You know what’s creepier than a rotting cabin or a ghost town? A computer world that’s literally rotting from the inside—code unraveling, rules failing, and reality glitching like a broken GIF. That’s the hook in The Corruption, a small, atmospheric indie horror FPS where the universe is made of data and the bugs are very real. Built by Acellular and released on Steam in May 2025, it’s a short, headspacey shooter that mixes tense combat with exploration, puzzles, and some light platforming. If “glitch horror meets Backrooms vibes” sounds like your thing, you’re in the right place.
So… what is The Corruption?
On paper, it’s a first-person shooter with horror, exploration, and the occasional puzzle/platforming detour. In practice, it plays like a walk through a dying server farm: long black corridors, yawning voids, rigid geometry, and unsettling props—chairs, desks, dead trees—like echoes from the human world trapped in a machine’s dream. Steam’s page calls it a “digital utopia” gone wrong; updates broke more than they fixed, and now the place is crawling with corrupted processes. You’re one of the few uncorrupted ones, poking through the ruins and trying to wipe the infection before it wipes you. The campaign is compact—about 4–5 hours—and there are multiple endings if you like straying off the critical path. There’s a free demo too, which is a nice touch.
The Alt+Ctrl+Delete of destruction
Your signature tool is the Process Termination Grenade Launcher—imagine IT support if they solved problems with explosions. One direct hit and most threats are instantly… alt-controlled-deleted. Combat is snappy, with quick waves of Zealots (the standard corrupted) and chunkier Partisans that split into ankle-biting Tiny Zealots when they go down. Don’t expect a full Doom-style armory; the game is built around this one clever toy, which you can upgrade with sticky shots for satisfying on-contact pops.
Part of the tension is that sometimes the game yanks your launcher away. Those stretches flip the vibe from “grenade-popping power trip” to “unarmed mouse in a maze,” and they work—especially because of how the level tools are set up. Red gates vaporize anything that touches them (including you), and data-beam devices spit blue (safe) and red (lethal) lines you can use to corral enemies or create your own hazards. When you’re weaponless, creative trap-making becomes your lifeline.
World design: glitch-core minimalism
Visually, The Corruption commits to the bit. Think vaporwave galleries, Backrooms hallways, and De Chirico-style surreal plazas reinterpreted as hard-edged, almost brutalist blocks. Everything feels grid-aligned and rules-driven… until the rules fail. That stark, low-poly aesthetic could look cheap in another game, but here it reinforces the fiction that you’re in a brittle construct. It’s minimalist, sure, but it’s purposeful. Steam even leans into those inspirations in the blurb, and the mood holds across the whole run.
Audio does a lot of heavy lifting. Old phones ring in empty rooms; when you pick up, disembodied voices drip cryptic guidance. You’ll also find floppy disks with notes from digital denizens still trying to live “normal” lives as the floor falls out from under them. It’s not a lore dump so much as a slow immersion—enough to sell the setting without getting in the way of movement and combat.
How it feels moment to moment
The loop alternates between three modes:
- Explore: Navigate maze-like environments, hunt for switches, and parse the architecture for paths. Hidden nooks and optional routes reward curiosity (and funnel into those multiple endings).
- Destroy: fights that pop off fast—zealots trace your footsteps, partisans tank hits, and the grenade launcher makes positioning matter. Traversal and combat interlock; you’re always one mistimed jump or bad angle away from exploding yourself.
- Ascend/Escape: Unarmed chase sections that crank the anxiety. You’re listening more than seeing—enemies don’t need line of sight to be dangerous, so audio cues become your radar.
What I like most is the tension profile. It’s not a jump-scare factory. You’ll hear threats before you see them and usually have a beat to plan. The result is dread that accumulates instead of cheap jolts.
“Indie jank”… used for good
Let’s address the elephant in the server room: this is a small-team game and it shows. Animations are basic, interactions are simple, and you can feel the “first-3D-project” edges. Normally I’d ding a game hard for that, but here the roughness matches the fiction—the world is supposed to feel half-broken. The art direction makes the budget constraints read as style.
That said, bugs happen. In my playthrough, I found a blue-lit descent, took the plunge, and landed behind a locked door where I wasn’t supposed to be. I literally hopped through it, skipped a chunk of level, and—oops—missed a weapon I needed later. Without manual saves (it’s autosave-only), recovering from that detour meant replaying a few hours. That’s a rough ask when the pathing can get opaque. Some areas are so dark and empty that you can wander in circles until you happen to catch a hidden route from the correct angle. I also saw intermittent frame dips, the kind of optimization stutters you expect in a solo-dev or micro-team release.
Scope, price, and who it’s for
The Corruption is positioned as a short, atmospheric single-player FPS—4–5 hours if you just go, longer if you chase secrets and endings. If you’re allergic to minimalist presentation or need big, varied arsenals, it won’t convert you. But if you like weird indie horror, tight run times, and a focused mechanical hook (that grenade launcher really carries), it’s absolutely worth a weekend. The Steam page lists Acellular as both developer and publisher and highlights Achievements and Steam Cloud support; there’s also a downloadable demo if you want to test drive the feel before buying.
Verdict
The Corruption does more with less. Its glitch-core aesthetic, clever hazard tools, and “one-weapon-done-right” combat create a distinctive rhythm that a lot of slicker horror shooters miss. I bounced off the navigation vagueness and really wish I could set manual saves, but the atmosphere stuck with me after the credits. For my money, it’s a small but memorable indie horror FPS—and I’m glad I got lost inside it.The Corruption does more with less. The Process Termination Grenade Launcher gives combat a sharp identity, the environmental hazards add playful routing, and the glitch-core look sells the “dying digital world” story better than a thousand cutscenes could. Navigation opacity and the lack of manual saves hold it back, and the bugs can bite—but the mood is memorable and the tension is earned. If you like glitch horror or Backrooms-adjacent worlds and don’t mind some rough edges, this one’s worth getting lost in.
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