DeathOmen is a psychological horror story by developer Jeff Winner and published by CreativeForge Games. I do like a good psychological horror, but to truly get my spine tingling with fear, the formula needs to evoke my imagination to run away with itself. Consequently, I often find myself unimpressed by the genre as the stories try too hard to create something tangible. Each viewer will take away something different based on their experiences, so it’s a complex formula to master, and I applaud those who manage to accomplish this.

I know I don’t get frightened easily as I have been watching horrors since I was ten years old, but what can I say? Parents in the 70s were more lenient, and with over a decade in the security industry, sitting alone in the dark, catching things moving out of the corner of my eye, hearing unexplained noises, finding things inexplicably changed, and listening to staff and colleague’s ghost stories about the environment, my nerves are pretty steely.

DeathOmen follows the story of an individual and has you playing in first person, spending your nights in a mysterious house. The individual suffers from transient global amnesia, depression, and agoraphobia. Simply put, the individual has short-term memory loss, is sad, and doesn’t go outside. Exploring the house will reveal facts about the individual and the environment, and soon enough, questions of sanity will arise when asking if the medication is the cause or the relief of the delusions.

Moving about the house is excruciatingly slow, which adds to the monotony you will have to endure in DeathOmen. I suppose I was terrified at the snail’s pace when moving from room to room and faced having to search around to forward the story – So, ok, that was horrific.

The story experience is highly linear to the point I felt as though they missed a diagnosis of the individual; obsessive-compulsive disorder. Simply put, the individual must do things a certain way. This was most egregious when purchasing items, using money earned by viewing video cameras.

Once you have enough, you can buy food, medicine, or a torch. However, regardless of your money, you can only purchase the items when they become relevant to the story. If you happen to suffer from Decidophobia, you’ll be safe in the knowledge that you won’t have to deal with this if you do manage to decide on playing DeathOmen.

All up, DeathOmen took me under an hour to complete. I was curious to see if things would be different on a second play-through, so I played again. If you suffer from Metatheisophobia, you’ll be pleased to hear that nothing changed on my second play-through; re-playability is not an option unless you are a masochist and want to torture yourself with something monotonous.
The household environment and video camera views are realistic and minimalistic.

As reality distorts, the objects, environments, and paranormal activities remain grounded in that graphical choice. One positive thing DeathOmen has is that the graphics are clean, and the other is that it runs without bugs or glitches. However, one graphic choice I question is the transition between reality and scares. Why is television static used? I’m looking through the eyes of the individual, not a camera.

Before discussing the audio, I want to tell you about my cat, so stick with me. It’s a pertinent point. My cat is the epitome of the term “‘fraidy cat,” as everything scares him. If I had known he would be this scared of everything, I would have called him Cringer, after the unpowered form of Battle Cat from He-Man. Anyway, my cat freaks out from the simplest of noises; a door suddenly shutting, a sock falling on a carpeted floor, or simply farting in his general direction.

When playing DeathOmen, my cat comfortably curled up on my desk and fell asleep. The classic creepy noises, like mysterious crying, creaks, and groans, or the mundane noises of movement and interacting with the environment, and the obnoxious blast of sound to scare you when a jump scare occurs didn’t make my cat flinch – and neither did I. The jump scares are highly predictable and cliché. As much as I would like to say the sound is good, I believe the aim was to build anxiety, and unfortunately, DeathOmen missed its mark.

DeathOmen scores two points, one for the clean graphics and the other for being functional. Everything else feels like an analogy of a bad smell when you’re locked in a hot steam room. The thought of it may be scary, and catching a whiff of it may be startling, but you’ll soon be thinking about how to get out and away from this rather than being frightened.

Written by: Ashley Barnett-Cosgrove