If you enjoy the novelty and challenge of fiddly first-person shooter controls, do check out the free new “experimental survival horror game” Neural Parasite. Can you fight your way out of a Nazi bunker when everything is controlled by clicking? Even simply moving involves clicking on pictures of your left and right shoes, moving faster as you alternate shoes faster. Neural Parasite is short and it’s free, so hop to it! Or, click on one of your shoes to hop to it, I suppose.
You’re a prisoner in a Nazi research bunker where something has gone wrong, turn them into lumbering grinning zombies. To escape, all you need do is click a couple thousand times.
Everything in Neural Parasite is controlled by clicking on stuff. Left-click on your shoes to move forwards, going faster if you alternate feet (sadly, clicking repeatedly on one shoe does not make you pivot). Right-click on your shoes to backpedal. Click arrows on the side of the screen to turn. Click on stuff to interact. Right-click to draw your revolver and left-click to fire. Reload by clicking on spent shells to eject them, then clicking on empty chambers to refill them.
It’s not a complex game. Explore corridors, find keys, open doors, shoot monsters. It’s not difficult either, if you manage to keep your cool. The problem is that because the controls are unfamiliar and alien, you can’t fall back on seasoned FPS instincts. It takes active effort and concentration to do anything. Panic and you’ll fumble your clicks, maybe running towards something you’re trying to escape or fumbling a reload. Thankfully, you can find a limited supply of knives that’ll instakill enemies, automatically jammed into their skulls as an emergency backup if they get too close. You can outright evade some baddies too, if you’re feeling confident.
Neural Parasite never reaches the point of Wolfire’s excellent Receiver games, which use many individual keys to control every part of the surprisingly complex mechanisms of firearms. There, you come to feel surpremely cool and confident when you nail a reload under pressure. Here, you simply learn how to play the video game and have that learning tested under mild pressure. But I still found it fun, and it ended at a good point before the novelty wore thin or frustrating.
You can grab Neural Parasite free from Itch.io for Windows. I’ve only now noticed that it launched on actual Christmas Day. God bless us, everyone.
Now I’m off to go play the game which inspired Neural Parasite, Car Game, which is also free. That does also make me want to revisit classic ursine driving sim Enviro-Bear 2000.
