When you first look at Post Trauma — developed by indie studio Red Soul Games — you are immediately reminded of numerous genre-defining PlayStation 2 survival horror games. Why, you ask? Because Post Trauma is a modern interpretation of that era of horror. Paying homage to titles like Silent Hill, Resident Evil, Haunting Ground, Siren, and Fatal Frame, it proudly wears its inspiration on its sleeve with much-deserved respect and admiration.

When I booted up Post Trauma, I was immediately transported to the survival horror worlds of yesteryear. Some of my favourite horror games exist on the PlayStation 2. So when this game set out to capture the feel of late 90s and early 00s horror, I was hooked. But in the end, I was left disappointed. Post Trauma bites off more than it can chew in its overambition, and it ends up feeling like a mess of warring ideas.

After a shocking introductory scene, Post Trauma begins with the player controlling Roman (played by Togo Igawa), a middle-aged, heavy-set Japanese man who awakens to find himself alone on a seemingly abandoned train following a severe panic attack. With no clue how he got there, he must navigate the eerily dark and silent carriages, hoping to get off the train.

It’s an interesting start to a horror game, where you play not as some boulder-punching action hero or unsuspecting schoolgirl, but as someone who would typically serve as cannon fodder. Having the protagonist be an older, heavier person who speaks broken English ultimately adds to the surrealist, uncanny themes present in Post Trauma. Roman doesn’t belong here, and everything feels out of place and out of time. It creates a fascinating hook where the story is experienced by someone who likely would have existed to boost the overall body count. His movements are slow, he consumes stamina quickly, and he breathes very loudly. When he is fighting for his life to survive, it looks like it, feels like it, and sounds like it.

Make peace with The Gloom

Post Trauma has a unique and distinct sense of art direction. Using highly saturated colours, grain, visual imperfections, and vertical stripes to give the impression that the game has been shot on film. The use of fixed camera angles and cinematic bars, coupled with the repeating motif of eyes, creates a film-like aesthetic, but also adds that extra cinematic flair. When I first recognised how these elements were coming along together in harmony, I immediately felt like an observer in The Gloom, watching as Roman traverses the hellscape he finds himself in.

Additionally, the music of Post Trauma (created by Nicolas Gasparini, overwise known as Myuu) evokes the feeling of listening to Akira Yamaoka’s work on Silent Hill for the first time. Gasparini has done a fantastic job creating an emotionally charged soundtrack full of chilling tones that help enhance that sense of foreboding apprehension while playing, using piano, strings, and drums that hone in on Post Trauma’s well-crafted atmosphere.

Throughout the short three-to-four-hour runtime of Post Trauma, you’ll also encounter other people trapped in The Gloom. There is Jill (voiced by Autumn Ivy), a mysterious woman whom Roman supposedly knows but cannot remember. Carlos (voiced by Hyoie O’Grady), a strange man who knows more about The Gloom than he lets on. As well as Freya, a young, mute girl who uses her phone to communicate with Roman.

Nearing its conclusion three hours in, I felt like I was constantly being asked if I understood the message. Yes, Post Trauma, I get it. These characters have done something bad and now need to accept responsibility for what they’ve done and find forgiveness. I’ve seen this same message done more times than I can count. But there are so many characters you’ve thrown in haphazardly, and a whole area that feels drastically out of place. Post Trauma has some really interesting and fresh ideas that just need that extra attention and polish. But the who, what, when, where, why, and how of it all are never explained, nor is there enough information around the world to try to piece together. Post Trauma so desperately wants to have the same level of nuance that other games in the genre have, that it forgets to create a cohesive narrative.

There are also a couple of technical issues that distract from the amazing art design. On an RTX 3060 with graphics set to high and resolution scale set to balanced, there was a staggeringly unstable framerate. Ranging from lows of 24 and highs of 144. This seesaw of a framerate persisted regardless of what settings were changed. Additionally, textures frequently popped in late, and some assets simply never loaded in, such as the sledgehammer. Audio cut in and out, and some sound effects never played.

Post Trauma is a puzzle-focused experience, so, understandably, combat would take the backseat, serving to break up exploration and puzzle-solving. But when you factor in that there are barely a dozen enemies throughout the entire game, it starts to look as if it was added to pad out the already short runtime. Even in hard mode, which the game boasts has more enemies and harder combat, there was a complete absence of challenge.

Furthermore, there is a lack of resource management, a staple of survival horror. In Post Trauma, you have separate inventories for key items and equipment, trivialising the panic experienced in games like Resident Evil when you need to dump everything in a storage chest to pick up that needed green herb. Or the fear of wondering if your last bullet will be what saves you from certain death. But you never have to worry about inventory space, because, in the first place, there is barely any ammo or med kits to pick up around the environment. I spent the majority of the game holding nothing but the sledgehammer, and only ever managed to find a medkit or some ammo once or twice. Items may be scarce, but because they don’t take up much-needed and limited space, they lack importance and value.

Hell would have meaning

Post Trauma is a puzzle-based survival horror experience, and each puzzle is designed to be a challenge in itself, requiring you to meticulously study the environment around you to find the solution. Whilst I was playing, I found it was incredibly handy to have a pen and paper to write information on. And honestly, it was the only way I was able to get through most of these puzzles.

The puzzles in Post Trauma are difficult. Absurdly so. And most notably, unsatisfying to complete. They’re nonsensical, with obtuse solutions that sometimes require immense leaps in logic to reach. Whilst there are some easy puzzles, the majority feel condescending in their difficulty. And as you progress through the game, they become more and more cumbersome. One puzzle just before the final boss was so ridiculously hard that I ended up smashing my head against the brick wall trying to solve it, before giving in and using a guide. This became even more frustrating when the intended solution felt as if it had no relation to the clues given leading up to it.

Yet at the same time, none of these puzzles are original. Each feels like a direct reference to previous games in the survival horror genre. There are countless keypads and clock-based puzzles, puzzles where you must collect coins and place them in order based on a poem, collect medals around a police precinct to open a secret passage, program a train line to follow, and many more.

I can’t even help making comparisons to games like Silent Hill and Resident Evil, because Post Trauma shoves those references in your face from beginning to end. Characters like Jill and Carlos are direct references to the protagonists from Resident Evil 3, and in the introductory puzzle, there are train stations named after Silent Hill protagonists like James Sunderland and Henry Townshend. There’s a story set in a reality fueled by trauma, with monsters embodying some element of a character’s fears or guilt. The list goes on. These references and gems of nostalgia seem arbitrarily thrown in to keep the player engaged. Whilst Post Trauma unapologetically leans into its inspirations, it does so to its disservice, losing its own identity. By the three-hour mark, I was struggling to maintain engagement because all I wanted to do was play those other games instead.