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Eurogamer has dropped review scores and replaced them with a new recommendation system. Read the editor's blog to find out more. Deco Digital's impressive first-person puzzler Pneuma: Breath of Life is not a religious game - that's to say, it's not a game that espouses a particular faith, though it makes play of ideas that may be familiar from scripture. Brought superbly to life using Unreal Engine 4 (and with support for Oculus Rift, to put the cherry on the cake), its sumptuous Greco-Roman halls, courtyards and towers comprise a sort of demilitarised zone for believers and non-believers, reaching back to traditions of the sacred in art that are unlikely to strike anybody now living as blasphemous or preachy. And yet, it's a game that often makes you feel like you're under divine surveillance, a trespasser on holy ground.
It's in the way the world sits uncannily between thought experiment and habitable landscape - an impossible marble labyrinth that is strewn with props like hand brushes, urns and torches which imply the presence of other beings, not long absent. It's in the fact that there is birdsong but there are no birds. Most of all, it's in the curious metallic stencils of eyes that serve as Pneuma's key puzzle component, eyes that catch yours as you round corners or study the background in an oil painting. There is a quiet horror to these encounters which makes a game that could have seemed dustily abstract feel pressing and powerful.
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