Below

Below released in full on Steam on June 4, 2026, from small developer Gamedev Guy LLC, an $8.99 first-person found-footage psychological horror game in which players explore dark tombs and tight halls beneath a pyramid, camcorder in hand, fleeing mummies and pharaoh ghosts across what most reviewers describe as a single, short sitting. Its 16-review English pool sits at Mixed (10 up, 6 down, 63%), and the reviews split sharply between players who found real, if brief, tension in its VHS-filtered chase sequences and players who found the whole thing over, and unchallenging, before it started.

The found-footage presentation and its unusual Egyptian setting draw the pool's most consistent praise, even from reviewers who ultimately landed mixed on the whole package. One reviewer wrote that they "really enjoyed playing it with my chat," adding "you don't see many indie horror games taking on the egyptian ruins theme, so it was definitely a pleasant surprise." Another called it "a super trippy cool realistic horror game taking place in a pyramid full of mummies and pharaoh ghosts," praising how it captures "the magic of the deep secrets inside the Egyptian pyramids." A more measured reviewer specifically credited the presentation's technical execution: "most of the impressive graphics are achieved through those beautiful VHS-filters, which truly show how realistic a game can look nowadays," alongside praise for "beautiful wall textures and shadow games together with an eerie lighting that truly hits the spot."

Tension and atmosphere land inconsistently across the pool, and the reviews that engage with this most seriously offer genuinely useful, specific detail rather than a simple thumbs up or down. One reviewer scored the experience methodically, giving "Ambience: 6.5/10, Fear: 7/10, Gameplay: 9/10, Overall: Solid 8.5/10," while praising creaks and cracks for the ambience but noting the "fuzzy VHS sounds and breathing" nearly "ruined the atmosphere" until turned down in settings. Another reviewer called it "an exciting and tension-filled experience" where "the found footage style was nailed pretty well," while a third said it was "very much... scary" and "genuinely creepy" despite "lack[ing] depth." Set against that, the pool's most detailed critical review argued the opposite directly: "there's nothing scary about it, and there's no challenge whatsoever," specifically because "the monsters themselves are extremely easy to avoid, and almost every encounter with them boils down to you simply running away by following an obvious path which completely ruins any sense of tension or anxiety."

Runtime and value are the pool's most consistent, least disputed complaint, showing up across both positive and negative reviews alike. One reviewer who finished the game in half an hour called it "a beautiful graphics demo hat ends when others start," while a positive reviewer still flagged that it "could do with being a bit longer" after completing it "in under an hour," and felt the ending was "quite abrupt and jarring," saying it "felt more like a demo than the full thing." The pool's harshest reviewer went further, calling it "dog water" and claiming to finish "the whole game in less than an hour" with "zero jump scares," though that same review's unsupported accusation that the developer "paid previous reviewers to oversell this game" is a serious claim with no corroboration anywhere else in the pool and is not reflected here as credible.

A cluster of specific, concrete technical complaints is worth reporting directly rather than folding into general runtime griping. One detailed reviewer, in an update to their own review after the developer patched several issues, still flagged that the game is "MEGA DARK," making battery pickups "near impossible to see... unless you are right on top of them," and separately identified a specific missable key item that, if skipped, "caused me to softlock" with no way to go back and retrieve it. A separate reviewer reported dying repeatedly at an early door puzzle with no clear explanation and no manual save option to fall back on, writing plainly, "Since there's no manual save, I have to go through the same beginning of the game... to try and figure out how not to die. Very frustrating." Another reviewer flagged rapid battery drain paired with a persistent low-battery beep as "tiresome fast," and doors that "slam shut in a split second" if not held open properly.

The developer's responsiveness to bug reports is a genuine, repeated bright spot across otherwise critical reviews. One reviewer specifically thanked the developer for a quick hotfix addressing a missing mouse-inversion option at launch, along with a promise to look into heavy GPU load, while another separately confirmed "the dev was quick to reply and patch the game" after reporting bugs in an initial playthrough. That pattern of active post-launch support suggests at least some of the pool's sharper technical complaints may already be less severe than when the original reviews were written.

Taken together, Below is a short, visually distinctive found-footage horror game that lands its atmosphere for some players and falls flat for others, with a runtime that both camps agree is thin for the asking price and a small handful of concrete bugs, a soft-lock-capable missable item, an unclear death loop, and rapid battery drain, that a responsive developer appears to be actively working through. At $8.99 for twenty minutes to an hour of content, it's a reasonable pickup only for genre fans willing to treat it as a brief, atmospheric curiosity rather than a full horror experience.