Mirror Forge is an upcoming psychological horror game helmed by a passionate solo dev and slated to release on Steam this year. I only came to learn about the game when I recently saw a screenshot the dev posted of a deep red, rust-covered room accompanied by a note that the demo was available.

I had to give it a try.

It’s a brief thing, introducing you to the tone, with some light gameplay and puzzles to round it out. The first thing that comes to mind after playing the 15-minute-ish demo is the word bold. Mirror Forge strikes me as a bold game. Not necessarily in vision or mechanics, but in tone.

There’s some otherworldly shit going on here. You awaken as Thomas, a non-descript and confused protagonist in search of his missing ex-girlfriend. When you first take control, you take two steps in the filthy alley you wake up in and notice a giant, spiraling, sinewy vine seemingly made of organic material.

A few steps forward dispels any illusion you’re playing in a normal world. A corpse of some cherub-looking creature lays propped up against a wall. Thomas off-handedly comments that he might be able to use something called the Seal of Nur to combat them should he encounter more in the future.

There is some form of combat in Mirror Forge involving the Seal of Nur, but we’ll get to that.

The sky cracks open with lightning, rain batters the rusty facade of some warehouse as I scrambled up its scaffolding. On the roof, I spy a few dark creatures milling about on the road below. Looking the other way, a monstrous, sky-scraper of a creature strides away beyond the distant mountain range. It’s only visible in flashes of lighting. Aside from some environmental clipping, the exterior world looks great. It’s gloomy, oppressive, and overwhelming. Good stuff.

This goes back to the boldness of  Mirror Forge. It’s unashamedly forward in its tone and presentation. Shit has effectively hit the fan, and it’s falling down all around you.

This continues as you walk through the streets and head to a diner. Using the artifact mentioned earlier I stun a few monsters and duck past what I’m pretty sure is an old testament angel. It’s some sphere-shaped thing floating above the road complete with interlocking spirling metal rings. The monster is moving too fast to see if it’s covered in eyes though.

Inside the diner, we’re also introduced to another function of the Seal of Nur. It can reveal imprints of past lives, recalling brief voiced expositionary dialogue. The voice actor does their best and it’s all pretty meaningless in the demo but furthers the idea that the world is in a very sorry state. It highlights that the military has tried and failed to respond to the sudden influx of demonic or otherworldly creatures.

It was when I went into the back room and picked up a key and a spooky face literally just clipped through the wall beside me that I began to wonder what the developer was going for here.

I know in the demo I’m missing the greater context of the story, but there is a lot of mixed imagery going on here, and I can’t see anything too cohesive through it.

The following scene has you trapped in a public bathroom–really the scariest place I can think of in a city–where the ambiance turns red and the walls grow mesh fencing.  A statue of perhaps Mary or some generic angelic figure appears and of course, follows you around when you’re not looking.  à la weeping angel.

So up until this point, there has been some seemingly Christian imagery. There’s the statue, the giant thing floating above the streets and malformed enemies below it. The I in the game’s title is an inverted cross. Hell in the opening scene there’s even some writing on the wall scrawled in blood that reads “Your God has been replaced!!!.” So I thought, “Ok maybe this is some sort of Revelations-level reckoning going on”.

However in the same bathroom scene,  what looks like some stone-hewn, ancient tablet appears depicting some deity or entity without any further context. Coupled with the strange fleshy vines also seen in the bathroom, and a few odd, masked men sitting in the background of the city, I’m getting a lot of mixed imagery here.

And reading through the Steam description of the game, Mirror Forge paints itself as a hybrid of the  “science gone wrong” of Stranger Things and of course the psychological horror of Silent Hill. But through playing the demo I’m not seeing that.

Then, you’re soon introduced to another central feature of the game; traveling between dimensions. It uses a portal system that allows you to either cross between places within the same world, or travel to new ones entirely. The one and only portal you take is the latter.

So the portal drops you into a cavernous structure, a mighty gate at your back. A giant, spiderlike creature lumbers out of the darkness, mouth agape, high heels welded to its legs like Masahiro Ito’s Lying Figure.

And I’ve got to commend the design here! It’s big and it’s monstrous but recognizable enough to see what it was transformed from. Nightmarish, good stuff.

It initiates a brief chase sequence that leads to a small puzzle where you align a number of objects to their matched locations. It’s pretty basic with instructions outlined on the wall with a neon glow.  I understand this demo is a vertical slice of the game and I don’t have the greater context of this point in the story, but this puzzle and underground sequence feels like a mish-mash of ideas as opposed to something holistic. That could be said of the demo experience as a whole.

So that ends the demo for Mirror Forge. There’s definitely a lot of passion put on display here. The following trailer that plays when the demo ends highlights that as well, showcasing many different environments and characters that all look pretty great!

It’s hard to come away with any definitive thoughts here. I would have liked a sequence in the demo that felt a little more cohesive, with a clear goal and escalation to form a nice idea of what the game will be like. You have a brief puzzle and a nice intro to your tools to deal with threats–even if they didn’t feel very dangerous–but it would have been neat to see more of the dimension-jumping portals.

I’d have liked to see a little more tension built before the couple of jumpscares as currently, they didn’t have much impact of purpose.  A little more stage-setting in general would have been nice to key in the player as to what’s happening around them.

However, I’m eager to see the full release of Mirror Forge. There’s enough passion and ambition on display here. And the chaos everywhere is enough to pique my interest as to the greater story. I’m curious to know how the portal gameplay works and what the game does with all this evocative if jumbled imagery.

You can wishlist the game now on Steam here