Macabre Review: A Game With a Brilliant Idea and a Brain-Dead Monster

Some games have a premise so good you can't help but be intrigued. Macabre is one of those games. Its pitch is perfect: a co-op extraction horror game that mashes up the relentless AI tension of Alien: Isolation with the high-stakes loot loop of Hunt: Showdown.

Kickstarter backers have been waiting years for this nightmare to become a reality. I just jumped in, and what I found is a janky, often boring, and fundamentally broken experience that feels less like a finished game and more like a promising prototype that escaped the lab a year too early. It’s a glorious mess of brilliant ideas and baffling execution.

And yet, I can't bring myself to completely hate it.

The Perfect Pitch

Let's start with what they got right, because when this game shines, it's blinding. The atmosphere is top-notch. The game's Australian forest setting is dense, creepy as hell, and genuinely beautiful to look at, with lighting that perfectly balances visibility and dread.

The monster itself looks sick. It's the kind of twisted, wendigo-looking creature that hooks you from the first trailer. When you hear that thing screech in the distance and the lights in a nearby research outpost start to flicker, you feel a genuine pang of fear. For a few minutes, you can see the brilliant game that Macabre is trying to be.

And playing with friends? It's absolute chaos. There’s nothing quite like throwing a sonic plunger at your buddy’s face to make him the target while you make a break for the exit. The potential for glorious, friendship-ending betrayals is sky-high.

The Brain-Dead Boogeyman

Now for the bad news. The monster AI, the entire goddamn selling point of the game, is catastrophically stupid. This creature was hyped as a "smart," adaptive hunter that learns from your tricks. In its current state, it has all the tactical cunning of a brick.

I’ve watched it hit me through walls. I’ve seen it completely abandon a chase because I threw a bottle a few feet away. It can watch you dive into a hiding spot and then instantly forget you exist. One time, I walked off a small ledge, and its pathfinding AI had such a complete meltdown that it just stood there, frozen, until I put it out of its misery by leaving the match.

The animations don’t help. The awesome kill animations from the trailer are nowhere to be found. When it chases you, it just uses a sped-up version of its walking animation, which looks more goofy than terrifying. It’s a threat, but only in the way a broken animatronic at a cheap haunted house is a threat.

Death by a Thousand Papercuts

The problems don't stop with the monster. The core gameplay loop is just… boring. Most missions involve running around a spacious but empty map, collecting generic items from containers that are empty half the time. The objectives are uninspired, and I’ve had entire missions where I completed my main task and extracted without even seeing the monster.

Then there are the bizarre design choices. You can’t jump. In a game with a hilly, uneven map, the lack of a jump button is a constant, baffling annoyance. The "amnesia-style" click-and-drag door opening feels completely out of place. And the game is riddled with bugs, from getting permanently stuck in hiding spots to falling through the world after getting knocked over.

A Glimmer of Hope

I was ready to write this game off as another Early Access disaster, another Kickstarter dream that turned into a waking nightmare. I was ready to refund it and never look back.

And then the developers did something shocking: they listened.

Less than 24 hours after a launch that was met with a wave of criticism, the studio, Weforge, did two things. First, they publicly acknowledged the feedback and laid out a clear roadmap of the exact issues they were working on fixing: the AI, the gameplay pacing, the bugs.

Second, they did something almost unheard of: they slashed the price. They admitted the initial $25 price tag was too high for the game's current state and dropped it to just $9.99, offering a special cosmetic to the early buyers who paid full price as an apology.

That move, more than anything else in the game, gives me hope. It’s a rare and refreshing display of humility and a genuine commitment to their community.

So, am I giving this a score? Hell no. The game as it exists right now is probably a 5/10 at best. It's a buggy, unfinished mess with a broken core feature. But the developers' response changes the entire conversation. They’ve shown they’re not just in this for a quick cash grab.

I can’t recommend you buy Macabre today (Apart from if you have some extra money to support the devs). But I can absolutely recommend you wishlist it. There’s a brilliant game buried in here somewhere, and for the first time, I’m actually confident that the developers might just have what it takes to dig it out.

We at NLM received a key for this game for free, this however didn't impact our review in any way.