Caput Mortum Review
This unique inaugural title from Black Lantern Collective promises a bright future for the horror publisher.
Caput Mortum. Credit: WildArts / Black Lantern Collective
Canadian studio WildArts previously released Born of Bread and Helltown, two excellent games that couldn't be more different from each other. Caput Mortum leans closer to Helltown's horror sensibilities, driven by inspiration from the King's Field series and Amnesia: The Dark Descent. This latest title creates a richer experience that showcases the studio's growing mastery of atmospheric dread.
You play as someone drawn by an inexplicable compulsion to investigate an abandoned alchemist's tower in 16th-century France. Rather than climbing upward, exploration takes you deeper underground, descending level by level beneath the structure. To reach the depths, you must solve puzzles requiring careful observation and face the terrifying creatures left behind by the alchemists' hubris. Each floor reveals more about the tower's horrifying past through environmental storytelling and scattered documents, painting a picture of unethical experiments and forbidden knowledge—two things that a long history of movies, games, and books teaches us will inevitably lead to disaster.
Caput Mortum. Credit: WildArts / Black Lantern Collective
The gameplay revolves around a fascinating mechanic: manual control of your right hand's position. This proves crucial for object interaction, combat, and certain puzzle solutions, creating unique situations I hadn't encountered before. You might need to position your hand precisely to manipulate levers, light torches, and land attacks, adding a new layer of spatial awareness to standard first-person horror gameplay.
The default control scheme deliberately embraces obtuse, unintuitive mapping intended to create a feeling of vulnerability. Rather than modern twin stick movement controls, the defaults assign looking up and down and left and right to the controller’s shoulder buttons and triggers, respectively.
Caput Mortum. Credit: WildArts / Black Lantern Collective
I found this experiment unsuccessful. Rather than feeling vulnerable, I felt frustrated by this artificial difficulty that had nothing to do with the game's actual challenges. The combat already carries inherent jankiness, and managing your hand position adds enough complexity without deliberately unfamiliar controls fighting against you. Thankfully, a modern control option is included with standard twin-stick controls, allowing you to hold down the right trigger to switch the right stick to handle the movement of your hand. I still felt plenty vulnerable with familiar controls and found the experience genuinely challenging, all while making the game far more enjoyable. The developers should have leaned harder on their fantastic atmosphere and devised new gameplay scenarios to create that sense of vulnerability rather than relying on control scheme gimmicks.
Caput Mortum. Credit: WildArts / Black Lantern Collective
The game features PS2-era graphics that make it feel like a lost horror classic, without compromising the fidelity needed to instill fear in the player. Each floor of the tower is unique and full of details to absorb, and the creature designs are creepy. The homunculi designs are particularly memorable. As opposed to most thick, giant golem depictions I’ve seen, these are incredibly tall, with thin limbs and bulging white eyes. Our first introduction to them is in an unnerving game of hide and seek that I won’t soon forget.
Environmental details provide us with a glimpse into how the homunculi were taught and experimented upon. These beings and their story made me want to explore more of this world and discover what other nightmares the alchemists had created, especially with the attention to detail in the game’s haunting setting.
Caput Mortum. Credit: WildArts / Black Lantern Collective
Caput Mortum delivers a short but engrossing horror experience that succeeds through atmosphere and creative puzzle design. The game makes me excited for Black Lantern Collective’s future releases, as this game displays uniqueness that makes it stand out. However, the choices in the default control scheme feel misguided. Without the modern control option, I would have either abandoned the game or approached it with significant negativity. The developers needed to trust their atmospheric strengths rather than relying on artificial difficulty to manufacture tension.
Caput Mortum is available now on Steam.
Overall Score: 8/10
Played on: Steam Deck
