The Corruption Within is a short, horror/mystery, point and click, pixel game. You play as Samuel Taylor, and his family has gone missing during a camping trip in the mountains around England, oh and it’s the Victorian era so you don’t have a flashlight or a cell phone, have fun finding them. Most of the game is set inside and around a mysterious mansion out in the middle of nowhere that houses a wealthy family and a few of their workers. You’re invited into the house to try and figure out where your wife and children have disappeared to, but not everything is as it seems.

Most of the items you find are pretty easy to find, as they don’t blend into the environment which is nice. Sometimes you have to go back to pick up items you know of because Samuel wouldn’t pick up something without a purpose which is logical but maybe a little annoying for the player who’s likely just going to be telling the screen that, ‘This is clearly something important, pick it the fuck up already.” There’s a few handfuls of items in the game not a ton, the game is only about two hours long. Everything makes sense where you use it, for the most part, there are a couple items that don’t necessarily make sense until it’s used.

Most of the game is focused on talking to the wealthy family and their workers to get information to figure out what you need to do next. Most of the workers are fed up with the place to varying degrees, and want you to do things for them so they can get the fuck out of there. Some of the family wants you to do things for them as well, but mostly you’re kind of fucking things up for the family albeit mostly accidentally. There’s only adults left of the family as the only two children died years ago. There are, I believe, five workers, and five wealthy family members. When you talk to people they often have a number of dialogues to choose from, but in the end you have to talk to them about everything they know. To aid with this, the options you’ve selected are removed afterwards, this is great so you don’t accidentally choose the same thing twice, but it’s also a problem for those of you who forget what was said as you can’t ask them again.

There are some small twists that I believe are supposed to be big twists, but they’re pretty obvious honestly. And there’s an interesting little aside to the game when you finish it; the game tells you what happens to everyone after the events of the game. From that you might expect there to be multiple endings, there’s not, there’s no replay value in the game each playthrough is the exact same and you have to go through the same dialogue options, etc, it’s all the same each time. That all being said, that aside is interesting, I enjoyed reading what happened to everyone after the events of the game. There are some small choices you make in the game that impact the information after the events of the game, but they’re minuscule and don’t really matter but are interesting none-the-less.

Overall, the game wasn’t bad, I wouldn’t say too much that I liked it, it had some interesting sections to it, but I’ll admit I’m the the primary audience for this kind of game as I don’t like point and clicks usually, they get boring to me. I would say it’s because there’s not enough going on as I mostly play action games, but I can’t even use that because I love visual novels. But for some reason, I just can’t get into point and click games usually. Again though, there are good parts to the game, good interactions between characters, and good drama scenes in it, but overall it’s just not for me, because finding items and figuring out how to use them is just boring to me.

The Corruption Within was developed by Cosmic Void.

Point of Sale: Steam, itch.io.

Price: $10


A review copy of the game was provided by someone on Twitter who I don’t believe is part of the dev team.

darkmikasonfire does not award Not Another Weekend the Indie Gamer Team Seal of Approval.