Post-Soviet horror trinket Kletka is an endless descent in an elevator that wants to eat you

Every time I step out of an elevator, I accelerate wildly in case the elevator falls without warning and chops me in half, leaving the frontal and, all things considered, inferior portion of my body swaying in place for a second before collapsing in a cloud of bisected bone and organ. Don’t laugh: I know you do this too. Kletka isn’t helping: created by in404, it’s a horror scavenging game reminiscent of Lethal Company and Golden Light, in which you ponderously plummet through the layers of an “endless” post-Soviet Gigastructure, scrounging fuel, parts and provender for an elevator that wants to eat you.

The elevator’s roof is a gnashing, lipless mouth with a lantern dangling beneath it like a droplet of drool. It parts and closes ever so gently as you scurry around with hunched shoulders, refuelling the generator and patching the machinery. You can almost feel its breath in your hair. Needless to say, you’ll want to keep it sated with edible objects pilfered from the surrounding world. I spent my 15 minutes in the Steam demo with both eyes riveted to the screen displaying the creature’s level of peckishness and my cursor hovering over the brake lever.

The rooms and corridors of the Gigastructure aren’t much safer than the elevator. They’re as dark as a dog’s interior, and chocabloc with traps such as landmines and lakes of electrified water. The game’s rusty, lichenous PS1-era visual direction makes spotting resources and items a fiddle, and your all-important torch has to switch off and recharge at regular intervals. Worst of all, you’ll have to deal with Samosbor. I’m not sure what Samosbor is, but you can’t kill it. If you see a lot of red light, run run run as you would from a Balrog with the mumps.

Kletka’s demo includes a multiplayer mode for up to four – this won’t allow crossplay with the full release, which is due later this year. You can spectate online games and join the proceedings when the host finds a vending machine in the Gigastructure, as when rescuing Survivors from closets in Left 4 Dead. Also as in Left 4 Dead, though for different reasons, co-op partners are worth having around even when they suck at the game. Teamwork makes the dream work, yes, but Kletka’s Steam blurb offers the fine counterargument that “friends make for good fuel”.