DaRmaZat Solo developed by Alessandro Guzzo, the creator of The Land of Pain and The Alien Cube, Cosmic Fear is a first-person adventure that blends cosmic horror with sci-fi. Clearly powered by photogrammetry, this third entry in Guzzo’s connected horror universe wears its Roswell influences on its sleeve, mixing Lovecraftian and occult themes with alien abduction and conspiracy theories. It’s a lot to throw into one story, but surprisingly, these elements come together into a pretty tasty cocktail.
In Cosmic Fear, both the storytelling and atmosphere are immediately on point. You play as Benedict West, a member of a paranormal investigation team alongside Jakob and your translator Rosa. When you arrive at a dark forest at night, your two companions are nowhere to be found. You soon stumble across a body lying in a pool of blood. Thankfully, it isn’t either of them, although there are clearly some murderous creatures roaming the area. Then, a bright light appears in the sky. A UFO? Before you can even find out, the game takes you back 24 hours earlier.
You’ve just left work and are heading to the Thornes brothers to follow up on a new clue in one of your darkest investigations. Their house is completely abandoned, an island in the lake behind it gives off a strange purple glow, and stones scattered around the garden emit an eerie green light. Inside a shed, ancient artifacts hint at a necropolis buried somewhere underground nearby, and it doesn’t take long before you realize there’s much more going on here. And that’s only the beginning, as the story keeps getting more exciting and the situation keeps getting more serious. You really start to feel involved in one big conspiracy spanning multiple locations, gradually becoming both the person uncovering the truth and the one who has to deal with it.
Cosmic Fear‘s puzzles are mostly familiar walking-sim fare, requiring you to find keys, equipment or power cylinders to open the next area. One problem, however, is that the environments are often huge, while the game gives you very little indication of what you’re actually looking for or where to find it. This turns some of the searching into unnecessary padding.
Unfortunately, things become even more frustrating once stealth enters the picture. You eventually have to sneak past enemies, but these encounters rely heavily on trial and error. There are too few save points, there is no option to disable detection, and getting caught usually means instant death. Even on Easy difficulty, you can still get killed regularly. Once an opponent detects you, you’re pretty much a dead man walking, as sprinting won’t help you escape and they’ll keep chasing you until they catch you.
Nevertheless, the storytelling and atmosphere are easily the game’s strongest points. Meanwhile, unsettling sounds constantly make you wonder what might be lurking nearby. Keeping you on edge throughout, the sound design works particularly well here, and combined with the detailed environments, it makes Cosmic Fear genuinely effective at creating an oppressive atmosphere.
Its exquisite Unreal Engine 5 visuals, built around photogrammetry and dynamic lighting, add even more to that. However, while the environments look impressive, the animations don’t always live up to that. This may also explain why you rarely see NPCs up close. When characters do appear, you’re often watching someone collapse or talking to them from a distance. And some of the murderous creatures don’t really look like they’re walking so much as sliding across the ground. I also ran into a few technical issues. After dying several times in a row, the game occasionally crashed with an error when I tried to load my save. Thankfully, this didn’t happen very often.
Final Thoughts
Cosmic Fear is an atmospheric Lovecraftian horror adventure that brings ancient mysteries, alien encounters and conspiracy theories together into one intriguing setup. Despite its flawed stealth sections and some seriously frustrating puzzle sections, its immersive sound design and beautiful Lovecraftian environments are genuinely impressive, while the story does a good job of pulling you deeper into its strange world.
Additional Information
Release Date: September 9, 2026
Reviewed On: PC. Download code provided by the publisher and PR agency.
Developer: Alessandro Guzzo
Publisher: Alessandro Guzzo
Relevant Links: Available on STEAM
