The Tartarus Key Review: Puzzle Me This

The wobbly, low-poly look of Vertical Reach’s The Tartarus Key, the way that its images are suggested by crude shapes and muddy textures, is on trend with so many other recent indie horror titles. It features blood on walls, flickering lights, weird visions, and objects mysteriously tipping over, all to lend an even more sinister dimension to the kidnapping of the player character, Alex. She awakens in a spooky mansion full of eerie and occult decor, constantly observed by security cameras. A walkie talkie is her only means of human contact, and the person on the other end says that she’s trapped somewhere else in the mansion.

Beyond these touches, though, The Tartarus Key is less a horror experience than a series of escape rooms. To get out of the initial room, the player must look for clues to reveal a keypad combination, which will open another room that requires putting bottles of colored liquid on pedestals in the correct order. Eventually, the game branches into multiple paths and periodically features puzzles with more mortal stakes for the manor’s other prisoners. In this way, The Tartarus Key suggests a tamer version of Saw or other “death game” stories.

The game doesn’t quite avoid coming to the odd standstill, whether in an unclear puzzle interface or a critical object that blends into the scenery. Though plenty of other games use their lo-fi graphics to direct the eye to relevant information, every object and texture in The Tartarus Key looks plausibly important. But in general, the game moves along at a satisfying clip, with its first-person perspective giving a tactile quality to searching each environment.

It helps, too, that the game’s dialogue scenes progress quickly, and that its puzzles are intuitively segmented to involve only items in the same room rather than asking you to ferry objects from one end of the mansion to another. When it works, The Tartarus Key’s brevity and smart constraints string the player along with the allure of just solving one more.

But even when the game works, its story constantly undermines itself. Every character sounds like a very-online teenager trying to be clever, so focused on twee hopefulness and self-worth that the gravity of the situation they’re in never registers. Worse, the game offers plausible explanations for why every room has elaborate puzzle locks and why the doors are themed after animals, with the behind-the-scenes scientists recalling the capper to The Cabin in the Woods.

Nothing we see here matters because it’s all been made up for puzzle-solving. As such, the weirdness of the game’s mystery and its visuals is practically obliterated. It’s good, then, that The Tartarus Key squeaks by on the strength of its puzzles alone, because the connective tissue between them seems determined to strip the game of narrative intrigue before our very eyes.

This game was reviewed with code provided by Player Two.