Even beyond the terrifying world of Resident Evil Requiem, the horror genre has more to offer. On September 25, the retro-inspired Lovecraft shocker The Order of the Snake Scale is launching on PS5 and Switch.

The Order of the Snake Scale originally slithered onto PC back on March 13, 2024. Despite (or perhaps because of) being a rather intriguing horror title, it barely did better there than the 30th clone of the trash-clicker Banana. At least that’s what today’s pitiful 23 Steam reviews would suggest.

Still, publisher Ultimate Games S.A. released The Order of the Snake Scale on Xbox on September 4—and on the same day announced ports for PS4, PS5, and Switch. These versions are slated for release on September 25, though it’s still unclear how much coin you’ll have to fork over. The PC version currently goes for a cool nine bucks, while the Xbox version will set you back $13.

Okay, so what makes The Order of the Snake Scale special?

Whoa there, slow down. 😉 First off: do you know H.P. Lovecraft? That old horror guy with the tentacles. I mean, he didn’t have tentacles himself, but he sure had a thing for them—and for sea monsters. And The Order of the Snake Scale, in turn, has a thing for Lovecraft.

However, Polish developer FM Simple Games Studio isn’t basing this one on any specific Lovecraft tome. So just expect a Lovecraftian, surreal horror vibe wrapped in a dystopian sci-fi setting.

Fittingly for a horror style loosely rooted in the 1930s, The Order of the Snake Scale is presented in an isometric perspective. Old-school gamers will recognize this “camera angle” from classic CRPGs, and of course, the original Diablo from 1996 rocked the same look. But FM Simple Games Studio’s much newer creation has something even cooler up its sleeve.

Death through the scope

When you start feeding bullets to Lovecraftian horrors, you don’t just do it from the isometric view. A scoped view also pops up, letting you shoot enemies from a first-person perspective. It looks stylish, too, because the endless darkness of horror games is pierced here by a night-vision scope. Just take a look at the image below.

Pretty sweet, huh? Just to spell it out: when you’re blasting a horror freak in the face through the scope, the isometric screen also shows you what’s happening. So when some gooey head goes flying, you get to... appreciate the moment from two angles.

What else?

Naturally, as a Lovecraft-inspired horror trip, The Order of the Snake Scale delivers a story too. You play a detective in the dystopian city of Happy Rock, investigating the death of a woman. Dystopian? Yeah—this is an authoritarian state that seizes property, bans religion, and enforces mass sterilization. Among other things.

The video below—cookie-free!—shows the game in action.

Marketing promises an open world, though it’s more like semi-open at best. Still, that’s something—and who really needs fully open horror worlds anyway? Alongside some brawling and bits of story, the gameplay also features logic puzzles, platforming, and resource management in true survival horror fashion.