If I had four arms, I’d witch arm-slap, lantern-hold, spell-cast, and grenade (accidentally)

Lovey-Dovey

The irony of me posting this little impressions piece about solo developer Moonless Formless’ demo for the upcoming action-horror RPG Withering Realms is that I don’t think you should read it—at least not without playing at least the demo, if not the previous game (Withering Rooms, from 2022/2024), for yourself. Withering Rooms belongs to two exceedingly short lists of videogames, for me: favorite games I’ve played on my big, fat PlayStation 5 (see also: this console generation) and games I wish I could re-experience again for the first time.

I first played Withering Rooms back in 2024, and I made the critical (connotation: positive) choice to start it in the very early morning on a summer night with headphones on. I am deeply possessive of the experience—but not the game since that would be weird—to the point that I have barely watched anyone else play it, because I didn’t want to override the… texture of my feelings about the game with anyone else’s.

I think it’s that special: a winning combination of, let’s say, Demon’s Souls (2009) and classic Resident Evil, with just a smidgeon of Castlevania and with a bit of another game I won’t mention here because I think even invoking its name constitutes a spoiler, but I’ll be coy and put it in an endnote.[1] The mix of inventory-dependent survival horror with a little RPG-y progression is mechanically satisfying, but then there are the story and atmosphere: the gothic trappings of a young girl in a haunted house with a bloody history, together with a distinctive Welsh setting.

I’ll conclude this mini-review/spoiler-free argument in favor of playing Withering Rooms by saying that while not particularly “Souls-like” for the most part, it captures a feeling that those other games have lost a bit over the years as they’ve gotten bigger and more polished, their formula more down-pat and widely-known—the sense of genuine exploration and of going places and seeing things you’re not “supposed” to. As familiar as certain bits and pieces can be in isolation, it is in aggregate a consistently surprising experience in a way you should discover purely, firsthand, if you’re so inclined.

From here on out, there’ll be spoilers. I’m not going to attempt to deeply dissect what amounts to a pretty short hunk of game (Steam says I finished the Withering Realms demo in “2.6 hours”); my Lies of P demo coverage from 2023 still haunts me with its inaccuracies. Instead, I’ll just talk about my current appreciation for the new game, firmly in comparison/contrast with the first. One thing I can’t address is how this plays if you haven’t already experienced Withering Rooms. Withering Realms has that same sense of confident completeness about it, but some of it is familiar to me already. The official word from the developer is that playing the first game is not required, but I can’t say whether this is as gripping of an introduction to the Withering style, world, ideas, etc. as Rooms was for me.

New Dimension+

One of the biggest changes from Withering Rooms is the addition of a new dimension to the play area: no more left stick-ruining, straight, hard, never-wavering, perfectly parallel “left” and “right”—We’ve added “up” and “down” and the accompanying diagonals. With the new isometric viewpoint, I wondered if the game would play like a twin stick shooter, but it plays like a Souls played from slightly overhead.

And I won’t lie: The increased Souls-y-ness (or, Bloodborne-ism) does bug me a bit. The HUD for standard gameplay greatly resembles that of those immensely popular ARPGs—Immediately obvious is how the texture of the health, stamina, and magic bars resembles Bloodborne, and how the configuration of the spell, item, left-hand armament, right-hand armament icons, with the vertically-oriented dark rectangles packed together d-pad-style, is immediately recognizable as Souls-inspired. One of the things that I liked so much about Withering Rooms was that it had a certain plausible deniability re. this particular influence, visually and mechanically. No stamina bar, for example. Withering Realms’ is grey rather than Souls-borne green, but it clearly is what it is, influence bare-assed this time around. And no doubt some people will gape and point!

The gothic curse of having even once played a Souls: You are damned to attempt to make your own (or else mod the existing games). I’m no innocent myself!

Protagonist ghost girl Clover’s fighting doll, to which she clings, feels much more responsive than Withering Rooms’ fleshly leading lady, Nightingale. Attacks are snappier, and dodging is very fast. Add the extra dimensionality to space and strafe around in, and baiting and responding to enemy attacks feels much more… natural now. In Withering Rooms, I often found the ostensibly straightforward process of hitting enemies when they weren’t attacking in my direction pretty difficult. Nightingale was slow; her reach often felt overly-limited; and even equipping an accessory that gave her dodge invincibility frames didn’t lead to me feeling in sync with opponents.

We inevitably overlapped (overslapped, traded), but I came to see that as part of the game’s charm, as a distinct counterpoint to the perfect-dodge-obsessed contemporary Soulses, for one thing. But also the way that the ungainliness of combat enhanced the horror in a Resident Evilian sort of way, by placing a heavy emphasis on the contents of the player’s inventory. Fighting often meant using some resource or the other, and the survival horror mathematics involved in the experience were a big part of its charm. I was always aware of what items I had on me, what I might use or had used, and whether or not I was able to find or buy replacements. Inventory and stats/builds matter much more than reflex most of the time, and the fact that the game is very hard to finesse is part of what makes it still feel like pretty effective horror even as the player’s advantage grows. Even late in the experience, if you don’t have any healing in your pockets, that’s trouble!

By contrast, I found Withering Realms pretty easy to finesse. As a player who’s good (or Good) but not GOOD, I have a knack for exploits, like how far the doll’s default blade’s lunging heavy attack can carry it for hitting-and-running purposes, or how the severed hand/arm weapon’s projectile attack could consistently, repeatedly bait the final boss of the demo into doing an exploitable lunge. On top of the aforementioned new perspective and the improved game feel, which includes smoother animations for the player and enemies—All of these advantages make the combat easier, and I was able to complete the demo with minimal deaths. I beat boss #1 on my second attempt and boss #2 on my first. While Withering Rooms bosses mostly were not much tougher than that, the critical difference was the stress/fear that the jank and the inventory-importance conferred upon those fights. I had fun here, but I didn’t have my mental fingers crossed like before. I looked forward to fighting because it felt pretty good but was sorely missing the moment-to-moment stress of survival.

But this is only a demo. There are certainly still interesting wrinkles: like the potential darkness of arenas and the slyly constrained camera view which can make keeping enemies on-screen without also being within slapping distance tricky. Additionally, the “improved” combat has allowed the developer to experiment with larger enemy groups. I won’t actually do the math, but there are certainly rooms in the tutorial Beynon House that are noticeably more… withering than what you’d encounter starting out in the old Mostyn House.

For another (quick) thing, while stealth is “gone” in the demo, the footage I’ve seen so far in trailers seems to suggest that there’s been a bisecting of the core gameplay based on whose shoulders Clover clutches, where the doll represents hack-and-slash empowerment and another character (seems) to be potentially stealth-focused. While this “removes options,” it might be the better approach to keep combat and sneaking comparably meaningful for the whole game experience—where stealth in the proper sense became increasingly useless and pointless in Withering Rooms, aside from using the animations to step “back” into the scenery out of the way of enemy attacks. In more than one way, This might be better in the long run.

All this is not to say that the Withering Realms demo never scared me. There are some unsettling sights and sounds already—like a strange scene of a gory cage and bathtub quite early on and a description of a dismembering ritual in a witch’s house that Clover reads with a certain chilling confidence (for someone so young)—that suggest as creepy a vision, an extension or hopefully an escalation, of what was in Withering Rooms.

As for actual capital-S SCARES: I did get jolted at least a couple of times, by the sudden approach of an enemy from the darkness in a room of the Beynon House and by a scripted jump in a Night Mother hall of worship, but the thing that Freaked Me Out most is something I won’t actually spoil, despite the earlier warning, since it’s such a perfect Withering (franchise) beat. Let’s just call it a case of sudden teleportation ending somewhere very unexpected. It’s deranged in all the ways I’d hoped, and my regret is just that I didn’t have it happen to me at 2 a.m. with headphones on in the dark. We’re talking primo Cholera Clinic, Wrong Room vibes, my Rooms-heads.

New Arms++

Aesthetically, one big change from Withering Rooms to Withering Realms that has had me by the proverbial throat is the change from a single upright, normally-sized protagonist to the previously mentioned duo-in-one of little ghost on the back of her monstrous doll companion. It’s a visual that appeals to me and obviously isn’t limited to this game. I won’t try to trace its provenance, but depictions that immediately spring to mind include the 1970s manga Lone Wolf and Cub, my own short-lived hobbyist comic “series” from a few years back, the upcoming shooter videogame Pragmata (2026), and at least two appearances in the base game of Dark Souls 3 (2016) and the Shadow of the Erdtree expansion to Elden Ring (2024/2022)—kneeling giant Prince Lorian with clinging brother Lothric in the former and a similar familial team-up that I won’t outright spoil due to recency, and out of laziness and a desire for minor conciseness, in the latter.

To borrow and potentially bastardize a Tim Rogersism, the words that keep coming to mind are “Babychild-Bigfriend Situation,” from “ACTION BUTTON REVIEWS The Last of Us.” To be either the doting brute or the fragile powerhouse a’shoulder! There is something about the ambiguity of the roles that’s a lot of fun. In Pragmata, big old Hugh has the body armor and guns, but tiny Diana has the special hacking powers that let him do appreciable damage; Lorian’s physically stronger, but the fight kicks into high fear with Lothric’s additional magic attacks and the ability to resurrect his brother over and over again; little Clover on her own (right at the start of the game) is so slow and vulnerable and only starts to positively race around her haunted house of a home when she boards the doll, but, then, “When the doll takes too much damage, Clover hauls it to the nearest ‘ichor fountain’ to heal it” (emphasis mine, quote-source here). The concept of the weak Clover “hauling” anything anywhere is charmingly surprising, and it would be neat if we actually saw her doing it at least once, for the first death (maybe).

The conceit that our “protagonist” actually consists of four usable limbs rather than the usual two is used as an “excuse” to bend the established rules of Withering combat. The first game played by the high-commitment rules of Souls—and, to be fair, other games like classic Castlevania—by only allowing Nightingale to perform one action at a time. This doesn’t make perfect, realistic sense since you could probably both swing a knife and eat a roll if you were in a situation that involved those two actions for some reason, but it’s an acceptable abstraction of a real-enough quarter-truth: that humans don’t multitask well.

But two beings as one allows for a logical expansion of that idea, so now the doll can be doing something, like attacking, while Clover does something else, like using a consumable item or casting a spell. This “makes sense” within the established logic because there are now four arms involved. It also just so (intentionally) happens to represent an easing of the difficulty of the experience. The concepts of “recovery frames” and of “input buffering” represent noticeable hurdles to Souls neophytes since it’s easy to panic and lock yourself into undesirable animation after animation if you spam attack or dodge in a panic, say. It’s worth noting that this “change” doesn’t represent anything other than an adjustment of the internal logic of the game since all these actions and equipment slots already existed, but the back-bound baby offers a convenient excuse for why the player is now allowed to pop a heal mid-combo when they couldn’t before.

I think the demo offers a subtle statement of intent here with its very limited options in this regard: During my time with it, the only items I had were healing flasks and rare grenades, and my only spell was a shield specifically designed to block enemy attacks. Assuming an exact match with the final version of the game, these limited options act as a soft tutorial for the idea that beneficial support actions can be performed more freely. There may be other items or spells that feel more singular than supplemental, but these are all things that beg to be used in the midst of other, more primary, things.

This separation of the four hands involved in gameplay is explicitly represented in the equipment menu, where you have the doll’s right and left hands and Clover’s right and left hands depicted next to their individual equipment slots. I am going to reach here and argue that the four-handed concept also translates into other aspects of the menu design, like as a sneaky motif. The concept of simultaneous menu-ing via a tiered system of R1/L1 and L2/R2 presses corresponding to one of two layers of menus is nothing new, but something about Withering Realms’ use of it strikes me as thematically coherent. Having the LB/RB and RT/LT menus exist at once but on opposite sides of the screen is suggestive of the multi-limb concept, to me. On one hand, your in-game hands—on the other, a map. Like the actual gameplay and equipping processes, this is more gimmick than mechanic (the doll and Clover’s available hands conveniently correspond to the exact, perfect, usual number of Souls slots, and there are no unexpected options in the menus), but maybe presentation is half the battle for novelty. In which case, I think this focus on hands is Neat.

Something that is either a “dimension” or “arm,” in this loose poetical association, is the addition of new “open zone”-type areas to the game—both a reasonable extension of the predecessor’s ultimate mix of houses (with rooms) and wilderness spaces, and also an annoying reflection of modern game design. As the industry at large seems to be struggling to move on from true open worlds, one half-solution has been the offering to the player of occasional “zones” of more free-form exploration, where the scope is still ultimately limited but there is for some interval a hint of the choice-making and checklist-ticking of the truly Open approach.

You can see the initial chunk of the demo’s open zone “Saintswood” area in the above screenshot. Clover’s house operates like a classic Rooms area, but just viewed from above and with two rows of rooms off a straight-as-an-arrow hallway instead of the first game’s one row. When you exit, you arrive in the initial field mapped above. The Saintswood is composed of several of these big squares of open field-and-trees. Each one seems to have a fixed number of attractions, like bells to ring to summon combat challenges and small enemy camps to clear for a treasure chest, which are marked on the map but which rearrange themselves upon death or rejuvenating checkpoint-rest. These seem to stay cleared after one go, however. It’s a moderate novelty that might make repeat playthroughs or grinding more interesting, but I’m not sure it makes that big of an impact in this early stage of the experience.

The main positive right now, is how it represents an escalation of the original game’s design. While there are wild areas in Withering Rooms, the focus was certainly primarily on several structures—the Mostyn House/Asylum for a sizeable chunk of the game, but also the ancient basement ruins, cursed Blackett House, and end-game Blood Tower. The outdoor zones are noticeably more modest, so the impression one gets from Realms is of an expansion of the scope. That house icon on the map above that represents Clover’s home is also repeated for other structures in the open field, like a witch’s abode and a church of the Night Mother. There’s this tantalizing suggestion—albeit not really borne out so far—that you could pop in and out of Mostyn House equivalents all over the place. With the added dimension comes an added sense of scope, of having broken free of the 2D plane to which Nightingale was confined to see “the rest of the world.” My biggest disappointment of the demo was having that feeling of free-form fumbling curtailed by the dead-end in the mine, which I had hoped would loop me back to the inaccessible backyard and basement areas of the Beynon House as a side treat.

The biggest positive was that I thought I’d probably have to experience this demo vicariously through some… steamer since I imagined my computer (bought primarily for work utility and maybe rarely to play PC ports of games from the PS3 era) would not be able to run Withering Realms, but it did. I reflexively—maybe needlessly—preemptively turned some stuff down just to be safe, and I still worried that it might run okay inside the introductory house but falter when I hit the open zone, and I kept my HAND on the tower to see if it was over-heating, but I got through everything. I would not have blamed a solo developer if their game was not optimized “well” enough to run on my toaster, but it still looked very good despite my tinkering and performed surprisingly smoothly, so this was just quite the treat for me, personally, in the end.

Assorted Gripes and Observations (at the risk of making Lies of P Demo Write-Up-esque mistakes)

Like I said earlier, I deliberately have chosen not to try to do a comprehensive critique of a less than comprehensive (at this stage) work, but here are a few further final thoughts that I couldn’t fit naturally into the framework above:

• I noticed a consistent issue with the prompt to pick up items lingering in certain places even after I’d scooped the loot—specifically in the exit room of Beynon House and in the ritual room of the witch’s shack.
• I also got stuck on the rubble beneath the broken stairs in the aforementioned witchy abode, but I was able to lunge my way to freedom using the default blade’s heavy attack.
• I found the icon for status effect build-up on enemies very hard to see. I didn’t even notice that a weapon was doing bleed damage at first, until I completely filled the little indicator once. The progress toward filling it is still hard to evaluate at a glance even now that I know it’s there.
• There seems to be a possible “issue” with Clover/the doll swapping equipment unprompted at times. The big one was how I’d sometimes find myself with grenades as my active item rather than healing vials. I learned about the swap the hard way (wasted precious grenade) early in the playthrough and kept watch for it after that. Hopefully this is not just some phantom of the d-pad issue with my venerable PC gaming controller. (After some experimentation, it may be that interacting with any equipment slot in the menu, whether you change what’s equipped there or not, swaps to that slot when you exit the menu.)
• Subjectivity Inbound: I do miss the old map marks indicating unlooted containers from Rooms. Without deep experimentation (read: starting a new game and erasing my precious save), I think there’s something like that with exclamation points(?), but me and my OCD were none too pleased at the prospect of leaving even minor stashes of coins behind in the object-filled halls and rooms of the initial area. Granted, the situation with lootables is no longer as simple as in Withering Rooms since the game now refreshes some containers after each rest, which would mean constantly respawning indicators for unlooted containers under the old system.
• MAN, do I ever also miss the “Spell Toll” and “Curse Rot” of Rooms! The new meter approach to magic-use makes a lot of sense in a faster game with a bigger focus on fighting a lot of enemies at once (and no doubt adds approachability), but I hope there’s something in the full release that exerts pressure on the player over time. I wasn’t a “fan” of Necrosis as a semi-permanent late-game scary debuff in Rooms, but some meanness is much desired. After the trial by “Runtlings” in a small room early in this demo, I kind of glided through the rest of the experience.

RIP Emma! I really enjoyed her role as antagonist-turned-friend in Withering Rooms, especially the tragic final turn this relationship takes in the 1916 section. She was one of my favorite characters from the first game, so when I saw that Realms began with “Beynon” something, I was immediately extra-invested.

[1] It’s The Evil Within.