Intriguingly Monotonous
HIGH Clever level design. Throwback one-bit style. Unsettling sci-fi and horror elements.
LOW Missed opportunities for world-building, wonky controls, tedious trial and error gameplay.
WTF No mouse controls whatsoever?
At first glance, REPOSE could be mistaken for an untouched classic CRPG, as it’s rendered in starkly monochromatic one-bit graphics with a square aspect ratio. Upon further observation, there’s a lot more going on than one would find in a stock dungeon crawler from the ’80s.
This title offers a creepy, Giger-esque art style, leagues of claustrophobic, labyrinthine corridors, gameplay that demands careful management of one’s stamina and an oppressive atmosphere established by the crestfallen NPCs, all of whom work for a sinister, mysterious corporate entity — “The Company.”
The player’s job is grim but simple — Gather oxygen tanks from dead employees whose corpses can be found collapsed on the floor, sitting mutilated in office chairs or hanging from cables throughout the Company’s space station.
The tutorial turns out to be a dream from which the player wakes, only to find themselves sitting in a booth at a cafe an NPC named Cynthia. She informs the player that she also works for the Company, and it’s clear from her dialogue that the Company is some sort of spacefaring mega corporation with a penchant for placing profit over people, much like Weyland-Yutani in the Alien universe.
The original Alien’s iconic tagline, “in space, no one can hear you scream,” could just as easily be applied to REPOSE as the player sets forth from the bustling cafe and descends into the desolate lower levels where they will find a host of humanoid monstrosities — all the more horrifying for their indeterminate features with cables writhing around like tentacles.
With such threats lurking around every corner waiting to one-shot the player, they must be careful to take their journey one step at a time — literally.
Like the classic OG dungeon crawlers REPOSE was inspired by, the player assumes a first-person perspective and moves by taking one step after another (rather than fluid movement) which might feel archaic to players who unfamiliar with the genre, or nostalgic to those who grew up playing such games.
In an interview with DreadXP, Hungarian developer Bozó Attila Bertold explained how REPOSE started out as a sword and sorcery game in the same vein as the genre-defining dungeon crawler, Wizardry, but gradually, it felt more natural to change tack and make it sci-fi/horror-themed which is also reflected in his art.
However it’s not just an homage piece, as some mechanics work differently than one might expect. For instance, while the combat is as simple as can be, stamina does not exist in the traditional sense.
Rather than losing and recovering stamina as one does in many modern games, the player has a specified number of steps they can take (pivoting to look in a different direction does not count) before they hear a radio-like screech and they collapse.
It’s crucial to mind this mechanic, as it forces the player to carefully plan their route ahead of time based on what they learned from their last venture. One might say that REPOSE‘s greatest challenge is making the most out of every move.
One way that players can recover stamina is by drinking flasks of tea which can sometimes be found between areas, but these do not allow the player to save. It’s only once the player manages to make it to the next bed (they serve as checkpoints) that they can replenish their stamina and save their progress.
The beds are often spread out between 40 and 50 paces away from each other so as to offer a variety of ways that the player can go about reaching the next bed, but sometimes, the player has far less steps to work with and must think carefully to figure out what the most efficient route is.
Often, the route to the next bed is blocked by obstacles or doors that must be opened elsewhere, and sometimes, opening the right door can create a shortcut back to a bed from earlier in the campaign, allowing the player to have more steps to work with.
Inevitably, the player will die many times before they find the way forward, so they must be careful not to lose their save codes as REPOSE will not autosave or autoload — saving is done the old-fashioned way by physically writing down a code somewhere, or by taking a screenshot.
This could be infuriating for some, but it does add to the sense of retrofuturism by being required to ‘input a code’ as an ’employee’ of the company. With that said, this feature can also be turned off, if one so chooses.
While these nods to retro sensibilities will be well-received by the right players, one of REPOSE‘s most polarizing features may be its maze-like level design.
I was often struck by how much thought and effort must have gone into the layouts as the paths I took wound around, up, down and back to somewhere ages before. However, impressive as it was, it didn’t take long before I lost my sense of where I was supposed to go and with it my motivation to continue the cycle of trial and error.
Something I was irked by was there was no option to rebind controls to the mouse. Personally, I would have preferred right clicking over having to hold a button for the windup attack as that felt less natural to me. Navigating menus or submenus is also inconsistent, alternating between WASD and the arrow keys, which isn’t a big deal, but it does seem strange to not have chosen to pick one or the other.
While I didn’t finish REPOSE, I did make it far enough to have unraveled some of the mysteries surrounding the Company, and it’s all fairly interesting — but I also felt that there could’ve been more opportunities for engagement with the NPCs and the lore that appeared in a few areas. My attention did start to wander at times and perhaps more of a story hook would have boosted that engagement.
Overall, I enjoyed visiting the world of REPOSE because I appreciate the retro look and feel, but the gameplay loop of stomping around looking for oxygen tanks, running out of stamina and respawning at the last bed before venturing out again is more tedious than it is challenging.
I’m sure there’s plenty of wandering left to do and there are more questions to be answered, but I’ll leave the Company to its devices and the corpses of its employees undisturbed.
Rating: 6 out of 10
Buy Repose — PC
Disclosures: This game was developed and published by Bozó Atilla Bertold and published by Akupara Games. The game is currently available only on PC. It was obtained via publisher and reviewed for PC. Approximately 1.5 hours were devoted to the campaign mode. The game was not finished. There is no multiplayer mode.
Parents: This game is not rated by the ESRB, but if it were me, I would rate it T for disturbing imagery and violence. The player will find dead NPCs in different stages of decomposition and have to kill or be killed by various weapons.
Colorblind Modes: The presentation is strictly black and white which makes it colorblind-friendly.
Deaf & Hard of Hearing Gamers: The dialogue is all text-based and the gameplay does not rely on audio cues making it fully accessible.
Remappable controls: The keybindings are remappable, but there’s no option to rebind to mouse controls.
- Dead Of Darkness Review - August 17, 2025
- Vessels Of Decay Review - July 23, 2025
- Tainted Grail Review - July 6, 2025