Brace yourselves my fellow gamers and pray to whatever deity you recognize: the ultimate asset flip slop is upon us.

I don’t even like to call stuff “slop” because it’s one of those overused buzzwords uncreative dolts slap onto anything they personally disapprove of regardless of its actual level of quality, but in this case there’s no better way to describe The 9th Charnel. This incredibly linear, 2-to-3 hour survival-horror adventure comes off more as a tech demo intended to show that something can be created entirely with crap purchased from the Unreal Engine Marketplace than it does a fully-realized game. Seriously, it’s a glorified proof of concept that solo indie dev Saikat Deb could have shopped around to secure funding for a more substantial project that’s instead inexplicably being sold for $30 USD on home consoles!

And before you say anything, NO, this should not get any sort of pass just because it was made by a single person. The laundry list of flaws and shortcomings you’ll encounter here aren’t the result of inexperience, minimal resources, or a low budget, but rather a noticeable lack of effort from its creator. It doesn’t take long to realize that the dude’s goal at some point simply became to get something that’s halfway functional out the door in order to make a quick buck. Honestly, it became clear to me during the very first playable sequence where I immediately got stuck looking for the “key” I was told was needed to open the locked gate in front of me, only to discover that by “key” what the game actually meant was the inconspicuous handwheel I wouldn’t have ever noticed had I not resorted to awkwardly humping every piece of geometry in the narrow environment in a desperate bid to find anything that would allow me to progress.

That’s not the only momentum-halting issue like that I ran into either. At one point I genuinely thought the whole thing broke on me as I seemingly couldn’t interact with a crucial computer. It wasn’t until I started desperately mashing each button on the controller that I learned it bafflingly requires a completely different input than literally everything else you’ll need to engage with—before or after—does. Heck, I frequently struggled to grab critical items out of drawers as targeting problems would repeatedly cause me to close them again as opposed to taking what was inside, which naturally leads to a lot of frustration in the instances where you’re being chased by foes at the same time.

As if having to regularly contend with that type of crap wasn’t proof enough that not a lot of care went into crafting this experience, the core moment-to-moment gameplay itself is tragically half-baked and lazy in execution as well. Good ol’ Deb didn’t bother to make encounters with monsters interesting, tense, or engaging in the slightest, as you can legitimately crawl into a locker or under a bed right before one’s eyes and it will almost instantly forget about your existence before wandering back to its programmed patrol path. The puzzles meanwhile are basic, uninspired junk he clearly just bought from some pack, and the introduction of guns for the final few levels falls woefully flat thanks to the fact that every ammo pickup gives you 100 bullets despite there not being anywhere near that many enemies across the entire runtime. I guess because that was much less work than creating the need for players to carefully manage their resources. That would’ve required, like, making sure things were thoughtfully balanced and whatnot…

In case you were wondering, the presentation doesn’t fare much better. The attempt to cut a few corners by using MetaHuman Creator has led to some very ugly character models and the most ridiculous facial animations I’ve seen to date. It would also be tempting to say that the bulk of the writing was probably done by AI given how nonsensical the plot and unnatural the dialogue is, were I not convinced ChatGPT could’ve spun a more cohesive tale out of the various horror tropes being poorly utilized here. You’ve got everything from creepy cults to science experiments gone wrong paired alongside a wannabe philosophical quest for God and themes of absentee fathers with no discernible connection tying them all together in a coherent manner.

I did get a bit of amusement out of the wildly over-the-top accents voice actress Shelley Ross does for a couple of the roles she took on, and the 2D .jpg of a pair of arms holding a firearm that awkwardly floats onscreen when equipping a weapon as opposed to the protagonist’s actual appendages, but not to the degree that the overall package becomes an ironically entertaining source of unintentional comedy à la Stray Souls. Consequently, the single praise I can give this mess is that it has an extremely easy Platinum, which may make it worth a rental for the most hardcore trophy hunters wanting to add another to their collection. Other than that, the sole reason I would even remotely recommend this to people would be so that they could see something that can accurately qualify as “slop” in the hope that they will learn to stop throwing that word around with reckless abandon.

3/10