OVERWHELM is a tricky game, sure, but it is mostly just incredibly oppressive. It is too close to your face, somehow. Its breath smells wrong, and you can smell its breath because it is too close to your face. Its worlds are drawn in an unloveable internal-organ palette of reds and purples, so cone fatigue plays a certain role in its queasy success. You finish a game and feel like you’ve emerged from something, like you’ve been swallowed and have spent an age fighting your way out. How long was I in there? Oh. Five minutes. But what minutes they were.
My mum has a word for things like OVERWHELM. The word is “horrid”. Horrid is one of the lonely Everests of her vocabulary, the word that stands at the uppermost peak of how a given thing might be. If something isn’t nasty, if it isn’t even wretched or ghastly, mum will say it’s horrid and you know – jeepers! – that whatever she’s talking about wasn’t screwing around.
Horrid, by its sheer power, is almost a compliment in a way. Well done at being so committed to unpleasantness. And so it is with OVERWHELM. OVERWHELM is a pixelly action blaster side-scroller thing in which you drop down into a Hive – listen up, Anthem, this is the effect of the right fictional word in the right fictional place – to reclaim a series of crystals. The crystals are, of course, blood red, and they are, of course, guarded by bosses. You can see their location on the map, but to see the map itself you have to fill it in through exploration.
Source: Eurogamer Horror-shooter OVERWHELM earns its capital letters