Video game architects are terrible at their jobs. Has there ever been a ship, tomb, or castle in a video game that could be used for anything other than hiding medical kits and requiring mad parkour skills to reach ancient artifacts? Before any disaster befell them, were these structures at all practical for everyday use?

These questions were left unanswered by Unlife, an action platform adventure set shortly after a monster-filled apocalypse sent people into hiding. It’s an old-school apocalypse, caused by nuclear fallout, not industrial or artificial intelligence. Ah, the adorable graphic scares of yesteryear.

All of this is relayed to the player in a cinematic chock full of grammatically incorrect text. I’m normally put off by this (the English major is, after all), but here, it somehow added to the game’s B-movie charm. From start to finish, from the mechanics to the graphics, this is a Saturday afternoon popcorn game.

You, our bearded hero, are the last survivor of some sort of industrial platform in the sea. An oil rig? Research facility? A military installation? If that became clear, I missed it. At first, you’re just trying to survive, gathering supplies, med kits, and weapons. This requires a lot of stair climbing, as obviously elevators and connecting rooms were not a thing in your workplace.

So you’ll spend a good portion of the game exploring your environment in an attempt to find what you need to access other areas of the facility. You will need to find supplies along the way and you will need to fight many monsters. These range from rabid rats to massive bone-and-flesh mutants that serve as the game’s bosses. Everything is really creepy, heightened by the atmosphere of the game.

As you’d expect (and wish), the graphics are dark throughout. You can turn on the lights and turn on your flashlight (watch the battery level), but they only serve to illuminate the immediate area. There are always dark corners where monsters may be lurking or objects hidden. The game never really ambushes you unfairly, but just moving around the screen can be annoying. There are even some platforming sections. These are simple enough to handle when you’re just exploring, but can be tricky during combat.

In fact, the combat is one of the disappointments of the game, mainly because of the controls. You move with the L stick, but control the direction you’re looking with the R stick. If you move left and look left, you’ll quickly run forward. If you’re moving left but looking right, you’re backing up slowly. Awkward at first, I liked this because it allowed me to slowly move away from enemies while stabbing them. The R-stick is also used to aim your attack, a dynamic I didn’t realize until I’d been killed by rats half a dozen times. When the real reveal arrives, I hope it comes with a tutorial.

The separate movement and orientation controls prove cumbersome, however, when you’re fighting against multiple enemies, and that will happen a lot. Although you can switch between various weapons found, you should mainly rely on your knife. As such, I’d rather not have to seriously think about the close quarters battle.

It also doesn’t help that the medkit usage is incorrect. I know it’s the ZL key, but the game screen tells me it’s L, so that’s what I hit sometimes in the heat of battle. As mentioned earlier, grammatical errors are fine when there are so many that they become a personality trait. But developers, please, at least run the UI through QA, ok?

The other problem with the game is that there is no real story progression. Our bearded hero is trying to escape because he may hold the secret to saving humanity. Fair, but nothing really happens to advance this or create any kind of urgency. Escape should be enough, because that’s really all there is.

That doesn’t mean, however, that the getaway isn’t fun. There’s a good balance between exploration and combat, and accessing new locations—especially underwater—was satisfying. Some of the combat is quite frustrating, however, a feeling made worse by the lack of game inventory. Death can set a player back quite a bit, and nothing ruins a game session faster than answering, “Do I really want to go through all that again?”

On the plus side, every death results in this embarrassing graphic…

I sure do!

So, again, Unlife is the gaming equivalent of a B-level action/horror movie—the kind we used to rent on VHS at gas stations because the actual video rental stores didn’t stock it. The kind with taglines like, “Take the stairs, take the stairs! For God’s sake, take the stairs!!!” (Of course, here, stairs are stairs and they’re your only option anyway.) If that sounds like fun, then Unlife is fun. Unless you happen to be scrolling through Tubi for your movies—which I guess is the modern equivalent of renting tapes at gas stations—you’ll probably want to pass this one up.