Every so often, a game comes along with an amazing elevator pitch but as soon as you jump into it, it becomes obvious why it’s a bad idea.
We’re all capable of well-meaning bad ideas, and Rotten Flesh is one of them. It features a concept that blends genuinely terrifying cosmic horror with a gimmick that should have never made it this far. You find yourself in a strange underground sewer (at least for as long as I played) and complete typical Resident Evil-style environmental puzzles (it’s even got a typewriter to save!). Your objective? To find your dog, named Roy.
To locate the right direction to travel in (even with a lantern it’s quite dark) you need to call out for Roy who’ll bark back in response. As an experiment for how terrible of a gameplay mechanic this is, try yelling out Roy five times right now: I’ll wait! I’d do it too but I live in an apartment, and as a society, we have rules.
Raising your voice like this to your dog is annoying in real life and it gets no better when you’re dealing with a microphone on a controller or the Steam Deck or your laptop that’s actually hooked up to a monitor and sits under your desk.
You can avoid some of these problems by pressing a button for your main character to do the yelling for you, but that takes away a key component of the game’s identity. The aim was to make a sound-inspired game. On that front, we have an amazingly unpleasant title.
It’s also worth mentioning how tiring it is to keep yelling for Roy when you’re lost. I’d rather use any of my other main means of communication, even eye-tracking as the game Before Your Eyes does beautifully, than yell at my game.
There’ll be some who enjoy this title and its uniqueness. I generally like idiosyncratic titles. Give me an FMV or unique indie any day. But not Rotten Flesh. He’s not a good boy.
