A Game You Win With Your Blood

Haemo is a game in which you’re fatally wounded and bleeding from the get-go. I’m not talking Uncharted-2-style cinematic “oh no is the main character of this game who I’ll be playing as for the next 12 hours gonna make it through the first five minutes of the game?!?” bleeding either. Each blood-soaked step your bug-eyed avatar takes brings him/her/it another inch closer to The End.

Except that in Haemo, The End really isn’t the end at all. Death takes you back to the beginning, but that doesn’t mean someone’s come through and mopped up all your progress. As you move through the game’s invisible maze, your blood slowly but surely marks a path — or multiple paths, really. The maze is large and branches in all sorts of crazy directions. Enemies use this to their advantage; they’re white as ghosts and blend almost invisibly into non-bloodied backgrounds.

The result is an extremely tense game, albeit one drowned in trial-and-error in addition to, you know, blood. Learning the maze requires time and patience, especially when enemies are almost impossible to see on your first run through an area.

It can get pretty frustrating sometimes, especially when your default attack has all the range and power of a mould-soiled garbage bag. Enemies appear, you can’t react in time, you die through very little fault of your own, repeat. Combine with narrow pathways to maximise incoherent curse word usage.

Haemo‘s concept is incredibly cool, though, and once I started moving around more — rarely pausing despite the fact that skittering around actively drains blood — I had a little more success.

You can grab it for free here. Have fun bleeding everywhere and then dying alone and frightened! I know I did.