ANOMALITH Review — A Fascinating World With an Identity Crisis

FuRyu has a habit of releasing games that sound incredible on paper but struggle to live up to their own ambitions, and ANOMALITH is a prime example. Just reading the tagline of “survival-horror first person shooter where you walk through distorted realities in retro-futuristic Japan, rationing your resources in an attempt to fight your way through otherworldly horrors” is enough to gain most people’s attentions. Unfortunately, while ANOMALITH has no shortage of interesting ideas, actually playing through it paints a much different, more disappointing picture.

The Promising Setting

Anomalith has you play as Reona Minazuki, a 17-year-old girl who joins the Anomaly Zone Countermeasures Office in search of her missing friend, Arisa Kato. This backstory for Reona is drip-fed to you between main story missions in the form of flashbacks as the game progresses.

The setting is easily one of the more interesting aspects of ANOMALITH. These Anomaly Zones are essentially distorted pockets of reality where the laws of nature no longer apply. Ordinary locations become twisted, nightmarish versions of themselves, and the creatures inhabiting them are just as unpleasant. There’s a heavy emphasis on liminal spaces and the kind of environmental horror that makes familiar places feel uncomfortable.

It’s an interesting premise, and I enjoyed some of the smaller details surrounding the organization and how humanity has adapted to the existence of these zones. One such detail was that divers are usually pumped full of drugs to counteract the mutations caused by exposure to Anomaly Zones, which is perfectly equal part horrifying and fascinating.

Similarly, there’s also the Doomsday Clock, a mysterious object that counts down to humanity’s extinction. Although simple, it’s a solid foundation for a hook, and I certainly give the game points for that. It’s stuff like this that breathes life into the world and makes you want to keep playing and learning more about it. 

One-note Characters

Unfortunately, while ANOMALITH has an intriguing setting, I can’t say the same about most of its character writing.

The cast consists almost entirely of familiar anime character tropes, and while that isn’t necessarily a problem on its own, the writing rarely gives these characters enough personality to feel like anything more. Everyone seems to have one defining trait, one expression, and a handful of predictable responses that they repeat throughout the game. You can usually tell what a character is going to say before they’ve even opened their mouth.

This has become something of a recurring issue with FuRyu’s games, and although I’ve come to expect it to some degree, that doesn’t make sitting through particular sections of the dialogue any less grating. There are only so many times a character can deliver the same personality-driven response before you start wishing they’d have something else to contribute to your experience.

Thankfully, the voice acting does a lot of heavy lifting here. The performances are excellent across the board, and I was genuinely surprised by how much the cast managed to elevate some of the weaker dialogue. This becomes especially noticeable during the later sections, where the story starts leaning more heavily into its emotional moments. There are scenes that work largely because of how well they’re delivered, even when the writing itself hasn’t done enough to earn that emotional payoff.

It’s a shame, because with some more attention given to the characters, I think ANOMALITH could’ve had a genuinely compelling story to go along with its fascinating world.

Exploring the Anomaly Zones

The primary gameplay loop involves entering Anomaly Zones, fighting enemies, gathering resources, completing objectives, and eventually making your way back, basic extraction shooter stuff. Between these excursions, you’ll spend time at the Control Room, which serves as the game’s central hub to prepare for missions.

In theory, it’s a tried and tested formula. However, I have one major complaint about the exploration, and it’s something that bothered me almost immediately: walking anywhere in ANOMALITH is a chore.

I first noticed this when the game introduced the Control Room. What should’ve been a relatively straightforward hub for preparing equipment, interacting with characters, and progressing the story instead made me painfully aware of how much time I was spending just walking around. It might sound like a minor complaint isolated to the game’s large hub, but unfortunately, this feeling never really went away.

It becomes especially frustrating during the extraction levels, where you’ll frequently find yourself retracing your steps through areas you’ve already explored collect every possible item. This is when you’ll find yourself wishing there was a faster way to traverse through the maps than just running. And when you find yourself wishing for 2x pace in your survival horror videogame, you know something has gone wrong.

The game offers a decent amount of equipment customization and resource management, and having materials to collect at least gives you some incentive to explore. However, those rewards don’t always justify the time spent getting to them, particularly when the journey itself isn’t especially enjoyable.

There’s a difference between making exploration slow and deliberate to build tension and simply making it slow. ANOMALITH feels like it falls into the latter category far too often.

An Identity Crisis in Combat

If there’s one aspect of ANOMALITH that best represents my issues with the game, it’s the combat.

On paper, there’s a lot going on here. Reona has access to various firearms and supernatural Anomalization Skills including melee, ranged, and defensive Skills. You can customize your weapons, improve your equipment, and experiment with different abilities and combos to deal with the creatures inhabiting the Anomaly Zones.

It’s a fairly extensive collection of mechanics. The problem is that none of these systems feels sufficiently fleshed out, and the game struggles to make them work together in any way that’s truly satisfying. There’s a bit of clunkiness when trying to combo it all together that ruins the feel of combat making it feel like the systems are working against you. Which is a shame because, individually there’s potential in each of the combat systems.

The shooting is functional, but it lacks the refinement I’d expect from a game that places such a heavy emphasis on gunplay and put such care into gun designs. Meanwhile, the melee combat feels like an entirely separate system that never quite finds its place. You have access to parries and counterattacks, but the actual process of transitioning between ranged and close-quarters combat isn’t nearly as satisfying as it should be.

It’s almost as though the developers wanted the deliberate resource management of a survival-horror shooter alongside the reactive, timing-based combat of an action game, without fully committing to either approach.

And that’s a shame, because the two styles aren’t necessarily incompatible. There are plenty of ways to make game’s combat system have a satisfying flow to it, especially when supernatural abilities are involved. A good combat system can encourage players to switch between different approaches without making those transitions feel awkward or unnecessary. ANOMALITH simply doesn’t find that balance.

It’s made all the more frustrating by the game’s progression systems. There’s a considerable amount of weapon customization and equipment management, which should theoretically give players plenty of freedom to experiment with different approaches. However, having more customization options doesn’t mean much when the underlying combat isn’t particularly gratifying.

I don’t necessarily think ANOMALITH needed more or less combat mechanics. I just think it needed to figure out what it wanted to do with the ones it already had.

When the Dialogue Doesn’t Match the Gameplay

I’ll admit that this issue might have bothered me more than it should have, but it’s my personal pet peeve when the dialogue in the story doesn’t match what you need to do in the game. From the start of the tutorial to the end of the game, there are numerous examples of enemies you supposedly can’t engage with that you inexplicably end up fighting and beating just a few minutes later, if not immediately. It makes the trove of dialogue you’re made to sit through seem even more trivial when you realize the plot points you’re engaging with don’t even matter.

It’s especially disappointing because the game actually has some interesting mysteries to unravel, and the final act makes a considerable effort to bring everything together. Unfortunately, by the time some of these revelations arrive, you’ve already spent so long questioning the logic behind certain events that their eventual explanations don’t carry quite the impact they should.

Verdict

Between its uncanny environments and its ambitious nature, you’d be hard pressed to declare that the experience of playing ANOMALITH is completely devoid of charm. But with the game’s lackluster attempts to juggle a poorly strung together combat system, inconsequential survival elements, fast-tracked RPG progression, and story elements that don’t align with the gameplay at all, it’s certainly one that left me wishing FuRyu had spent a lot more time figuring out exactly what it wanted to be.