The Most Frightening Aspect Is That There Are No In-Game Saves
Below, Rusted Gods has a terrific premise. You sit inside a Cold War-era command facility and remotely guide four soldiers descending into a mysterious underground chasm. You communicate through terminals, monitor their physical and psychological condition, track movement on radar, inspect a video feed, and scan radio frequencies for anything unusual.
Aesthetically, the game is pure cassette futurism: boxy industrial equipment, CRT distortion, physical dials, oversized clicky buttons, and every machine looking as though it weighs 140 pounds and performs exactly one task.
It is basically:
MY FIRST ABYSSAL COMMAND CENTER
* Giant arrow buttons.
* Friendly colored lights.
* Easy-grip radio dial.
* Medical monitor with one fact per screen.
* Mysterious marble statue shown on a CRT monitor, stained with blood, that moves “sneaky, sneaky” when no one is looking sold separately.
* Ages 3 and up.
The atmosphere and sound design are easily the game’s greatest strengths. Some of the radio channels provide you with otherworldly sounds that seem to be orca whales and Enya warming up after 35 years off the stage, which is not a good noise. At one point, the technician begins talking about the weird moaning coming through the radio. Therefore:
“That’s right, folks—you’re listening to MOAN 96 FM, broadcasting live from the chasm that holds the mysterious fallen gods!”
“Up next: two hours of orca mating calls, followed by Enya warming up inside a Soviet ventilation shaft. MOAN 96: All anguish. All abyss. All the time.”
That is Below, Rusted Gods at its best: strange, atmospheric, tactile, and just unclear enough that you feel as though you are genuinely interpreting incomplete information.
Unfortunately, the game repeatedly establishes fascinating systems and then barely uses them.
The video monitor is the clearest example. Events happen on the expedition’s camera that you cannot report to your team. At one point, a marble statue holding a small bowl in the distance suddenly appears directly in front of the remote camera, covered in blood, with the bowl it’s holding now filled with blood. Eventually, it sneaks back while you, The Operator, are not watching, returning to its original state and position.
But you cannot warn the squad. There is no option for:
“Guys, the statue moved…and interestingly enough it is presenting me with a saucer full of blood through the remote video feed.”
The camera then spends much of the game displaying essentially the same old image. This could have been one of the game’s defining systems. Give every soldier a body camera. Provide intermittent feeds because of depth and geological interference. Let cameras cut out at different times. Show a delayed transmission that contradicts the squad’s current report. Have one camera continue moving after its soldier supposedly stopped.
Instead, the dedicated CRT primarily exists to display Statue Holding Bowl.jpg for half an hour or more.
The expedition eventually enters what appears to be the soft, iron-scented anus of a sleeping god. The commander describes conditions as “disgusting.”
Along the way, the soldiers encounter creepy humanoid figures cocooned in phlegm. The medic somehow identifies what one of these creatures is doing, suggesting that his unexplained professional specialty is comparative abyssal theology: the academic study of what unspeakable things in the abyss appear to worship.
Eventually, the horror reaches your own facility. The lobby goes dark, strange symbols appear on the walls, and something destroys a lightbulb. This is the Administration’s secret screening procedure:
“Is this guy a wuss who is going to leave the room immediately when we knock out a light?”
My answer was, yes, I am that coward.
There is a lot to like here. The premise is excellent. The cassette-futurist command center is wonderfully designed. The soundscape is oppressive. The game produces several genuinely disturbing images and ideas. But it feels as though nearly every system stops one step before becoming truly meaningful. The instruments often provide atmosphere rather than actionable intelligence. The dialogue choices frequently change tone rather than behavior. The soldiers report extraordinary events that you cannot meaningfully investigate or communicate. You move painfully slowly, there is no ability to run, and long stretches appear deliberately time-gated.
But again, the most frightening aspect of Below, Rusted Gods is that there are no in-game saves.
There is no manual save and no dependable “save and quit” function. You must continue until the game decides to create a checkpoint, without clearly telling you where the natural stopping points are. A short horror game still needs to respect the fact that players have dinners, families, responsibilities, interruptions, and functioning digestive systems of their own.
Because there are no in-game saves and no clear checkpoints, I ultimately quit after listening to the third cassette tape, which was technically Maria’s second mixtape of her ghoulish, tormented mania.
The ancient gods did not defeat my expedition.
Dinner did.
I may return in a year to see whether the developers have added proper in-game saving. Until then, the entire operation remains paused while Maria explains that she does not feel well due to possession by ancient entities and abyss-induced torment.
Sorry, Maria. You may be possessed or tormented, but I need to eat dinner.
For those of you who have a pile of snacks and drinks ready at hand and can burn three hours of time without needing to save, go for it!
