Beneath review: a broken '90s horror throwback I can't stop playing

First impressions can be deceptive, and in Beneath, they almost sank me. The first thirty minutes, both below and above the waves, are a scrappy, stuttering mess. Textures blur, framerates tumble, and the early ‘zombie’ encounters aboard diver, explorer, and all-around dude, Noah Quinn’s rusting boat look like the kind of game I'd avoid two decades ago, let alone now, on PS5.

Yet, sticking with it, something unexpected happens: Beneath begins to take hold. Its retro survival horror roots slowly bubble to the surface, and before long, I’m hooked. When the action relocates to a crumbling underwater base, which looks something like it’s resurfaced from a lost 90s PC build, my instinct to hit uninstall and play, well, anything else, diminishes.

Developed by 'micro-studio' Camel 101, just two brothers, Beneath shouldn’t really exist, and yet, here it is, dredged from the depths with a disarming sincerity. The duo’s love for their influences bleeds through every corridor: Resident Evil, F.E.A.R., The Thing, all haunt this deep-sea nightmare.

Beneath the retro influences

There’s nothing especially new here, no modern twist or reinvention, but Beneath wears its nostalgia like a badge of honour. It’s a wink and a nudge to those who remember when tank controls and fixed camera angles were part of the tension (though to be clear, Beneath is a first-person shooter, think the similarly flawed Clive Barker's Jericho). When fighting bugs, actual game bugs and not the polygon type, were all part of the fun.

Visually, this isn’t the PS5’s next Silent Hill 2 Remake or Resident Evil Requiem. It’s basic, sometimes painfully so. The corridor-based levels are a smart design decision, limiting the player's eyeline, forcing and funneling me into, erm, corridors, certainly means the team can put limited resources in the best places.

What Beneath lacks in polish, it compensates for in atmosphere. The developers know exactly how to dress a scene: steam, smoke, and strobing emergency lights disguise the game’s rough edges with theatrical flair. When the hissing pipes and flickering bulbs close in, there’s a genuine echo of Aliens’ claustrophobia; a grimy, industrial aesthetic that feels alive despite its technical flaws.

Combat is clunky, weapons kick like angry mules, and enemies have the intelligence of damp coral, literally not moving. But strangely, that’s the point. The jank becomes part of the experience. Heavy movement and unreliable framerates force me to play cautiously, just like in the days when survival horror meant surviving the controls as much as the monsters.

There’s even a story worth following. Quinn’s descent into paranoia, touches of other-worldly sights, offer enough hooks to keep me pushing forward, even when my shotgun feels like it’s firing marshmallows. And while the promised loot and weapon upgrades rarely materialise, there’s simply not much to find, the illusion of progress keeps the tension taut.

Beneath is littered with shortcomings and technical issues, but it’s also the kind of game that reminds you why survival horror mattered in the first place: not for jump scares or spectacle, but for that creeping sense of dread that something is always just around the corner, even if it turns out to be just a trick of the flawed, flickering, bleeding light.