There’s been a good precedent of horror games flourishing on mobile devices before making the inevitable step up to Steam. The superb Year Walk led the way, and now Decay: The Mare is following in its footsteps.

Set in a hellish mental asylum, Sam Eldritch (which is as unsubtle as nomenclature can get) is trapped in a relentless nightmare and must break free from his incarceration if he wants to survive.

A first-person protagonist, escaping from a demented mental asylum? You’re thinking ‘Outlast!‘, but this is a completely different breed of horror game. Rather than the frantic fun to be found in Mount Massive, Decay: The Mare is filled with patient, intelligent puzzle solving with the occasional dose of light horror.

The puzzles are admittedly hit and miss. There’s a range of inventory based puzzles which provide some challenge, but there’s also a ‘combine’ feature, where by the player can meld two objects together to become one, but it’s only used twice throughout the entire game and feels unnecessary.

Decay: The Mare’s tone effectively evokes the mood of a nightmare, and some of the puzzles live up to that, such as when the protagonist is tasked with punishing a teddy bear by pushing four nails into it.

Unfortunately, the game falls back on tried and tested puzzle formats and at times lacks imagination, particularly towards the end. Most of the main puzzles revolve around finding an arbitrary number of arbitrary objects, but usually finding those objects is fun and challenging. However, in the third and final episode the player is tasked with finding four balls, and two of them literally drop from the ceiling in rooms the player has already visited. It’s hardly Grim Fandango.

The player explores the asylum through a series of still-shots, and moves between areas by clicking arrows. It reminded me fondly of some of the outstanding horror adventure games of the 90s, such as Blackstone Chronicles. It also resembles a 90s adventure game aesthetically, but given its mobile device origins and limited budget, it can be forgiven for that.

It’s difficult to accurately summarise Decay‘s plot, because it’s about as clear as post-modern interpretative dance. From what I could gather from the few little pockets of exposition scattered throughout the three episodes, the ‘Reaching Dreams’ asylum is haunted by several vengeful spirits and a murderess. Beyond that, my head is filled with white noise.

Sometimes it’s a masterful move for a horror game to make its story as vague as possible, as in the aforementioned Year Walk. After all, the unknown can be just as scary as a hundred mutilated necromorphs.

However, there’s an art to telling a vague story that still keeps the player hooked, and I think it’s an art that Shining Gate Software are yet to master. I feel that the developers may have written a story fit for a game that stretches beyond Decay: The Mare’s 3-hour runtime, because characters and plot-points race past in the blink of an eye. It’s a little disorientating.

After the climactic confrontation with the antagonist, the game ends with a pseudo-philosophical quote, and for the life of me I couldn’t figure out what it had to do with the game or its characters. Is it pretension for pretension’s sake, or am I just dumb? Don’t answer that.

Despite its grim title, Decay: The Mare isn’t a game that’s going to keep you up at night thinking about that evil bastard in the dungarees, like other horror games I could mention. It’s fantastically well-paced, and there’s a few moments of genius on show, such as when the protagonist has to use camera shots to navigate a black room, knowing that something will pop up at any moment.

Apart from the occasional well-executed jump scare, it’s fairly tame. As I alluded to earlier, Decay: The Mare excels at establishing the tone and atmosphere of a nightmare, and when it revels in surreal horror it shines brightest. There’s a character who is literally a gory hand in a bag, and my encounters with him were the only parts of the game that really got under my skin.

Decay: The Mare is probably best sold as a first-person puzzle game with horror elements rather than vice versa. Most of the puzzles are challenging and inventive, but aside from the odd jump-scare, any seasoned horror player will breeze through mostly unnerved. Despite this, it’s an enjoyable little romp, showcasing simple but effective design and the occasional decapitated head. What more do you want?

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