The Flayed Man could not be more laser targeted at me if I designed it myself. I’m a huge fan of Clive Barker’s work, with the body horror delights of Hellraiser being a seminal title for me. This appears to be a clear influence for The Flayed Man as there is a similar narrative of guilt, judgement and temptation at play here. You begin as the titular flayed man with no idea of who you are and how you got to be where you are. During the short 30 minute adventure, you’ll explore the handful of rooms in the house and find objects to solve puzzles. Fairly standard fare, but the quality of the design and the wonderful pixel art goes a long way to make it feel fresh. Oh, and this costs less than a cup of coffee.
Unlike many point and click games, there is little dialogue to go through – indeed, at the beginning of the game you have no tongue or even an inner monologue to assist you. As the game progresses you regain these faculties and this means that you have to revisit rooms afterwards to learn more about your surroundings. The puzzles here are well designed and include traditional inventory management and even a timing based one.
The star of the show, aside from the creepiness of the setting, is the pixel art here. Everything in the game is positively dripping in gore and the feeling of playing is uncannily close to an immersive Clive Barker story. Just as Barker’s best work is his short stories, The Flayed Man benefits from being such a compact adventure as it doesn’t get lost in the main problems of larger point and click games where you end up aimlessly wandering around multiple screens looking for the next interactive object or combining every item together to try and find the solution to a problem that makes no sense outside of the game’s internal logic.
The difficulty for The Flayed Man, and for countless other games that are released onto Steam each day, is getting lost in the shuffle. Developer Snoring Dog Games took a novel approach of initially releasing the game for free and having a small optional paid DLC to support them and pay the artists that brought this vision to pixellated life. As of the end of last week, the game is now paid, though still only at £2.99 (currently 25% off at £2.24), and the £3.99 Supporters Pack now has a CC BY-NC 4.0 license for using the assets in non-commercial works.
Even with this, the stated goal by Snoring Dog is simply to cover costs of an accountant, paying the game’s artists, and hopefully raise enough funds to allow them to make another game. Having played through the game multiple times to unlock all the endings and achievements I can highly recommend that you check it out and, if you like it, throw a few more notes the dev’s way through the DLC.
