'Don't get lacerated!' is a bullet-point feature in limb-lopping survival horror game The Lacerator

The Lacerator - Announcement Trailer - YouTube The Lacerator - Announcement Trailer - YouTube
Watch On

DreadXP has announced it's publishing a new horror game from Brazilian Studio Games From the Abyss called The Lacerator, and it's a wilfully old school survival horror experience. As the mature content description on its Steam page warns, "This game contains scenes of explicit violence and gore, also contains sensitive themes and tank controls".

An escape-room action puzzle where you're trapped in a psycho's Saw-style labyrinth, The Lacerator's big selling point is limb removal. You can easily end up losing an arm or a leg without a game over, instead having to escape in more inventive ways the more limbs you lose. The trailer shows a stuck door that can only be opened if you've got two arms, and according to the press release, "There are multiple main escape routes, but depending on your remaining limbs you lose access to some of these paths. Each of these present a different narrative branch that will provide answers not available in the others."

The Lacerator is a low-poly affair with the blurred textures of a PS1 game, which I suspect the graphics options won't let you mess with too much. It's designed around a fixed camera and tank controls, and enemies who come out of the walls at you like you're back in Derceto's mansion from the original Alone in the Dark.

There's a definite tone to The Lacerator, whose protagonist is a porn star and whose villain sometimes comes at you in a skimpy leather two-piece. It takes the fetishcore subtext of Resident Evil 2 and makes it text, and much as I like a '90s throwback I don't know if that's really my vibe. The Lacerator is due out in 2025, as is another DreadXP-published joint I suspect will be more my cup of tea. That's Heartworm, which is about dealing with grief by traveling to somewhere spooky in the middle of nowhere as God intended.

If you want to try The Lacerator for yourself, it's got a demo you can find on Steam and itch.io

Jody Macgregor
Weekend/AU Editor

Jody's first computer was a Commodore 64, so he remembers having to use a code wheel to play Pool of Radiance. A former music journalist who interviewed everyone from Giorgio Moroder to Trent Reznor, Jody also co-hosted Australia's first radio show about videogames, Zed Games. He's written for Rock Paper Shotgun, The Big Issue, GamesRadar, Zam, Glixel, Five Out of Ten Magazine, and Playboy.com, whose cheques with the bunny logo made for fun conversations at the bank. Jody's first article for PC Gamer was about the audio of Alien Isolation, published in 2015, and since then he's written about why Silent Hill belongs on PC, why Recettear: An Item Shop's Tale is the best fantasy shopkeeper tycoon game, and how weird Lost Ark can get. Jody edited PC Gamer Indie from 2017 to 2018, and he eventually lived up to his promise to play every Warhammer videogame.

Read more
A stylized drawing of a horned demon with a skull for a face and glowing eyes peering over a forest cabin.
Bloober Team’s new horror label just unveiled an isometric survival horror game straight out of a comic book: ‘Avoid the Horned Man at all costs’
Fighting a masked enemy with an axe
Butcher's Creek is a short, sweet and brutal FPS video nasty from the maker of Dusk
Moroi trailer still
Romanian folklore, David Lynch, and heavy metal come together in a dark fantasy hack-and-slash action game 'with an even darker sense of humor'
White Knuckle trailer still
Ascend through 'ten thousand meters of concrete and decay' in this horrifying 'first-person roguelite speed-climbing game'
In-development screenshot of game Psycho Patrol R. It is a low-poly, low-fidelity graphical style with deliberately clashing colors and interface elements.
The next game from Cruelty Squad's creator, a 'policing and punishment simulator', has dropped a new trailer showing off its gruesome mech combat
A series of large explosions in Bio Prototype.
This bizarre roguelike has a new take on the Vampire Survivors formula: letting you build your own custom weapons out of brains, eyeballs, and chimpanzee spines
Latest in Horror
The outlast trials setting
'You just have to make them think this world is real, and this world can hurt you': The Outlast Trials devs discuss a changing horror genre and an insatiable need for scares
Silent Hill f transmission trailer screenshots
Silent Hill f is no longer banned in Australia, but it still sounds pretty messed up
One of Repo's player characters, resembling a yellow pedal bin with googly eyes, encounters a skeletal, open mouthed face with glowing yellow eyes.
REPO dev says it wasn’t actually inspired by Lethal Company, and started as a singleplayer cleaning game: ‘It was nice, but far from what REPO is now’
Uplifted chimp Penn and cyber-rat Trip in the key art for Animal Use Protocol
Animal Use Protocol's dysfunctional chimp-rat alliance drags the Stasis series into a horrible new first-person era
A woman with short hair stands next to a pot plant, provocatively
GOG's version of Silent Hill 4 has been updated with missing content from the original console game
A man turns away from an open window while monsters gather in the dark
Look Outside is a survival horror RPG where you absolutely should not look outside
Latest in News
Assassin's Creed Shadows promo image
Ubisoft scores a legendary ratio against Elon Musk on his own platform—which hopefully marks a final end to all the Assassin's Creed Shadows' culture war nonsense
Tzarina Katarin Bokha, the Ice Queen of Kislev
Total War: Warhammer 3 rolls out a cool Kislev overhaul, changes befitting Tzeench’s magic, new projectile units and creakier skeletal horses
An image of a golden first place award from Geoguessr
'We're actually getting GeoGuessr on Steam before GTA 6': the Google Street View puzzler arrives on Valve's platform this April
Napster client circa 1999
Former music-pirating platform Napster to be reborn rather ironically as a metaverse for musicians to connect with their fans after $207 million deal
The snazzy red and black HyperX Cloud Alpha wireless headphones float in a teal void. The microphone is attached to the headset.
The best wireless gaming headset is now even better in the Amazon Big Spring Sale, boasting a more than $50 discount
A chip being held up in an Intel fab
Intel is reportedly 'working to finalize commitments from Nvidia' as a foundry partner, suggesting gaming potential for the 18A node