Climb down a hole, pursued by a centipede

Spiders don't bother me at all, but centipedes? Centipedes glisten. Centipedes look like worms wearing a crab exoskeleton. Centipedes, wet slick and scurrying, are the perfect organism for sluicing inside small holes and pipes like Eugene Victor Tooms - and as a human being I contain an unfortunate number of small holes and pipes.

Luckily I never need to encounter the giant centipede pursuing me in Idols Of Ash. As long as I can perfectly descend into an impossibly deep well and navigate forgotten caves and crumbling megastructures using nothing but a grappling hook, I'll be just fine. Just fine!

Uh oh.

Idols Of Ash costs $3 from Itch.io and I completed it in an hour or so, much of which was spent clumsily falling to my death. You could go play it in lieu of reading this post, and you should.

Despite my clumsiness and dislike of chitinous arthropods, Idols Of Ash is surprisingly generous. Your health bar is substantial, you can fall further than you expect without taking damage, and there are glowing health pickups and a handful of checkpoints to mark your journey downwards. If you do fall further than you would ordinarily survive, your grappling hook can often catch you, and it never rips your arms out of their sockets.

This relative kindness to the player allows Idols Of Ash to ramp up tension and difficulty in other ways, without tipping into frustration. "Grappling hook" is the right name for the climbing implement you're carrying, for example, but it's not the handheld, automated zipline found in other games. This is a thoroughly earthbound device. You need to cast it out almost like a fishing line, without a reticle or dotted parabola to guide you. Even if you perfectly judge the distance and length of your rope, it's not uncommon for the hook itself to bonk fruitlessly against a wall or otherwise fail to find a flat surface on which to grip.

If it does find purchase, you'll need to use ctrl or shift to climb up or down the rope, both of which take time. You'll often also need to take a risk and swing or drop from the bottom of said rope to find your next safe harbour, too.

Sometimes, there simply is no next platform accessible to you. If Idols Of Ash is generous with health and physics, the scratchily textured geometry of the space is a big old bastard. You need to always be scouting ahead, peering down into the dark to find your next route, lest you end up dangling from a rope like Guybrush Threepwood with nowhere to go but back up. Going back up is very bad, because that's usually where the centipede is.

You need to be scouting ahead, but then you hear the skittering of dozens of enormous feet and suddenly all common sense is forgotten. The centipede's pursuit of you is not constant, but the threat of it is, and that click-clacking growing louder puts me into a frenzy. I died more times from panic than from actually being eaten. On several occasions I leapt from a ledge without properly connecting my grapple first, and on several others I just blindly walked over an edge with my neck craned upwards at the abomination in pursuit.

I love how the centipede moves, even as I hate it. It winds down and around Idols Of Ash's cave walls, its monastic ruins, its stretching tree roots, always steady in its pace, its body clipping through itself in ways that only make it more unheimlich. It has the confidence of movement you, the player, can only dream of.

Yet Idols Of Ash is clearly a power fantasy more than a horror game, because you do find your way down. You find the one ledge that leads to the next, and you swing and you jump, and your legs and arms never tire. You master the space, if not the creature that lives within it. There's a story here, too, told in flashes of memory and snippets of dialogue, but your descendent climb and all its desperate falls, sudden devourings and eventual victories are the real story of your time with it. I don't play horror games and I don't like centipedes, but when I reached Idols Of Ash's nadir and unlocked "Nightmare" mode, I immediately clambered inside for more.