Edge of Sanity Review – Niche Gamer

Face your worst fears in Edge of Sanity, a Lovecraftian 2D survival horror game.

Edge of Sanity puts players in the shoes of Carter, a supply runner who finds himself stranded in the frigid lands of Alaska without any recollection of how he even got there. From there, Carter must survive days of unending madness as he scrapes by trying to survive against diseased eldritch horrors who roam this newfound snowy hell.

So, does the game’s horror land? How are its survival crafting mechanics? Is the plot any good? Find out the answer to these questions and more in our full review for Edge of Sanity.

Edge of Sanity
Developer: Vixa Games
Publisher: Daedalic Entertainment
Platforms: PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Xbox One, Nintendo Switch, Xbox Series X/S, and Microsoft Windows (Reviewed)
Release Date: September 13, 2024
Players: 1
Price: $19.99

Edge of Sanity‘s gameplay has players sneaking through monster-infested locations to collect various resources, which are needed to build up your camp and keep other survivors alive in the harsh Alaskan winter.

The survivors you recruit can get sick, hurt, or tired, and that affects their ability to produce food and water unless cured by the player. Survivors lose morale once their basic needs are not met and eventually die when neglected for too long.

After upgrading certain workstations, the player can use food or water as crafting materials, although it doesn’t feel like you ever get the opportunity to do so, since your survivors produce barely enough to keep themselves alive, not to mention the random events that spoil your food or contaminate your water every few days.

The second act is where the game picks up mechanically as far as the camp management mechanics go, by having the player produce and collect an ungodly amount of scrap metal to fix a truck, which crashes 30 seconds after you start driving it.

It goes without saying that the camp mechanics make Edge of Sanity a chore to play. This could have been a short and sweet horror game with a story focus, but instead we get so much padding that the actual game gets lost in the middle of it.

It’s incredibly repetitive to go through the same levels over and over in search of materials, especially since they have a limited amount of layouts that keep repeating. Edge of Sanity starts off quite strong and then puts in as much effort as it can towards giving the player raw, unfiltered tedium.

It’s not easy to balance sanity mechanics in gaming, as they usually feel like cheap ways to punish the player for looking at an enemy or exploring stages thoroughly, and unfortunately, that’s exactly where Edge of Sanity is at.

The player gains a new trauma every time their stress meter fills up, which happens whenever you interact with an enemy, including being hit, being seen, or simply standing up near them, despite being undetected. Even interactions that the player wins, like killing a smaller enemy with a rock, seem to result in stress gain, so even when you win, you still lose.

It’s quite clear that Edge of Sanity wants to justify its stress and trauma mechanics by forcing them upon the player, making it so even encountering the same enemy multiple times increases your stress, which falls flat and makes it so you are forced to kill every enemy you find to avoid getting hit with more stress while backtracking.

Edge of Sanity incentivizes the player to always stay away from enemies, as its combat has an emphasis on setting up traps or throwing rocks from far away. The game does feature melee weapons, but it’s rare that you’ll get to use them without taking damage, so they end up as tools to break obstacles or kill bugs.

A weird thing about the game’s combat is that the player does have a stationary dodge, which, when timed correctly, avoids an enemy attack. The problem is that it locks you into an animation for so long that you can’t attack afterwards, making it entirely useless.

Being cornered is also a huge problem, since there is no way to go through an enemy or jump over them if they aren’t stunned. The player can place bear traps or throw rocks at enemies to stun them, but those are crafted with the resources you use to progress through the main story, so there’s this constant progress delay because you are forced to fight some enemies.

There is a version of Edge of Sanity that manages to be a competent survival horror game, and it’s a version that completely ditches these camp management and crafting mechanics in favor of story content and tighter levels. Unfortunately, that isn’t the version we got.

Edge of Sanity is at its best when the player is moving through its story missions, which have unique layouts and an actual purpose. These moments don’t last, since most of the game consists of doing the same four missions in search of arbitrary amounts of resources.

The blueprint for a title like this has already been set by 2017’s Deadwood, so it’s disappointing to see Edge of Sanity completely miss the mark in such a way, failing to provide a competent horror experience as it chooses to ignore its strengths to focus on tedium and repetition instead.