Writhe is dripping with atmosphere and dread but doesn’t have a lot else going for it. There is no mention of any sense of story or what is going on. The graphics lack either a eye catching style or technical detail. I have played many short games and feel that you can do a lot with even the sub ten minutes this game has but it just didn’t. The footsteps sound effects were fantastic and tied in with the well done atmosphere.

    I played Writhe on Linux. It didn’t crash and I didn’t notice any bugs. There is no menu system at all and no graphics settings at all. The game is either capped at 25 FPS or it had some serious performance issues. There was one brief time where it dropped to 1 FPS for a second or two. Given the lack of detailed graphics I fail to see the reason behind the drop or the low overall frame rate. There is no save system but given the short nature that isn’t a big deal.

Game Engine: Unity
Graphics API: OpenGL

GPU Usage: 0-54 %
VRAM Usage: 813-820 MB
CPU Usage: 4-5 %
RAM Usage: 2.0 GB
Frame Rate: 1-25 FPS

    Overall it is tough to recommend Writhe even for the cost of free. There are simply better free games out there. The lovely sense of dread it gave me wasn’t enough to cover for the lack of story; visual detail or performance issues.

My Score: 5/10

My System:

Intel i7-6700 | 16GB DDR4-3000 CL15 | XFX RX 590 8GB Fat Boy | Mesa 22.2.4 | Samsung 870 QVO 1TB | Solus | Mate 1.27.0 | Kernel 6.1.5-229.current