After the grim goings on of The Evil Within, I thought we’d brighten up the Horror Show this week with a lovely little game about frogs, namely They Breathe, available now on Steam.

Except of course, it’s not a lovely little game about frogs. It’s a surprisingly disturbing horror title about a strange, unnatural species of amphibious bovine creatures that terrorise frogs.

They Breathe is as minimalist as games get. It was apparently born out of a school project and takes half an hour to complete. The gameplay consists of swimming around, avoiding aggressors and inhaling bubbles.

Yet somehow, The Working Parts manage to take this simple framework, which could be the premise of any number of gimmicky mobile games, and craft a unique and unsettling horror experience out of it.

As far as I’ve gathered from the story, you play as a frog that dives into a body of water which contains a sunken forest ruled by skin-crawling creatures in order to rid the frog community of this evil, once and for all.

There’s a real elegance in a spooky story told without words, and I felt completely engrossed trying to figure out what the hell was going on, who the malicious creatures were and why they existed.

Despite its low budget, the visuals are remarkably smooth and eye-pleasing, with excellent lighting.  It’s full of soft colours and stylised animals, reminding the player of all the fairy stories they read as a child. This just works to emphasise the horror.

First it reminds the player of being a child, and then it seeks to exploit that vulnerability with twisted and disquieting imagery. There’s something endlessly frightening about being chased relentlessly around a screen by weird jellyfish/cow hybrids.

Many horror games try to elicit that little adrenaline fuelled rush where a pursuing enemy nips at the heels of the protagonist. Obviously Outlast is the exemplar, but many triple A horror games fail to get it right.

It’s shocking then that They Breathe, with its quaint 2D graphics and simple gameplay, nails it. The enemy A.I. is unpredictable, and will suddenly burst towards the player-frog without any warning. It manages to be consistently panic-inducing.

Probably the most impressive aspect of They Breathe was the emotional impact it had. Through-out the game, there are several other frogs, desperately suffocating and at the mercy of the cruel organisms that plague the water. If the player ignores them, they die. The player can even selfishly push them in the way of enemies to make things easier.

However, when I did this, the resulting guilt was palpable. There’s something about their vulnerability, as they flap and wince, that really got to me and made me want to save them, which is possible but increasingly difficult. I felt a genuine sense of remorse for each frog I couldn’t rescue.

Obviously, there’s only so much a player can get out of They Breathe. I mentioned before that each playthrough lasts around half an hour, and for £1.59 that’s reasonable enough in my opinion. With Halloween coming up, it’s worth adding it to your wishlist in the highly likely event that it’ll be available for about 50p in the sales. However, after around two hours of playtime, they’ll be little to no reason ever to play it again.

But not every title needs to have endless replay value to be worth your money. An engaging half an hour of horror is worth every penny in my books. And quite frankly, it’s hard not to love a horror game in which the main character is a frog. See, developers? Your protagonist doesn’t always have to be a bland, grizzled white American man. I’m looking at you, Sebastian Castellanos.

8/10

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