Nullwake Review

A hospital that forgets how to be real, one hallway at a time

Nullwake, developed and published by DIG Games, released 29 October 2025 at NZ$8.99, opens with the player waking inside an abandoned hospital that feels almost safe, until small details start to feel wrong. Lights flicker, corridors stretch longer than they should, and as the player pushes further the world doesn't collapse all at once but erodes, blending a deserted town, empty fog-choked streets, and mannequins standing where no one should be into a single fractured, overlapping space. It's psychological horror built explicitly around atmosphere over action, and its small 14-review Mostly Positive sample responds strongly to that specific ambition, even while flagging real technical problems that undercut it.

The game's atmosphere and sound design draw the most consistent, specific praise across the sample. One reviewer describes the mannequins as the toughest part of the experience, making them freeze every time they turn around, uncertain whether moving or stopping is the safer choice in a given moment, precisely the kind of unpredictability the game's stated design philosophy is built around. Another reviewer, writing one of the sample's more detailed reviews, frames Nullwake as a deliberate rejection of conventional horror pacing, calling it a slow-burn experience that places atmosphere, ambiguity, and unease at the centre of its design rather than leaning on constant jump scares, a reading several shorter reviews independently echo in their own words. Multiple reviewers specifically praise the game's graphics as unusually realistic for an indie horror title at this price point, and more than one highlights the fog and empty-street design as convincingly selling the sense of a world that's quietly coming apart around the player.

That said, a real and specific cluster of technical complaints cuts against the warmer reception, centred most seriously on the game's save system. One detailed negative review reports the save and load system simply not working, describing a softlock at a cabin location where a scripted "burning mask man" enemy froze in place and the game failed to progress, leaving them with nothing to load and no way to continue, a complaint serious enough to represent a genuine, potentially playthrough-ending bug rather than a minor inconvenience. A separate reviewer describes a related but distinct frustration: spending roughly two hours searching for a specific rooftop location the game references by name without ever clearly indicating where it actually is, arguing that even a basic in-game map or building labels would meaningfully improve an otherwise tense experience that currently tips over into pure disorientation. A third reviewer criticises the voice-over work sharply, describing it as tonally mismatched with the atmosphere the visuals and sound design otherwise build carefully, a complaint distinct from, though compounding, the navigation and save-system frustrations raised elsewhere.

It's worth sitting with the tension between those two clusters of feedback, since they point in genuinely different directions about what kind of horror game Nullwake is trying to be. The positive reviews largely praise the game for not explaining itself, for letting environmental storytelling and unpredictable enemy behaviour do the work rather than handholding the player through clear objectives, and that restraint is presented as a deliberate, successful design choice by several reviewers who clearly connected with it. But the negative reviews describe a version of that same ambiguity tipping over into genuine frustration, where the absence of direction isn't unsettling so much as simply unclear, and where technical failures like the reported softlock turn ambiguity from an atmospheric choice into a practical dead end. Whether a given player experiences Nullwake as intentionally cryptic or simply undercooked likely depends heavily on whether they happen to run into the specific bugs the negative reviews describe, which makes this an unusually save-dependent horror game to recommend with full confidence.

On the developer relationship, at least one reviewer's experience is worth calling out specifically because it cuts against the game's rougher edges: after refunding the game once over a difficult puzzle, they describe the developer personally helping them past the sticking point, prompting them to buy the game again and finish it. That kind of direct, responsive support is a meaningfully positive signal for a solo or small-team horror release this early in its post-launch life, and it suggests at least some of the sample's harsher technical complaints may see fixes over time, even if that responsiveness doesn't retroactively fix the softlock and navigation issues reviewers experienced at launch.

Value is worth addressing on its own terms, since Nullwake's NZ$8.99 asking price sits well below most horror games with comparable production values, and several reviewers explicitly weigh that price against the experience they got. One reviewer specifically frames the low cost as making the game an easy recommendation for anyone curious about low-budget horror, arguing that even with the bugs, the atmosphere and sound design alone justify the purchase at that price point. That calculation shifts considerably for anyone who runs into the reported softlock, however, since a genuinely unfinishable playthrough is a poor value proposition regardless of how cheap the ticket price was to get there, and the sample is currently too small and too split between smooth and broken experiences to say with confidence which outcome a new buyer is more likely to get. Prospective buyers should treat the low price as a reason to try the game rather than a reason to overlook the save-system risk entirely.

Taken together, Nullwake is a genuinely well-atmosphered slow-burn horror game that succeeds at the specific, patience-demanding tone it's aiming for, and its low price makes that atmosphere an easy recommendation for horror fans willing to accept some real friction along the way. But the reported save-system failures and disorienting lack of direction are serious enough, and specific enough, that this isn't yet a game to buy expecting a smooth, reliably completable playthrough, and anyone picking it up should save at every opportunity and expect real moments of confusion between the genuinely effective scares.