They breathe is an… interesting game. It was originally released on 2011 and finally released on Switch. It’s a mix of survival horror, puzzle, and some sort of bullet hell combination of a game presented in a visual style of a simple drawing. It’s very short, but could actually be way longer than it should. As you will die. a lot.
The game doesn’t provide any hint other than you can press A to “boost” yourself to a direction. It doesn’t tell you what to do and you have to figure it out yourself. Thankfully it’s divided between waves where you can slowly figure out what to do in a certain situation. Such as the first level where there’s just nothing but air bubbles. you will quickly figure out that you can run out of air and will have to hit the air bubbles to survive. And it gets more complicated the deeper you go. There is no health gauge, there is no timer. It’s all up to you to figure it out.
I’m tempted not to reveal anything as part of the fun is figuring out what to do or what to avoid/ interact with. Therefore i’d keep this a bit shorter than it should be.
It won’t take long until you start figuring out what’s going on, the deeper you go, the scarier/ darker it gets. The visuals of other frogs slowly dying and how the “cow-jellyfish” enemies drags them down will gives you a sense of eerie/ creepiness of the situation.
Gameplay starts simple, but gets harder and harder, you starts with chasing bubbles to survive, to avoid enemies, to helping other frogs WHILE avoiding enemies, to help other frogs avoid said enemies and help them survive while you yourself have to survive as well. There’s a certain visual element that will help indicate how close you are to dying as the screen distorts more and more, making it harder to see anything.
I would really suggests you play this with an earphone, there’s no amazing musical score but the creepy sound of cows mooing underwater can be a bit unsettling. And it does wonders to add to the atmosphere.
The game, thankfully gives you some checkpoints and save just in case you want to continue later, or dies way too many times in a certain wave and needed to breathe (get it? ha)
It is a very short game, as some of my friends have told me that they finished it in an hour or so, i find myself still pretty much dying and repeating the same area after an hour. I am that horrible.
Finally, the game does have co-op play. which actually makes the game harder than playing single player.
Would i recommend it? funny enough. Yes. It is after all quite a cheap game. and will give you some cheap thrills. Albeit for a short time.
