The Tartarus Key review: an absolutely nails thriller-puzzler that's worth the effort

The Tartarus Key

There’s no way out for Alex Young who wakes up to find herself locked in a strange mansion filled with puzzles, traps, and cameras following her every move. Whether she and her companions live or die, and find the truth behind their abduction, is up to you in this first-person mystery thriller.

If you woke up in a mysterious mansion, with no memory of how you got there and only a walkie-talkie and a bunch of security cameras for company, how d'you reckon you'd handle it? Personally I know, sure as eggs is eggs, that I would absolutely go to pieces. I'm not hitting the end credits of The Tartarus Key in real life, but fortunately, it's a nails thriller puzzle game that fuses PS1-style retro graphics with Saw-esque murder traps. Plus, you know, it's only about six hours end to end, which isn't bad for a semi-magical kidnap plot.

In this situation I am not me, of course, but Alex Young, and Alex upon escaping a locked study (an easy warm-up puzzle involving postcards) she finds and frees Torres, an ex-cop turned private detective, who sets up a base of operations around the mysterious mansions main fireplace. From there game's rhythm is clearing the different wings of the house by completing increasingly difficult puzzle rooms, each eventually culminating in finding a new person to save from a new death trap - concocting the antidote for poison or following the instructions to get through an electrocuted floor maze.

It's an odd group, but if you rescue everyone you start to see the edges of a wider story. There's a nice layering of paranoia, because most of the puzzles have an element of, for want of a better word, magic to them. One of the very first sees you tasked with getting an academic out of a living flesh-blob, and failure results in it and him vanishing into nowhere. You also find an underground lab with notes on scientific experiments, and a holding cell slash testing chamber - but given that next door is a giant meat freezer sokoban, is it not the case that the lab is just another puzzle room set? The low-poly, low-draw distance style of everything really adds to this, and you keep suspecting that some new puzzle or trap or maybe a weird murderer is going to suddenly loom out of the darkness in front of you. It's the kind of head melting I haven't had since playing Old Gods Rising.

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