Obey the Insect God Review

In our current era of hyper-realistic graphics, it’s easy to forget what games used to look like and some of the truly odd-looking titles that existed. One of the more popular techniques was called “digitised photorealism”, but it has long fallen out of use. However, Chunkle Freaky’s Movie Games' latest title, Obey the Insect God, has jumped into the scene to trigger the nostalgia sections of our brains. The question is whether there is an enjoyable game here or if this design would be better left to the annals of history.

The first thing to do is to break down just what digitised photorealism, also known as “digitised graphics”, actually is. Essentially, it involves filming actors in several poses and movements, then digitising these images into the game. The technique was used to great effect in Mortal Kombat 1 when it was released in the ‘90s, helping it to avoid the more cartoony sprites seen in other games. 

While it might not be the most impressive graphically, Obey the Insect God uses this design to create something that is visually very unique and, at times, hilarious. Now, it is apparent that they only had a couple of character models; most of the enemies appear to be played by the same guy as the main character; some great uses of random images help to break it up. This old school design seems to have been the inspiration behind some of the voice lines as well, which are compressed and hard as heck to understand sometimes. It’s a nice nostalgia trip, but the question is how the actual game plays. 

On the surface, Obey the Insect God is a pretty simple hack-and-slash in a similar vein to the original Prince of Persia game from 1989. You have a set of attacks and combos, as well as special skills and the ability to block and dodge. However, there’s a bit of complexity here for you to sink your teeth into. For one thing, Obey the Insect God is a difficult game; you don’t have much health and can’t really take a hit. You can siphon more life from opponents if you beat them up enough, but that’s it.

That’s easier said than done, as your enemies have both a health bar and a guard bar. Now, you could simply whack away until they die, or you could parry by blocking at the right time and instantly break their guard. This is a little difficult at times, as there can be a lag between controller input and the action on screen, which can make the fights annoyingly challenging, especially some of the boss fights. However, this issue is lessened as you unlock new skills and weapons, which help to reduce some of the challenge of combat, but this can take a while, and there are some punishing difficulty spikes before you reach that point. 

Aside from the combat, you’ll also be doing a fair amount of platforming to reach new areas and secrets. Interestingly, while the combat inputs can be a bit sloppy, the platforming is really smooth. The issue is that it’s also weirdly punishing at points. For instance, you wall jump and accidentally hit some spikes and take some damage. Fair enough, I’d say, but then the bounce effect from hitting the spikes knocks you into MORE spikes. Now, offering these kinds of cascades of issues isn’t necessarily bad, but when the main way you heal involves fighting people, losing most of your health to one jumping section is a real pain. 

Obey the Insect God is a game that offers an interesting look back at old game design, but it also has many of the same issues as those games. It’s certainly entertaining, and it’s wacky enough to find it enjoyable, but the challenging difficulty isn’t entirely by design, and that makes it really hard to recommend. If you want to know what it was like playing games back in the early ‘90s, then give it a go, but for everyone else, maybe give it a miss.