Lamentum from Neon Doctrine and Obscure Tales is a pixeltastic survival horror game on Nintendo Switch. Learn more about it in our Lamentum review!

 

Lamentum from Neon Doctrine and Obscure Tales is a pixeltastic survival horror game on Nintendo Switch. It’s Rated M for Mature, which is easy to see from the game’s trailer and the screens in this Lamentum review. The game is set in New England during the middle of the 19th century, and you play as one Victor Hartwell, a young aristocrat who is on a desperate quest to find a cure for a mysterious disease that has affected his wife, Alissa. This will lead him towards Grau Hill Mansion, where he will find someone who says he can cure Alissa… but at what price?

You will walk with the left analog stick, sprinting by pressing and holding down the L button. You can look around with the right analog stick and can attack or use an item with the ZR button as you aim with the ZL button. You can assign shortcuts to items in your inventory with the X, Y, and B buttons, to help you during your quest. You will learn all of this during the initial sequence after you boot up the game since you can walk around a park as you wait for your then-fiancé, collecting a coin and some flowers while you wait for her. You will also need to combine items, and for this, you’ll have to press the + button to go into your inventory and interact with the objects you want to combine.

 

Things get crazy and creepy really fast, since minutes after starting the game, you’ll realize what you’ve gotten yourself into. Your wife starts to act very strangely after you arrive at Grau Hill Mansion. Most of the doors have chains over them as if they were set to keep someone – or something – from exiting. You’ll then see a vision of yourself on a bead, bleeding from a wound… and then you’ll wake up, injured, with blood over your abdomen. The wound has been bandaged, but you have no recollection of what has happened!

In a nod to the Resident Evil series that has served as inspiration for Lamentum – with the game also drawing from the beloved Silent Hill series – you will need to equip a bottle of ink in order to be able to write down your thoughts in an effort to save your progress… and perhaps your sanity! Ink runs out with every use, so be sure to only save when you absolutely have to, and search for more so that you can carry on with this bizarre nightmare you have gotten yourself into. You did say you’d do anything to save your wife, so now it’s time to prove it!

 

While exploring your surroundings, you can run around to speed things up without much worry. But when Victor is near a monster, his physical and mental stamina will take a hit. Because of this, he won’t be able to run indefinitely in an effort to escape, so you’ll need to plan accordingly. Running for a bit to put some distance between you and a monster is a good idea, but what if there’s an item near the monster and you have to collect it while also managing to escape from its deadly teeth and claws?

Speaking of teeth, there are some teeth and some strange coins for you to collect during your time with Lamentum. Some of them are missable if you progress too far in the story, so you’ll need to keep your eye out for them at all times. Collecting all teeth and coins will allow you to get one of the potential endings for Lamentum, so if you’re the type of gamer who likes to 100% games, you’re going to have to search everywhere to make sure you don’t miss something. Or, you know, use a guide.

 

Lamentum is an interesting pixeltastic survival horror game for Nintendo’s console. It’s not an action-heavy game, but it does lean into the survival horror side of things as you try to find what is really going on and how to fix everything before it’s too late. You’ll be spending 6-7 hours playing this one as you search every area for the right items to help you survive through its nightmare. Lamentum is out on Nintendo Switch with a $15.99 price.

Disclaimer
This Lamentum review is based on a Nintendo Switch copy provided by Neon Doctrine.