Body Horror Thrills In Spades

Dread Meridian released a demo for Steam Next Fest, but is it a worthy VR survival horror to look out for? Read on for our impressions.

With Steam Next Fest in full swing once again with dozens of PC VR demos, one of the more notable highlights is Dread Meridian. Planned for Quest and PC VR platforms, this Lovecraftian adventure certainly has the right idea of what makes spine-chilling thrills, even if there’s plenty of room for polish. As the gameplay shown can attest, this could be worth keeping an eye on.

Spelunking in a pitch-dark cave, protagonist Daniella is searching for her long-lost sister. Accompanied by a man willing to help her, they find crates from a company that might help them solve the mystery behind her sister’s disappearance, though things soon go deeply wrong. Creepy spider-like cryptids start crawling up the walls of the cave, making repulsive noises in the process. After a supernatural scream reverberates through the pit, the flimsy wooden platform where our unlucky characters are standing breaks, plunging them into the abyss.

Dread Meridian takes absolutely no time to put you in the thick of it. Falling deeper into the cave, a grotesque, mutated being begins pursuing you and your companion as soon as you touch the ground. Fail to act quickly, and your journey can end right then and there. This is where the issues arise. Moving debris to help your friend is hit or miss, because this is a time-sensitive situation leading to your early demise.

More often than not, the game doesn’t register holding objects at the first instant. This problem carries on throughout the rest of the demo, as grabbing on to rails or breaking locks with a knife feels imprecise. I will commend Dread Meridian for its focus on rattling set pieces, as starting on a chase sequence before even being able to get your bearings is bold.

Daniella is on her own once things calm down, crouching through continually claustrophobic spaces, and you’re only guided by a flashlight. Dread Meridian’s atmosphere is tense, helped by the impressive visuals of your surrounding environment. Using a backpack inventory system similar to Green Hell VR, she can pick up medicine injectors, bullets, and notes.

There are some documents recounting how the miners found these otherworldly beings and how it all went down, but the writing is currently par for the course. Light puzzles along the way, like finding three hieroglyphs drawn on the cave walls to unlock a chest, are also featured. I’d expect there will be more to come, and hopefully more involved puzzle solving in the full release.

Tutorials are currently a buggy mess. They remind you how to grab your backpack, reload, or shoot a gun; even if I do these actions, the tutorial boxes would disappear briefly, only to appear again throughout my playthrough. For an immersive horror adventure, this makes for a less than stellar impression. Regardless, I could push on to the end, hacking away at bat-like human heads and an infected corpse with a knife that made me clench my jaw with their unnerving movement and appearance.

The demo ends after 45 minutes, and you can see the foundations for an awfully good body horror adventure: an unsettling mood, desperate combat encounters, and the occasional jump scare while solving puzzles. From The Descent to The Thing, the movie callbacks are on point, with a bit of Dead Space for good measure. More polish is desperately needed, though if these bugs can be ironed out, Dread Meridian could become a worthwhile VR survival horror experience.

No release date has been confirmed yet, but the Dread Meridian PC VR demo is out now as part of Steam Next Fest. It’s also coming to Quest.