The 9th Charnel Review - A Masterclass In Boredom
I genuinely tried to find the terrifying survival horror experience promised on the store page, but all I found was a broken, bug-infested nightmare that made me want to shut down my pc.
Horror games and the first-person perspective go together like cheap beer and bad decisions. It is a formula that works beautifully when executed by developers who understand pacing, atmosphere, and tension. Then you have titles that try to ape the success of Outlast and Amnesia without understanding what made those games actually frightening. The 9th Charnel comes from Saikat Deb Creations, which is an ambitious one-man development studio. I always want to root for the solo indie developer trying to make their mark on the industry. Ambition does not excuse a final product that flat-out refuses to work. What starts as a mildly intriguing premise quickly devolves into an absolute chore of a video game.
The Setup And The Crash
You step into the shoes of Michael J. Jones, a genetic researcher who really needs a new career path. Michael and his two colleagues from the Epsilon Research Institute are driving near a remote wildlife sanctuary when a winged monstrosity attacks their car. You crash into a ravine, wake up dazed, and immediately get injected with a mysterious fluid by a creepy local who somehow knows your name. Your friends are missing, and you have to navigate a rural valley populated by hostile cultists and mutated freaks.
On paper, this sounds like a solid setup for a B-movie horror romp. The execution is where everything falls apart. The narrative is utterly vapid and fails to grab your attention. You will experience recurring flashbacks of a man raising his daughter, but the delivery is so incredibly awkward that it completely kills any emotional weight. The cutscenes look like they were ripped straight out of a 2005 tech demo. Character models feature faces carved from stone, and they speak through gritted teeth with zero lip-syncing. It is genuinely off-putting, but not in the terrifying way the developer intended.
Braindead Monsters And Broken Stealth
Survival horror relies entirely on the threat of the unknown and the intelligence of the enemies stalking you. The 9th Charnel features some of the most hilariously broken enemy AI I have ever seen in a commercial release.
You spend the bulk of your playtime crouching under beds or hiding inside lockers. This would be tense if the monsters posed an actual threat. Instead, they operate on a single shared brain cell. I watched a grotesque ghoul walk directly into a wall and aggressively march in place. In another encounter, a monster chased me into a room, watched me enter a locker, and then stood perfectly still staring at the metal door for five literal minutes. There is absolutely no pattern to learn and no dynamic pathfinding. You can literally stand right behind some of these enemies and they will not even register your existence. You will eventually just stop hiding and start looking for ways to exploit their broken pathing to speed up the process.
Tedious Puzzles And Clunky Controls
When you are not avoiding visually offensive monsters, you are wrestling with the game's terrible control scheme. Michael moves like a tank trapped in mud. The sprint input is awkward and causes actual physical thumb fatigue after a few minutes of play. Even simple actions like climbing down a ladder require frustrating trial and error because the interaction prompts are horribly inconsistent.
The core gameplay loop consists of finding a locked door and looking for the key in the immediate vicinity. It is tedious fetch-quest design at its absolute worst. In one instance, the game told me I needed a key to open a heavy door. I spent ten minutes searching the area, only to realize that a random valve wheel sitting nearby was actually coded as the "key" in the inventory system. Speaking of the inventory, it is a total nightmare. You cannot just pick up an item and use it dynamically. You have to open a clunky menu, manually equip the item, and then hope the game recognizes you are holding it when you interact with the environment.
The Bug That Killed The Run
I can forgive a lot of jank in an indie horror game if the atmosphere holds up, but I draw the line at software that refuses to function.
About halfway through this painfully short three hour experience, I encountered a progression-stopping bug. You enter a house belonging to one of the main characters from the cutscenes. The narrative requires you to interact with his computer to trigger the next event. The computer simply refused to register my inputs. I reloaded my save file. Nothing. I restarted my console. Nothing. I completely reinstalled the game, prayed for a miracle, and clicked the mouse again. Still nothing.
The game hard-locked my progress, forcing a complete restart of the entire campaign if I wanted to see the ending. I did not want to see the ending. I did not care about Michael, his missing friends, or the cult. I just wanted it to be over.
False Advertising
I also need to address the marketing for this game. The trailers heavily feature weapon combat, implying a frantic fight for survival against hordes of monsters. That is a lie. The 9th Charnel is a walking simulator masquerading as an action game. You are completely helpless for the vast majority of the runtime. When the game finally hands you a firearm in the closing chapter, it dumps a ridiculous amount of ammunition in your lap and throws a dozen slow-moving enemies at you. You gun them down effortlessly before they even cross the room. It is completely devoid of tension, strategy, or fun.
The 9th Charnel feels like an early prototype that was accidentally pushed to digital storefronts years before it was ready. It lacks polish, mechanical depth, and basic functionality.
The Verdict
The 9th Charnel fails to deliver on every single promise it makes. The story is boring, the monsters are laughably stupid, and the game is plagued by severe technical issues that halt your progress entirely. The developer recently joined the PlayStation Partners Program, and I sincerely hope they use those resources to drastically improve their next project. As for this game, do not waste your hard-earned cash or your precious time.
Score: 2.0 / 10 A masterclass in how to make survival horror incredibly boring.
We at NLM received a key for this game for free, this however didn't impact our review in any way.
