A.A.U. Black Site (Early Access)

Let me start with a confession. Once upon a time, horror was one of my favourite genres. I played through every Resident Evil game, tore necromorphs to pieces in Dead Space, and ran for my life through Outlast, and I thought it was all brilliant fun. Then I put on a VR headset and launched Resident Evil 7: Biohazard. Somewhere between a woman frantically stabbing me in the chest and hearing my own blood-curdling scream, something snapped. That was my last horror game.

Until now. A.A.U. Black Site is a psychological bodycam horror game in first-person shooter format. So, in other words, a head-on collision between what I love most and what I now avoid. You play an agent in the secret special forces unit A.A.U., whose mission in Serbia goes pear-shaped. The radio falls silent, the team vanishes, and you're left standing in the abandoned town of Uzovnica with a bodycam on your chest recording everything. Even things that shouldn't be there... Behind the game is the small Raspberry Studio, backed by publisher IZilla Games. I've played the Early Access version on PC, and the credits rolled after 3.7 hours, although more chapters are promised as the journey progresses. To scientifically measure my return to the horror genre, I've also introduced my own counter: the number of skid marks in my pants. We'll come back to the final tally.

It's immediately obvious where the developers have poured their love: into the weapons. I've counted 18 firearms available, and they feel authentic through and through. Rifles and pistols sound satisfying, the reloading animations are decent, and the recoil has character. I'll leave it to the gun geeks to decide whether they're authentic, but they're convincing, and that goes a long way. You shouldn't aim down the barrel, though: the ADS mode suffers from so much visual recoil that you can't see what you're shooting at. The solution is the "canted sight" , a slanted gangster angle, which quickly becomes the only sensible option.

The combat has its moments. The "Lean" function, familiar from Rainbow Six, lets you fire around corners, whilst the reload kick sends enemies flying across the room in pure ragdoll physics.

The AI isn't exactly brilliant, but it does its job well enough, where it takes cover and pushes forward whilst you're reloading. I played through the entire game on the hardest difficulty and found a clear rhythm. From a distance, the enemies shoot like stormtroopers as long as you're strafing, but if you stand still at close range, you're dead in an instant. So you take it easy, rotating between cover, and taking down those who close in. That's when the game really clicks. When the hard rock kicks in in the background, A.A.U. Black Site has its absolute best moments.

Then there's movement, and that's where the game loses a lot of its charm. The movement feels heavy and clunky. There's no wall-climbing, the character gets stuck easily in the environment, crouching movement is sluggish, and sprinting is activated awkwardly via either a double-tap or the Shift key. As someone who works on preventing repetitive strain injuries in my day job, I'm particularly annoyed by how little consideration is given to players' physical wellbeing.

Nor is it possible to freely remap the keys, which forces movement patterns that can become taxing over time. There's no slide-cancel and no bunny hop here, just a bloke who reluctantly picks up speed.

The game's biggest design problem, however, is that it's terrible at explaining its own rules. Time and again, mechanics are introduced that require a couple of deaths before the penny drops. The kick's charge-up lacks clear feedback, and an escape sequence tricks you into looking for the right timing when the solution is to frantically hammer the keys. Some objects look interactive but aren't, and vice-versa. "What you take for granted often isn't" became my mantra throughout Uzovnica. Funnily enough, the game is at the same time overly obvious in the opposite direction, as everything you can pick up glitters invitingly. A.A.U. therefore always helps you with the 'what', but rarely with the 'how'.

Strangest of all is that the game is at its best when it takes everything away from you. Early on, you're presented with a veritable smorgasbord of weapons all at once, which is a choice that kills all the joy of discovery. But in a later sequence, when the arsenal is gone and ammunition is running low, the game transforms. Suddenly, headshots are a must, every enemy a walking ammo box and every room a calculation. That's when my inner FPS fan really came alive. The puzzles also throw up surprises now and then, such as a physics-based crane that has to lift a car over obstacles, or a battery swap that rewards you with a vehicle you actually get to drive yourself, and then there are physics-based planks to smash, à la Half-Life.

And what about the horror, the very reason for the skid marks? It's there, and it bites, but it exists in a game of its own. Action and horror take turns in A.A.U. Black Site as they're never mixed, and you never shoot at the supernatural. I'd expected to be shooting demons tactically, but that's not quite how it works, at least not yet.

Perhaps that's exactly why the sequences work as when darkness falls, you have no weapons to hide behind. A scarecrow that attacks you when you look away gave me my first scare, followed by a floating ghost in a darkened hospital, where your ears become your most important radar tool. And then there was her... A woman with a knife, eerily similar to the very archetype that got the better of me in Resident Evil 7. I ran, I zigzagged, I survived, and I felt strangely proud afterwards. The studio has clear P.T. influences, some of which are wonderfully executed. When the credits rolled, the counter stood at 2.5: that's how many times A.A.U. actually managed to make me shit myself. Or rather, three, if I'm being honest.

As for the story, however, I don't understand a thing, and that's despite really trying. I even recorded my playthroughs and watched them back afterwards to try and work out who I'm actually shooting at. I still don't know... Sides change without explanation, enemies become brothers, and it's constantly hinted that nothing is what it seems. Perhaps the confusion is intentional; after all, the premise is about a reality that's crumbling. But whether it's intentionally incomprehensible or just plain incomprehensible, it feels exactly the same from my perspective. My working hypothesis throughout the whole adventure ended up being: they must be the bad guys as they're shooting at me, after all.

Technically, it's a mixed bag. "Made with Unity" greets you right from the splash screen, and for a project from a small studio using that engine, it's an commendable effort that's at times genuinely atmospheric with its grainy found-footage filter. At the same time, basic features are missing. There's no mouse sensitivity setting whatsoever (I had to sort it out using the mouse's DPI button), the sniper rifle's zoom has almost no sensitivity at all and becomes more of a nuisance, and the frame rate stutters occasionally even on an upper-mid-range rig. The soundscape is just as uneven, as while the weapons sound excellent, the vehicles' engine noises sound like generic filler, and the voice acting swings between charming and cringe-worthy. The music choices sometimes hit the nail on the head and sometimes hit you right in the face, such as when a sentimental friendship ballad kicks in right in the middle of an action climax.

So how does one sum it up? A.A.U. Black Site is most reminiscent of watching highly skilled Dreams creators build something ambitious with a shambolic overall vision and project management: the craftsmanship shines through constantly, but the whole thing doesn't hold together. If you like well sculpted stories, you should steer clear, but if you like horror, there are a few gripping moments. If you're curious about new developers' ideas and are willing to cut them some slack, it might be worth keeping an eye on Uzovnica during its Early Access journey. For my part, at least, I'm not particularly keen to spend my limited playtime going back to it.

My horror meter registered three involuntary physical and verbal shudders, so the rating speaks for itself.