‘What Lurks Inside’ is a co-op horror game with strategic and survival elements developed and published by Dimension Unknown Studio LLC. Get a group of friends and investigate what lurks inside or, investigate it yourself and see if you can escape!

Before What Lurks Inside starts, you’re told if you are infected or not, if you are infected, your goal is to eliminate all the non-infected players before they can escape, or they eliminate you. If you are not infected, then you’re required to go around fixing the power and other issues with the place you wake up in. You must be careful though as the infected player or players can appear as normal characters until they wish to un-disguise and attack you. If the non-infected players can escape, they win. But if the infected can eliminate the players, they win.

A good thing to do is check out the “How to Play” section on the Main Menu as it gives you valuable information about the game, it gives you information for being a Survivor and Infected. As an infected player, you can place traps around the map which helps you kill the Survivors quicker if they fall into the trap. You can also sabotage certain areas of the map, making the survivors backtrack to that area and re-do whatever task they had.

As a survivor escaping gives you a lower score at the end of the game, so if you’re looking to score the highest, you’d need to have killed the infected before escaping. All players have a Health & Energy Bar, if you run too much you’ll be out of energy and need to wait for it to rejuvenate. You’ve also got a Flashlight Bar which shows how much Battery you have left of your flashlight, if you run out you might be stuck in the dark. There are replacement batteries scattered around the map though.

The controls are quite easy to understand and use when playing as there aren’t many to remember, the main controls that would be helpful to remember are the flashlight button which is “F” and the Voice Button which is “Tab”. These can be viewed before joining a lobby and playing, which is very helpful.

The graphics are okay, they don’t need to be super amazing in this type of title as you’re primarily underground in the lab, the environment when you first start is dark and spooky, but with the trusty flashlight, you can light the way. The design of the infected character is amazingly created, it makes you feel like you’re in danger. The Infected character has a lot of yellow spores, eyes, and other types of spooky features in its design.

If you’re looking for a game that could give you good jumpscares from just the sounds this is something for you, if you’re walking and looking around in the rooms something could break and you’ll most likely jump, which is something that I love in titles like this as you’re playing a horror game and you’d expect it to be a little bit scary.

The Ambient sounds are also quite nice due to them adding to the spook factor, however, I do wish that the Infected Enemy had some sort of sounds, other than footsteps and the sound it makes when it attacks you, it’s almost silent, it would have added to the scariness if it had a scream or something. There isn’t any music in the game, as the only time I heard any music was on the main menu screen.

In conclusion, What Lurks Inside seems like it can be an interesting game. As it’s currently only a Demo Version there is still a lot of work to be done to make it into the game it can be. It would be a lot of fun to play with friends but it’s still fun to play solo if you’re looking for more of a challenge. Currently, though the audio and controls are my favourite part of the game.

Written by: Mitchell Batchelor