Insomnis Review

The latest title in the Tavern’s quest for more frights and scares is Insomnis, a creepy thriller from the folk at Path Games. What it may lack in action is made up for in an intriguing setting and tale, and a good few moments that’ll make less hardy horror fans jump for sure.

We play as an (initially) unnamed person as they arrive at Castevet manor; an abandoned building that has seen more than its fair share of upset and terror. At only two hours long, I’d hate to spoil too much of the story, but suffice to say there’s some creepy shit going on here, and the further we get in, the worse it gets.

Gameplay consists of walking around the relatively small house area looking for objects that can either be picked up or interacted with. These can be cunningly hidden, but also thanks to the sparse UI and lack of gameplay hints can be just as tricky to find and use them in the right place. One big tip I’d give you – when you sit down to play Insomnis, be sure to just have a few hours to dedicate to doing it in one run. I made the mistake of playing in 15-20 minute bursts to start with while away for work, and it made keeping track of what was going on and where I was going much harder than it needed to be.

Once I sat down properly though and played, what I found was a relatively straight-forward thriller; one that had me wrapped up in the goings on, but with an enjoyable (albeit fairly easy) set of puzzles along the way. As I say, the UI is all but non-existent but generally if we find an item it’s fairly obvious where to use it next to progress the story. The puzzles themselves are nicely designed to fit the theme of the story, and for repeat players some of the solutions are actually randomised as to prevent us from skipping ahead.

There’s no combat or need to hide or run from enemies here, but Path Games still do a good job of keeping the tension running high with jump scares, smart use of audio and lighting, and everyone’s favourite horror premise – children! While these kids are clearly not having a good time, Path also skirt going too far by making them a bit more inhuman, wrapping their faces up and presenting them almost like mannequins. Across the couple of hours play time, we learn the who/what/why of it all, and I must say I wasn’t quite sure where it was going until towards the latter 30 minutes or so.

One thing I wasn’t so keen on were the controls. On Xbox using a gamepad, fine aiming at the items to pick up was quite fiddly – we need to have the cursor just so to be able to interact with things. Handily, keyboard and mouse works by simply plugging them in and playing, and was a far better option to use. Well, to a point, as there’s no “official” support for K&M, and so some of the controller buttons just didn’t seem to be assigned at all. I ended up playing mostly with K&M but with a controller to hand to do one or two sections that needed the extra buttons. It’s likely me just being a bit fussy, but if the detection zone for controller input on items was slightly more forgiving I’d have not even considered K&M.

The only other real foible I had was the main characters chatter as we play; he has a thick accent which made it hard enough to understand at times, but he’s also fond of just mumbling under his breath, usually while something else is happening. Subtitles saved the day, but as someone who prefers to keep them off this was a bit of a disappointment.

Conclusion

Insomnis is a short lived affair, preferring to stake it’s thrills on tense atmosphere building and jump scares than combat or hide and seek scenarios. The tale it tells is entertainingly sad enough to pull us through the 2 hour runtime, and for the most part the puzzles are just on the right side of not quite too easy to make them enjoyable to complete. Some control issues and a mumbling protagonist sour things slightly, but on the whole we enjoyed our time with the game.