Mortanis Prisoners comes from Alexey Bulgakov, Vladimir Zlobin and Honor Games. Some first-person horror action with a bit of a World War II angle? I’m in.

“Mortanis Prisoners – A survival horror game set in a Third Reich concentration camp where the camp’s leadership, upon discovering a planned rebellion, orders the execution of all accomplices. Main protagonist encounter an even more terrifying fate. Will they be able to escape the nightmare?”

The setting of this one had me really looking forward to the game. You play as Justina who is part of the Polish Resistance and is caught by the Nazis, and the next thing you know, you’re waking up in a morgue. Greeted by a shadowy ghost, you’re told that you are trapped in purgatory and have to escape. First things first, I really like the setting, both the timeframe and the location. I do like a WW II game, and there’s something about creepy morgues and asylums that I love to explore in gaming. That’s the good…

Unfortunately, everything else about Mortanis Prisoners is very “meh” or worse. Think of this as a first-person Resident Evil-type game. Everything you’d expect from a RE title is here, monsters to shoot, puzzles to solve, an inventory system, etc. Well, almost everything you’d expect from a RE title is here. Do you know what isn’t here? Scares. I admit that the creepy feeling of being in a morgue works well for the most part, but there are zero scares here, not one. Not even a cheap jump scare. This is the least scary horror game I have played.

The controls are really awkward for something so familiar. For instance, duck is down on the d-pad, why? There are a plethora of other similar titles that nail the controls that the devs could’ve looked at. You can’t rebind the controls either, at least not on the Xbox version I played. Even weirder, the keys for the PC version show when I looked at the controls in the options screen, even though I was playing on Xbox. This has been ported to consoles with zero optimisation. You press the left trigger to aim your gun, but you don’t actually aim your gun, the screen just slightly zooms in. The running in the game is about the normal speed for walking. You have to use the left stick to select your weapon from your inventory using the quick select option, but you have to use the d-pad to select items in your main inventory, and that’s just strange. Pick one or the other, devs.

It’s difficult to see what item you have highlighted in your inventory because the devs have decided to use a highlight colour that blends into the menu. I came across several bugs, one saw an enemy with tenacles being able to attack me through a wall, and I couldn’t get close to them to hit them because their tenacles would hit me through a wall. I’ve had enemies spawn inside walls too. The game crashed on my twice and froze three times. You pick up notes to fill in the backstory, and the text often spills over the graphics of the note and float in mid-air. Plus several other bugs and glitches.

There’s this annoying thing where the game won’t let you pick up items that you need until you learn that you need them. For instance, I found a handsaw and the text said that I don’t need it, yet. Afterwards, I found the place where you use the saw, so I had to backtrack to where it was, pick it up, and then go all the way back to where it needed to be used. Just let me pick items up when I find them, that’s what an inventory system is for. Some of the clues for the puzzles don’t make much sense, as if they have been badly translated (maybe by AI?). There are these long and sweeping camera angles that often introduce you to something new, and they seriously needed better direction and trimming down. The story is flat and my covering you having to escape purgatory is about as deep as it gets, even the notes that you find add nothing.

With a price tag of around £16 and available now for PC, PlayStation and Xbox Mortanis Prisoners is a very short game. Bearing in mind that I only played through this once and without a guide, it only took me 78 minutes (that’s with crashes, freezes, bugs and the slow running), I’ve played demos longer than this, and at first, I thought that maybe I had finished the first chapter. Nope, it’s the whole game. Let me put it this way, I was given a review code for this game three hours ago. In three hours, I played through the game, wrote a review, edited it, sourced and resized images for formatting, and did all the behind-the-scenes stuff that needs doing before publication. In fact, it took me longer to write, edit, format, and do everything else needed for this review than to play through the game… and this is not a particularly long review either.

For me, Mortanis Prisoners is massively disappointing because there is potential here that has been missed by a wide margin. The devs have not spent any time optimising or fixing some of the most annoying issues. And to expect people to pay £16 for a game that can be finished in a little over an hour is a bit of a joke. It plays like an unfinished demo and is about as long as one too, and nobody should be paying £16 for that.