Caput Mortum arrives on PS5 wearing the confident air of an artsy first-person horror title that desperately wants to be different. Set inside a gloomy alchemist’s tower full of experiments gone wrong, it promises dread, mystery and “intentional” awkwardness. It certainly delivers the last one with impressive commitment.
Gaming Heaven
To its credit, the atmosphere is doing most of the heavy lifting. The setting leans into grim medieval alchemy rather than the usual sci-fi labs, which gives the whole thing a pleasantly musty character. Wandering through stone corridors, reading scraps of notes and piecing together what these morally flexible scholars were up to has a certain bleak charm.
Creature design is also strong. The misshapen homunculi look like someone tried to sculpt a person from wet clay and gave up halfway through, which is suitably unsettling. A few environmental puzzles are mildly satisfying as well, asking you to observe symbols and mechanisms rather than having the solution shouted at you. There’s clearly imagination here, lurking somewhere behind the suffering.
Gaming Hell
The controls feel less “bold design choice” and more “controller dropped down the stairs”. Looking around involves the triggers and bumpers, while the analogue stick waves your character’s hand about like you’re trying to swat a fly. It’s meant to make you feel vulnerable. It mostly makes you feel like you’ve forgotten how arms work.
Combat becomes a slow-motion slapstick routine of missed swings and awkward shuffling. Being chased by unkillable enemies should be terrifying; instead, you’re too busy fighting the interface to feel anything at all. What might have been tense turns into farce, like being hunted by a monster while assembling flat-pack furniture.
Pacing doesn’t help either. After the novelty wears off, trudging through levels with these controls feels less like horror and more like admin.
Final Judgement
There’s an interesting game buried inside Caput Mortum, wrapped in rich atmosphere and odd ideas. Sadly, it sabotages itself with deliberately dreadful controls. Unique, yes. Fun? About as much as filing tax returns in a dungeon.
