seconds of screen shaking when an angel rips off your head. Thank you, and God bless.

Angel Engine is available now on PC, Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 5, and Xbox Series X|S.

Reviewed on Nintendo Switch.

A copy of Angel Engine was provided by the publisher.