_

_ (yes, underscore) is a short, experimental game, and I thought it was a fun experiment. As far as I can tell there’s not a great deal of story -- you play as a character wandering a maze in search of items, while a monster tries to kill you. Very simple stuff. I played for about 30 minutes, but it was difficult for me to estimate how long it may take to beat as those 30 minutes were spent fumbling and dying over and over for the most part. Figuring out the game is a lot of trial and error, which I didn’t mind once I got through some initial problems with the visuals.

At first, just couldn't see even with max brightness and using my light. Eventually I restarted and realized that my computer had defaulted to low-quality "fast" graphics setting, but when I restarted on a higher quality I could see just fine when using the light. Without it, of course, it was dark as shit, but that's to be expected. No screenshots this time, as the game is mostly a dark maze and the game's existing screenshots pretty much show all I could find.

After that, my next hurdle was the monster. At first, I thought turning my light off would make it harder for the monster to catch me, but this didn't seem to be the case. After a few more tries, I looked through the gamepage's comments and learned that the monster seems to respond to your character's heartbeat. So yes, each audio cue does matter, which I loved! I wasn't able to interpret what the monster's sounds meant, but I was having fun experimenting and trying to figure things out. I also walked into the monster a few times, which was both funny and actually got me to jump. It was like an organic jump scare, which I mind a lot less than scripted ones.

With simple mechanics and effective sound design, _ succeeded in creating a tense atmosphere. Although I wasn’t able to complete it, I thought it was an interesting experiment. You might do a lot better than me, so if you’re tolerant of mazes and have some patience, you should give this one a try.