Volume 11: Horripilant

I’m veering off the regular path again this month, because my attention was dominated by one of the stranger DRPG-adjacent games I’ve played in recent memory. Pas Game Studio and Black Lantern Collective’s Horripilant is a bizarre genre blend, a mix of environmental puzzles, dungeon-crawling, and… Cookie Clicker? All of this wrapped in a sinister, horror-ish package that filled my mind with questions the entire time I was playing. Where is this going? What does this mean? How much more gross and creepy can this get before it’s over? The whole thing is a real doozy, even if it doesn’t wrap up in the most satisfying way.

You wake up in front of a campfire, a nameless, armored soldier in what looks like but may or may not be a prison. A voice compels you to explore a nearby dungeon, but before you can do that, you have to prepare. There’s a tree, you have an axe. Chop some wood. What else can you do? There’s no reason not to listen to the voice, for now.

The Cookie Clicker of it all is apparent from the moment you start clicking the tree. The UI doesn’t make any attempt to hide the “idle game” inspiration here. You hire some creatures to chop for you, click for additional resources, then spend the wood on upgrades. Your armor has different kinds of stats, and spending wood on it makes it stronger. You’ll hit resource capacity limits oddly quick for a game like this, so without anything else to do, that’s your sign it’s time to crawl. Go down the steps, enter the dungeon, and fight some rats. They’ll fuck you up, but you’ll bring back some meat.

Meat is everything in Horripilant. Raw, bleeding meat fresh from your own kills opens the door to everything else. It expands your storage capacity, it opens up new resources and new armor upgrades, and it opens up the real… meat of the experience. Once you notice you have the option to spread meat on the campfire, Horripilant’s crucial third pillar reveals itself. Now, each screen you can visit isn’t just decorative – there are things to interact with and puzzles to solve. The campfire hides a key – but just one key, and there are two locked doors, one of which has a different lock. But if you hop over to the equipment screen, there’s also a door in the background. That’s the door you’re looking for. Behind that door? A thing. A monster that defies description, just waiting in a dark tunnel. Approaching it feels dangerous, but you can offer it meat. And it offers you a companion. An additional tool for surviving longer in the dungeon. A way to get more meat.

Eventually you’ll find a pit. You can yell into the pit, voicing your frustrations with the void. But this void speaks back. Here, you meet God. A massive, smiling face that emerges from the pit. This God reinforces your mission, and offers you a new way to progress. Remake yourself. You might not be satisfied with your own strength, with the limits of your body. God can help you try again with a new form. Somehow, that offer feels correct, enticing. So you go for it, get a new resource, one you can spend on massive modifiers for all kinds of systemic elements. Think making upgrades cheaper and more effective, or giving you more ways to damage enemies in combat. It’s the final Cookie Clicker piece. Reincarnating yourself is the only comfortable way forward, as unlike Cookie Clicker, Horripilant has a path to an ending, and it isn’t afraid to make you grind for it. And grind I did, because I was not just hooked on the dopamine-driving mechanics, I wanted to find out what happened next, what the next piece of the puzzle was. And the only way to advance was to go deeper down into the dungeon.

The dungeon is simple. You exchange blows with waves of monsters, one at a time, until you get math’d to death. But every several floors you can find a tool or cipher-like gimmick. You’ll be using these tools and ciphers to explore the rest of the area, finding new puzzles and creepy beings living in this underground wasteland. At this point, Horripilant boils down to grinding, pushing through the dungeon until you earn the next Something, then figuring out where and how to apply that Something to make progress outside. 

I couldn’t tear myself away from this game. Part of that is how susceptible my brain is to compulsion. The whole ADHD thing. It makes games like Balatro terrifying to me, because I physically won’t be able to stop unless I pry myself off by force of will. And that’s tough to muster when the numbers are numbering the ways they do in games like these. But the other part was all the intrigue, the grotesque vibes, the puzzles. Real video game stuff, you know? I never felt like I was chopping wood just for the semi-ironic sake of making the numbers go up, like in Cookie Clicker. There was an ending to seek out, and other ways to use my brain and imagination besides the clicking. But there was also the clicking, and I felt that familiar pull. I knew I had to make sure I could get in and out, and once out, stay out. It’s what I imagine defusing a bomb is like. Scary!

I got through it. I found the balance for grinding versus reincarnating after a few days, pushed through, figured out the puzzles (and used some guides on occasion; I’m only human), and got to the end. It’s a hell of an ending, one I won’t get into here because I think this thing is worth experiencing as unspoiled as possible. It’s also a bit of a letdown, because the story goes into territory I’ve seen in games a million times before, and am over it. But it was still fascinating, and the journey there was cool enough that I wasn’t totally soured by the familiar tropes. I also stuck around to fill out all the achievements, which included a challenge to get through the first ten dungeon floors on a raw save, without dying or bailing on a run. It required a lot of care and attention in what was normally just an idle auto-battling piece, which was a cool twist. It took me a few tries, but damn it, I did it.

And then I was done. Forever. No more Horripilant. For my own sake. This was a fascinating game from a dungeon-crawling perspective, with its bizarre mix of genres, super spooky vibes, and earnest attempt at some ominous, contemplative storytelling. It’s not even ten bucks on Steam, even if it isn’t on sale. If you’re intrigued by all this, there’s no reason not to give it a whirl.

Until next time, dungeon delvers.