There are so many games based on John Carpenter’s The Thing that it’s a bit staggering. I can’t claim what its impact on horror in film is - fun fact! I swapped out of my film studies major my freshman year and into philosophy - but it remains a template for horror gaming. This is especially true of survival horror, and it’s easy to see why. The combination of enemies and elements makes creating tension easy and plausible, and it feels otherworldly without necessarily needing to be so. In more faithful adaptations of the Thing, this can also be paired with bodysnatching (like in Among Us or Project Winter) just to add an additional layer of tension. How a game draws from The Thing varies, but that these games do in a way that is unlike any other horror film is fascinating.

Distrust does this as well, and it does…fine, I guess?

Look, we all need a magical sleep some time.

Distrust is a survival horror game set in an Antarctic research station. You play as some set of survivors, struggling to escape while uncovering the mysteries of what happened in the base. However, it’s not enough to escape a polar research base. Survivors must confront mysterious alien anomalies, the elements, and, worst of all, a crippling lack of cigarettes.

In terms of its gameplay, Distrust plays like a game that is meant to be played co-op with a single player mode slapped on to satisfy friendless players like me. Players control a party of characters (initially two, but with the option to add a third), each of whom act independently and can be located far from one another. These characters have a shared inventory, but otherwise act independently.

In many ways, this gameplay structure feels not dissimilar to a game like This War of Mine, where characters are controlled individually, and players must balance both keeping track of multiple characters at once, and decide whether adding another character is worth it. Much like This War of Mine, characters also need to be constantly busy - idle time is as much the enemy as the elements or the aliens. However, in a game where most actions are brief and players need to be constantly vigilant, managing three or even two characters efficiently becomes an exercise in futility. I would try to keep all my characters busy, having them try to try an endless string of keys on a door or nap while the other searched, but kept finding them finishing their tasks before I could get back to them, or worse, hanging out while an alien devoured them. While this game has a single player mode, it plays very much like a single player mode meant for people better able to multitask than me. Which is saying something, seeing as I am currently multitasking and get bored quickly when I’m only doing one thing at a time.

...I'm not going to pretend I wouldn't also poke the alien object.

This lack of efficient control becomes even more frustrating when paired with the game’s enemies. When characters sleep, the game spawns alien entities known as anomalies. These anomalies have varying degrees of strength and obnoxiousness depending on how far into the game the player is, and have a variety of counters. One only needs a flashlight shone on it to be dissipated, while others need…?

At about the point that the game started spawning enemies with no indication of how to kill them, and the character control system made it difficult to keep track of where all the anomalies actually were and avoid them, it got a bit frustrating. Short of clumping all my characters up in once place - and thereby leaving characters idle - there didn’t seem to be an efficient way to handle the various anomalies and keep my little polar explorers safe. The act of switching characters also meant that, even if I had a character with a flashlight pointed in the right direction, as soon as I switched perspectives, the flashlight would go down, leaving me vulnerable again.

Once again, this is mechanically a co-op that can support single player, but not willingly.

These seem fun.

With all that said, there is still quite a bit to enjoy here. Distrust does a legitimately good job building its atmosphere and making the player feel immersed in the horror of this polar base. It supports a variety of strategies, as long as the player is also able to handle being multiple players at once (or, to put it another way, has a friend). Still, as I played through it, it felt like it was missing something to make it truly shine. Its story is lacklustre, but also, doesn’t have to be more, but still could have been more. Its environment is fine, but could have been better. It is, on the whole, middling, but with some frustrating mechanics piled on top.

In the end, I found my frustration with unkillable monsters and too many characters winning out. Bigger fans of survival horror may be willing to overlook these frustrations, but I am not.

Developer: Cheerdealers
Genre: Survival, Horror
Year: 2017
Country: Russia
Language: English
Time to beat: 1.5-2 hours per run
Playthrough: https://youtu.be/79MNDAyYsNY