Derelikt Review - Trapped in a Retro Sci-Fi FPS Nightmare

Barely Magic Mike

2 minutes ago

5 min read

Derelikt

PC/PS/XBOX

11/13/26

Philipp Jensen

I say this all the time, but it bears repeating - people who ask me what reviewing games is like usually have the preconceived notion that reviewing a terrible game is the worst part of the job. I can see why they'd think that, but I disagree. As many reviewers will tell you, a truly crap game may be miserable to play, but the art of picking it apart for everything it isn't at least makes for some interesting writing and usually a few good laughs. If Agefield High: Rock the School from earlier this year wasn’t made explicitly for this purpose, it might as well have been.

No, my friends, the worst part of reviewing video games is reviewing a game that's just kind of there. A game that never even aspires to anything above passably good, never does anything different, and yet is so weighed down by the gravity of poor execution that it's not bad enough to be a full-on stinker, but nowhere near good enough to recommend.

Today, that game is DERELIKT.

We can never get enough creepy sci-fi space games as far as I'm concerned, but DERELIKT’s consistently “We have Dead Space at home” vibe does it no favors at any point. The plot of this game has you working on a research station on an asteroid orbiting Saturn. People are dying, the ship is malfunctioning, and employees have become inexplicably drawn to a malevolent alien signal. Sound familiar? Right.

The story isn't bad, exactly. Much like our boy Isaac, you're mostly sent around the station as someone or another's bitch boy finding this or accessing this or unlocking that, and as you make your way around you learn what happened to the people on board, and why there are suddenly monsters everywhere. Seriously if you've played Dead Space before, maybe consider a bunch of DERELIKT’s plot pre-spoiled, with mediocre writing and a lack of voice acting that does its blatant lack of originality no additional favors.

The story's blandness is a shame, but we're about to have a blandFEST that puts DERELIKT’s weak narrative on even ground with damn near everything else about it.

Hooded astronaut in a dark sci-fi corridor, with SPECIALIST text saying: JEEZ! WHY ARE YOU SNEAKING UP ON ME?! — The characters you'll meet don't add much to the narrative.

But let's start with the worst of it - for a horror game, DERELIKT has the tension level of a Burger King commercial. Nobody having a voice doesn't help, but that would be forgivable if the rest of the sound design could pick up any of the slack. I know this is a retro game at heart, a first-person shooter inspired by the likes of System Shock 2, Alien Resurrection and Doom 3, but DERELIKT'S combination of poor sound mixing that makes for some irritatingly cheap jump scares, repetitive enemy grunts that easily tell you exactly what's around every corner, and areas that are sometimes completely silent or filled with generic atmospheric sound loops, makes arguably the most important tool in a horror game’s arsenal completely neutered here. System Shock 2 and Doom 3 may be fundamentally very different games, but they're atmospheric games that made their mark not just through gameplay and story but by being incredibly immersive for their time. DERELIKT, by comparison, has an overt cheapness to it. The ambient sound loops feel manufactured like the soundtrack you’d hear as you make your way through a haunted house. Never once did I hear something that made my brain fear what was in the next room or create any sort of build-up. The immersion here is just absolutely piss-poor and for a horror game, that's a really serious problem.

The visuals fare no better, sometimes making me feel disoriented simply because of environmental scenery being blatantly copy/pasted from one area to the next. I don't know how many times I saw the same collection of broken pipes blocking my path or wandered past the same doorways, boxes or locker rooms that didn't bother with the slightest hint of variation, but DERELIKT looks dreadful in all of the wrong ways. Retro does not have to mean lazy, but DERELIKT’s visuals are lazy. And my god is everything so grey and brown and beige. I couldn’t even tell the guns apart half the time. They're just dark and bulky. Why does the assault rifle look so similar to the shotgun? This isn't even a knock on retro games because games like Dusk, Amid Evil and Cultic look great. But those are games designed with intention - with levels having unique layouts and interesting landmarks and clever design. DERELIKT just looks like a minimum viable product. It's the nail in the coffin for a game already struggling to hold my attention.

And that was because nothing happening in DERELIKT is especially interesting. You'll fight annoying enemies like nearly undodgeable headcrab wannabes that travel in irritatingly large groups, you'll get thrilling weapons like an assault rifle that feels like it's out of ammo every 10 seconds and a pistol that feels like a light kiss on most enemies’ foreheads, you’ll have enemies back you into a corner you can’t get out of, you'll experience one of the worst gaming flashlights of all time (for real, how did this make it into the final release?) and you'll crawl through vents really, really slowly. But hey, at least banging my pipe on a vent hatch lets me play a little tune. Take that, Ocarina of Time remake! You'll also solve “puzzles” like looking at a poster above a computer for the code to access it or a hacking minigame that… Actually, you know, the hacking minigame is alright I guess. It doesn't happen very often at all and it pretty much requires the use of items to not get annoying but it's decent. Sort of like wordle without words. That will… Make sense to somebody.

Pixelated sci-fi corridor in a first-person shooter, gun visible at right, crosshair centered, HUD shows 83 and 3:24 in a dim tunnel — The game fails to capture that PS1 era look as well as one would hope.

Also, for heathens like me who prefer to use a controller for shooters, you should know that the controller support here is fairly awful, making inventory management and the act of switching weapons an absolute chore. The d-pad cycles left and right between the weapons you have but never allows you to choose a specific one, creating a tragically unique situation where my guns looked so similar to one another that I was sometimes not fully sure which one I had taken out. That's never happened in any other shooter I've played. This is not a compliment. Needless to say, keyboard and mouse is borderline necessary for this one.

I wish I had more to say about this game, but it's hard. I could talk about the in-game map being an eyesore, the inventory management being annoying, the almost hilarious abundance of explosive red barrels at times and this bizarre loading screen sound that… I don’t even know what that’s supposed to be. But do you care anymore? Does it matter? My point is this - even at its best DERELIKT bathes in its own blandness. Every facet of it from its story to its sound to its graphics to its gameplay to its puzzle design to its guns to its writing feels like it was designed to function and… not much else. In a day and age where fans of indie games have so much to play and massive backlogs, I don't really know why you'd play this. Its most redeeming quality is that it technically does what it sets out to, I suppose? It just doesn’t do any of it remotely well. So if you’re a fan of sci-fi horror games and you’re more than a bit desperate for content, you could reasonably do worse. Everybody else would be better off avoiding this one. DERELIKT gets the broken lamp of disapproval.