Horror scenes woven from analog tech circuits, such as VHS tapes, old cameras and FM radios, are often presented as if they shouldn’t be found. They’re like snuff movies and lost-and-found tapes, their babbling speech and degraded brand of imagery both disturbing and illegal. Then there’s the recent surge of PS1 horror games. These can be just as disturbing, given their cast of characters’ incredibly angular faces, distorted environments, and cracked textures — almost as if these are bootleg or unreleased games twisted by an unknown malevolent force. .
Tartarus Key wants to evoke the same eerie weirdness of those games, but without resorting to cheap jump scares. To that end, it’s hidden within the rough, jagged graphics of the PS1 game, while its story is delivered in an alluring spooky setting and plenty of puzzles. As an odd job named Alex Young, you wake up in an overly baroque mansion filled with musky books and dusty furniture rather than the familiar comforts of home. You find the radio on the table, postcards hidden in the crevice of the sofa, a locked safe and a closed door. In the radio squelch, an invisible voice tells you they’re in the same predicament, and your first step is to find a way out of the room. A security camera watches your every move, with its footage fixed on you as you gather debris and clues, unravel their meaning, and open doors.
Only when you do, you find yourself in another locked room. There is still one. There is still one.
Unfortunately, that repetition—and, ultimately, familiarity—does much to keep Keys of Tartarus calm, and its initially unsettling atmosphere never reaches unobtrusive levels. It’s not like a game like PT, which is a demo of a Silent Hill game that never saw the light of day, consists only of a hallway you walk through over and over again. By gradually introducing small variations on increasingly familiar loops, PT was able to instill a creepy sense of uneasiness, but Tartarus Key is just one big room escape game, mostly without the thrills of the horror games it draws inspiration from. Nasty fear. It has the horror aesthetic of the PS1 without being scary. That’s not necessarily a fatal flaw, as Tartarus Key does have some puzzles that serve as engaging brain teasers. But I’m not sure it deserves high praise for equating a horror game to a casual puzzle box for spending a lazy afternoon.
One of its biggest problems is that The Tartarus Key has very small stakes. The entire game keeps more or less the same sequence: find a locked room, discover a keypad, decipher the cryptic clue, enter the correct code on the keypad, open the door, and walk into another locked room. The puzzle-solving is mundane, but to its credit, there’s still some satisfaction in finding the answers in the game, and the puzzles fall somewhere between a bit easy and a bit punishing. You can also spend your time searching the scene – with no malice imposing a time limit on your detection – as Alex monologues how weird the whole scene is (which it really isn’t). That said, you won’t be under duress to solve puzzles, but it won’t make for a scary experience either.
Another problem is that since most of the puzzles are contained within each room, you’re less likely to get stuck by forgetting to pick up an item from the other end of the mansion. But it’s still frustrating at times because there’s no hint system if you get stuck. This can happen if you miss an important clue, and it’s happened to me a few times–such as in the game’s first locked room. The penalty for not being able to solve the locked room puzzle is simple: you’re just stuck there until you figure it out.
That said, occasionally you’ll see weird things happen. A corridor will stretch indefinitely, suggesting the otherworldly nature of the mansion. Heavy items will tip over from shelves and there will be a loud bang behind you. The distorted voice taunted and prevented Alex from talking to her companions over the radio. But even those events take place between locked rooms, which is predictable. Other times, they’re presented as cutscenes in which Tartarus wrestles to wrest control from you, only to give it back to you moments later. Such a setting isn’t particularly intimidating, even in the game’s labyrinthine lobby, which is lined with classic European-style paintings. Not much will seep into your skin – despite seeing blood seep from Francisco Goya’s “Saturn Devouring His Son” painting.
Meanwhile, these locked rooms are interrupted by a pivotal event, perhaps to emphasize the gravity of your situation. As it turns out, Alex isn’t the only one being kidnapped, and every few rooms or so you’ll have the chance to rescue a captive. Obviously, this is another puzzle to solve, but with one major difference: a wrong solution can lead to the captive’s death. For a horror game, this might seem risky, but it can be avoided with some old-fashioned saving methods when realizing the answer is wrong (usually Alex shaking her and yelling “no !”). This installment is little more than a marathon of fellow mates, each reduced to a simple caricature: the occult-obsessed historian, the disgraced doctor, the unrepentant rich bastard. There aren’t many subtle interactions with them either, as you simply park them in a safe room after they’ve been rescued.
In the end, the horror of Tartarus Key has a contrived feel to it, and that’s something the game can’t reconcile. In either form, I love horror because I want to experience the fear and excitement behind the safety of their screens. I hope to push boundaries and eliminate screens—or at least be forgotten.
Oddly, however, the Tartarus Key feels particularly firm in telling you that this screen exists. One of the captives, Torres, frequently pointed out that the mansion appeared to be unoccupied, that its furniture was merely scenery, and that the place was a perverse playground for the mansion’s ultra-rich. Room clues sometimes create a mise-en-abyme that conjures up a puzzle narrative disconnected from the game’s wider story. For example, a series of postcards detailing its author’s growing paranoia is dismissed by Torres as just part of the mansion game, with Alex commenting that the author may not be a real person. A separate conversation with another captive delves into just how bad she was at escape room games. A constant reminder that you’re playing a game within a game; there’s even a chance you’ll find a room for the mansion’s puzzle-making department. If you’ve played a real room escape game before, you know that you’re not actually in unimaginable danger and that you can stop playing at any time. That’s what it feels like to experience Tartarus Key, as if the game doesn’t want you to be overwhelmed by its horrors.
Perhaps more benevolently, “Hell’s Key” tries to blur the lines between horror and satire. Maybe it revels in its self-awareness by referencing the practical nature of horror games, which aren’t too different from most escape room games anyway. But it doesn’t create any tension or serve any narrative purpose. For the game’s final levels — or rooms, really — I’m more eager to complete the puzzles than focus more on its story or scares. These puzzles can be stimulating brain teasers. Other than that, however, I have very little recollection of the Keys of Tartarus, other than its rooms, sets, and all those damn keyboards.
