"In the middle of the Arctic Ocean, a fishing boat collided with an iceberg. Only one survivor made it to the life raft." That survivor is you. Wounded, bleeding out, barely, you manage to reach an oil rig, but your problems are only just beginning... Bleed Off is a horror game and a tribute to old VHS movies, all at once. A short but free experience, developed by "Vancouver Film School" (of course).
Power Drill Massacre, Lakeview Cabin and now Bleed Off. Homages to VHS movies can be counted on one hand, but they do count. And it's no wonder. Many of us, from that generation, are true "children of the VCR". Raised on pure cinema, we forged our primary identities VHS after VHS. And so we ended up: unable to forget the good times we had in their company. That's why, and personally, I think that any game that starts with a video cassette entering a VCR inevitably started in the best way.
That's what Bleed Off. We're watching a movie, but we're also starring in it. It's a horror film, but also a "survival horror" (almost a "walking simulator"). We play the sole survivor of a fishing boat, shipwrecked in the middle of nowhere. A tough guy, but mortally wounded, who with his last breath manages to reach an oil rig that seems like his salvation. But no. The place, at first, seems abandoned. Little by little we'll discover what happened there and get to know the charred remains of its former crew. Oh, and also the ones responsible for the horror, against whom you'll have to fight more than once!
That said, the game could be called "Horror in the Arctic", but it's called "Bleed Off" for a very good reason: while everything happens, you're bleeding out. If you don't press on your wound, you'll run out of blood. How this affects the gameplay is very simple: by pressing the right mouse button, you cover the wound with one hand. If you release the button, you start losing health slowly. Although a gimmick, this detail adds quite a bit of realism to the action, because more than once you'll need both hands and torrents of blood will gush from the wound. Another thing that will make you lose health are the monsters, of which there are plenty and all with the same antipathy towards human beings. I won't spoil anything because it's nice to see them for the first time.
The rest of the game is about walking around the oil rig, looking for clues of what happened or, better yet, a way to escape the place in one piece. Bleed Off has quite a few "jump scares", the kind that YouTubers who scream on camera and make tons of money love so much. But it also achieves an interesting horror atmosphere, with gruesome images waiting in every corner. Not to mention the VHS texture that accompanies every second of action!
On the negative side, it's a very short game (you'll beat it in half an hour) and quite easy. The latter, in my case, is what bothered me the most. I would have liked to feel the danger of being one hit away from death and being stalked by these horrendous creatures, taking death for granted at every step. Desperately fleeing, looking for a safe place among so much doom. But none of that happened, I barely lost health. That takes away "scare points", in my opinion. For the rest, a delight. And free! Totally free! If you want to experience Bleed Off, all you have to do is visit its itch.io page and download the executable (almost 600MB).
