The Scourge | Tai Ương

Rare Reversee isn’t a typical debut indie studio — it’s a Ho Chi Minh City production house that spent years making high-end CGI commercials for brands like Samsung, Unilever, and Garena before turning that visual pedigree toward a game. Co-developed with Beaztek, The Scourge launched its first chapter into Early Access back in October 2024 and reached its full, final release this March. The result is a first-person horror puzzle game that trades the genre’s usual haunted-mansion default for something much more specific: 1990s Saigon, urban legends, and a family’s unresolved guilt, all filtered through the nightmares of a man named Nhat Huy.

Atmosphere over jump scares

The clearest statement of intent here is what the game refuses to do. There are no cheap jump scares propping up the tension — instead, The Scourge builds dread the slower way, through environmental storytelling, a radio-based narrative mechanic that gradually reveals the truth behind Nhat Huy’s haunting, and sound design that’s been singled out repeatedly as the game’s best-executed element. It’s a deliberate choice that puts the game closer in spirit to Silent Hill 2 or Devotion than to the flashlight-and-scream formula most horror games default to, and the visual polish — dilapidated apartment corridors rendered with real craft — backs that ambition up convincingly for a debut studio.

A story rooted in something specific

What separates The Scourge from the crowded first-person horror shelf isn’t its mechanics, it’s where it’s set and who’s telling the story. Rather than a generic Western mythology or an unnamed haunted house, this is built from actual Vietnamese urban legends and a specific decade of Saigon, filtered through a narrative about inherited guilt and family failure. The game doesn’t treat that setting as a skin over a familiar template — it’s the reason the story has an emotional pull that reviewers keep circling back to, even the ones with real complaints about everything else.

The gameplay doesn’t match the ambition

That’s also where the cracks show. Strip away the atmosphere and what’s left is fairly simple: slow first-person walking (there’s no run mechanic, which is a recurring complaint given the roughly five-hour runtime), light puzzle-solving that’s mostly clear but occasionally tips into one or two genuinely obtuse outliers, and some rough edges — reported glitches and animation that doesn’t always match the environmental polish around it. Translation is also uneven in a way worth knowing before buying: full voice acting exists only in Vietnamese, so English and the other five supported languages are subtitle tracks over dialogue you won’t understand without reading. None of this undoes the atmosphere the game is built on, but it does mean the “puzzle” half of “horror puzzle game” is doing noticeably less work than the “horror” half.

Verdict

The Scourge is a strong pitch for anyone who wants their horror slow, atmospheric, and actually about something — the cultural specificity here is rare and the sound design alone justifies a lot of patience with the simpler mechanics around it. If you’re coming for intricate puzzle design or fast-paced survival horror, temper expectations; if you’re coming for a haunting, well-told five hours with three endings worth chasing, it earns its 93% positive standing.