EMPTY SHELL

About EMPTY SHELL

EMPTY SHELL is by CC ARTS and published by Hyperstrange. It came out on Steam on 16 October 2023, then on Nintendo Switch in March 2024, on GOG later that month and on PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Xbox One and Xbox Series X|S in July 2024. Its store calls it a tense roguelite survival horror with a top-down view.

Each volunteer signed a contract for a recovery operation without being told much. The facility on a remote Japanese island was supposed to have been abandoned for decades, but once there it is clear that something is wrong. Logs, emails and classified files from the 1950s tell the stories of the people who worked there and lead toward the accident that brought you here.

When you die, you take control of a new volunteer. Starting equipment is random and every level is generated anew. You scavenge weapons such as pistols, shotguns, rifles and melee tools like an iron pipe, manage an inventory with room only for what you think vital, solve terminal puzzles such as aligning antennas, and buy upgrades and devices to help in fights. Different kinds of enemies hunt you through each room.

The look is grayscale with scanlines and CRT filters, the view ringed by darkness, with health, a clock and points in the corners like a camera feed. The Games Machine compared it to Hotline Miami at a less frantic pace, and wrote that the anxiety of opening the next door on low health is real; Multiplayer.it praised its atmosphere and mystery. The pictures are dark and low in contrast, so creatures are often only pale shapes until they are close.

After the main story, the Daily Test Room mode, added in March 2024, gives everyone the same loadout each day and throws waves of ever tougher enemies at you, with health and ammunition mostly dropped by the dead and a leaderboard that resets daily. HowLongToBeat puts the main story at about four hours. It suits players who want survival horror tension in short, repeatable runs and do not mind shooting their way through it.

How to play EMPTY SHELL

1. Deploy as a volunteer with whatever random gear you are given.
2. Explore each generated level from above, seeing little beyond the room you are in.
3. Scavenge weapons, ammunition, gadgets and documents, and choose what fits in your inventory.
4. Fight the creatures that hunt you in each room with guns and melee weapons, watching your ammunition.
5. Solve the facility's terminal puzzles, such as aligning antennas, to open the way deeper.
6. When you die, spend what you earned on upgrades and send in the next volunteer.

Tips

• Read the logs and emails you find; they tell the story of the facility and of what happened in the 1950s.
• Keep inventory space for ammunition your weapons can actually use, and carry a melee weapon such as the iron pipe to save bullets on weak enemies.
• Clear a room carefully before searching it, since enemies come out of the dark at its edges; when your health is low, think twice before opening the next door.
• After the story, try the Daily Test Room: there is nothing to scavenge, so take health and ammunition from the enemies you kill.

Questions