Nedra is the work of developer Davit Andreasyar and their small team, it follows the story of a Soviet-era Antarctic station which has been overrun by frozen horrors, as well as its looming, ever-present structure.
When I first looked into Nedra, I thought that the premise sounded great, being a big fan of films like The Thing… and suspenseful horror in general. I thought the premise of heat-seeking monsters would be amazing but, in reality, they just didn’t live up to what I had imagined.
The idea was that the monsters featured would follow and hunt you based on your core temperature, leaving you in a dangerous limbo between freezing to death or being torn apart, however instead the biggest sense of fear that I had was trying to manage my resources just to progress to the next part of the level.
The enemy intellect was incredibly basic, with small hordes of the same model being thrown at you over and over again. In the beginning it was interesting seeing them trying to shuffle towards you at a surprising speed, but, about halfway through I was hoping to see at least a different monster but it never came.
At one point, while in a cave, I thought I had found a new towering monster only to be met with about six enemies stacked on top of each other just waiting for me to come to them in some sort of column of death… which seemed odd. This sort of thing seemed to normally be obscured by weather effects but in that location it was underground, leading to me seeing a few of these hills of frozen people.
Some of the areas were vast and wide for no real reason, and you had to manage your health and temperature with a limited amount of items, leaving me with more of a sense of frustration than fear. This being paired with the game only having two real enemy types meant it wasn’t hard to quickly figure out how to just skirt by, or use some of the questionable weapons to try and combat them.
The system in Nedra of which if you were cold enough the monsters couldn’t see you was interesting, leading to a few tense moments where you had to choose between eating worms (giving an instant temperature drop) produced from enemies, or drinking an alcoholic drink to warm back up again which did let you decide whether to fight or flee but often you needed to fight, otherwise you were dog piled by the shuffling hordes.
If there was an award for softest weapons possible Nedra would likely take the cake, you are given a flare gun and a crowbar quite early on, with each taking multiple shots/swings to take out one of the monster enemies. Humans were a lot easier to combat and seemed to respond better to being hit but the monsters were incredibly janky and unpredictable when fighting — with some of their swings reaching much further than they should have.
On the flipside the most useful weapon was the handheld flamethrower which melted most enemies down quite quickly and was also paired as a way to clear obstacles, so it was absolutely needed throughout at least half of the game. Human enemies were ironically more affected by it, almost dying instantly as soon as you tapped the flamethrower in their face, making it feel a bit weird when the weak-to-fire monsters would take several bursts to take down.
Nedra establishes some early ground rules with the enemies, such as frozen monsters not liking heat and being weaker in areas of heat but in reality it made little to no difference at all and areas that seemed safe were often harder due to not being able to use fire indoors as it would end up killing you.
Most of the game is told in the past tense with a narrator retelling the story as you play through it, most of the time the storytelling was okay, adding some much needed detail to what was going on, but, at times — like, when one of your bars needed tending to — the narrator would repeat the same lines over and over about how he needed pills for health or his rare tincture for warmth. This became repetitive and annoying pretty fast.
The story is quite short but did lead me deeper into the madness. The narrator had names for everything already which if it is being retold would make sense but it was weird hearing him say them when seeing certain things for the first time. I also think the voiceover may have been an AI generated voice and came across quite monotone, especially in situations that would have had the character freaking out or having any sort of emotion.
Throughout Nedra there were a number of notes filled with context and hints to help with some of its puzzles but one stood out to me more than any. There was a note that mentions the code to the door is in a secret room and needed to be found to progress. The secret room itself was very easy to find behind a bookshelf but the question was how to get into it.
I did try using one of the features Nedra shows in its prologue, a push mechanic, it seemed appropriate but at first it didn’t work, I tried a few times to no avail. I found myself exploring the entire building looking for switches, another note mentioning a code or anything, I tried hitting it, interacting with everything and finally I tried pushing it again and it worked. There were a number of times where the mechanics just didn’t quite work whether it was the physics or the fire mechanics and this was about twenty minutes of pure frustration. This was especially compounded by the fact that, surely, the narrator already knew the code?
Some of the other notes scattered around even started to look just like plain directions to tell you how to progress with one note and puzzle literally just saying go look at the roof in the other room and had a whole set of code directions to a safe with very little thinking really needed to be done on your part.
Overall, Nedra sounded amazing in theory, but its execution just doesn’t hit the mark. With some solid storytelling elements let down by weaker gameplay. I think with a few more enemy varieties, some more impactful moments and a lot less walking this could have been a really solid entry into the horror genre.
You can try Nedra for yourself on PC below.
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