Gore Doctor is a horror game from Salient Games which came out in March 2024 on Steam before inevitably making its way to consoles a year later. But rather than being your usual Resident Evil/Silent Hill kind of affair, this one’s going for a something of a Saw vibe which isn’t something that’s ever been done all that well in the world of videogames. Even the Xbox 360 Saw game was fairly sub-par. So can Gore Doctor finally give fans of blood, guts and giblets the horror game they’ve been waiting for?
You play as a man who has been abducted and wakes to find himself trapped in an institute by Dr. Gorberg, a former psychiatrist who goes mad after losing his wife. And along with the usual seven stages of grief, the doctor adds an eighth which is to kidnap people and torture them until they become monsters. He’s also not great at paying his electricity bill it seems as the place is incredibly dark.
When you start off, you’re just walking around in first-person trying to find whatever object or clue you need to progress but, here’s the thing, everything is dark, most of the rooms you go in have nothing in them and there are plenty of other objects there that you can pick up and look at but are otherwise useless. So, initially, it’s all a bit frustrating but even when you get a torch later on, the game is so comically dark that we had to up the gamma on the game to the max and pull the curtains in the room we were playing it in.
It reminded us of the old Xbox 360 game Condemned, itself another study in grim darkness, but somehow Gore Doctor is less interactive and impressive than that game. What you get here are a few basic puzzles where finding the thing you need is far harder than whatever logic the puzzle needs you to figure out. And with it all being set in a typical dilapidated facility, it all just feels very Silent Hill but without the creative enemies or interesting set pieces.
For a game that costs £15.99, this feels very amateurish in the way it all holds together. Every aspect of the game is marred by some sort of poor design. The one aspect that could have been interesting is the work of Dr. Gorberg himself. You’ll sometimes see one of his victims die in what’s meant to be a gory Saw type of thing but these are done in such a weird way. For example, the first time it happens you see a man kneeling on the floor and then a circular saw blade cuts him in half. There’s a bit of blood and the guy sort of explodes into chunks but at no point does he react. The same later when a guy is electrocuted. It’s as if the doctor is destroying mannequins filled with ketchup rather than dispatching victims.
This extends to the combat. At some point you get a gun and an axe but the enemies that you fight just don’t seem to react to any damage you inflict. In fact, if you miss the occasional blood spray, you might not know you’ve hit them at all. If you’re going to make gore the main feature of the game, at least get the reactions right. And the combat’s just weird throughout as there are barely any enemies in the game and the boss battles are oddly underwhelming, especially the first one where a cartoonish fat butcher woman chases you but her pathfinding means that just standing behind a table is enough to confuse her to the point where she can’t attack you. And that’s not a hard to spot bug, it’s almost unavoidable. Ridiculous. It gives the impression of a game that’s just not been playtested. And that tracks actually because if I was playtesting it, I’d be saying ‘I CAN’T SEE ANYTHING.’
With its dated presentation, dark visuals, clumsy combat and poor storytelling, Gore Doctor has the feel of a cheap PSP game (although it’d be impossible to play on a PSP thanks to these insanely dark graphics). PSN is awash with very cheap, basic games that hold together just enough to count as a finished game but offer very little to modern gamers in terms of fun, ingenuity and quality and unfortunately this game feels like one of those but at five or six times the usual price. It’s only three hours long too so the price seems kind of ridiculous for what you get.
We can’t recommend this one at all unfortunately. It’s just not a good game in any aspect. The story is thin and uncompelling, the combat is a disaster and you need the eyes of a cat to be able to play it. So, stock up on apples as this is one doctor you’ll want to keep away.
- Weak combat
- Feels cheap and unpolished