Clea

With Halloween just around the corner, there’s never been a better time to snuggle up with a heart-pounding, fear-inducing, horror-themed video game. And, as far as said games go, Clea stands among my top choices for this year. Though it may be short, Clea delivers a truly satisfying experience, striking a fine balance between traditional gameplay and unique elements that all but ensures that it won’t be forgotten any time soon. Facing your fears can be scary, but it’s games like this one that also ensure that it’ll be fun, too.

Don’t let its children’s book aesthetic and promise of being “jump scare free” fool you. Clea is an effectively creepy survival horror game that requires plenty of patience and courage when you’d rather just run.

An enjoyable stealth, horror puzzle game, that is definitely creepy, but not too scary. The puzzles are enjoyable to solve and will have you coming back again and again to figure them out. It’s too bad the Chaos Servants seemed so dumb and lazy at times, as they weren’t very scary at all.

Clea has the foundation that it needs to become something really amazing. The aesthetics are spot-on, and the mood and themes are conceptualised beautifully. The developer has chosen a difficult genre to work with, however, and while Clea is perfectly playable and complete, I would want to see some significant strides with a sequel before it enters the upper echelons of the genre. Nonetheless, it does represent a very different kind of Aussie creativity, and it's very much worth supporting on that basis.

Overall, Clea goes for an unsettling style of horror and, at least for me, completely fails. The atmosphere never really “lands,” enemies are more frustrating than frightening, and I really just struggled to find the desire to even play this game.