The real reason to play Horror Tales: The Beggar is the real-time world-manipulation abilities and how those can be used to solve the interesting puzzles that you come across
I really enjoyed playing through Horror Tales: The Beggar on PS5. It's a small FPS "horror" title made by, I believe, a solo developer, which might give you an idea of what to expect. However, when you play it, you'll be pleasantly surprised at how interesting the gameplay actually is.
Before I get to the most interesting part of this game, I want to touch on the story. You play as The Beggar, a cybernetic humanoid creature who seemingly broke the world. After being awakened by some robots, you're tasked with the goal of fixing the world you apparently broke, all while being hunted by another Beggar-like creature. It's an intriguing premise, but honestly, not much happens as you play. The game ends with a cliffhanger that sets up the next game in the Horror Tales series. While it's a cool setup, the story is the least interesting aspect of the game.
So, what's the most interesting part, you might ask? It's definitely the gameplay. If we go back to the beginning of this review, I put "horror" in quotation marks because the game isn't really a true horror game. It has some minor horror elements and, if I remember correctly, two jump scares, but that's about it. The rest of the gameplay involves manipulating the environment to solve puzzles, with a bit of combat where you launch objects and hit enemies three to four times until they die.
The Beggar has a couple of cool abilities. One is telekinesis, which allows you to pick up, move, and launch objects such as boxes, planks, carts and whatnot. This ability not only lets you create paths and solve some physics/platforming puzzles, but it's also your offensive attack. As you progress through the game, you gain access to even cooler abilities. Remember when I said The Beggar broke the world with some of his abilities? Well, one of those abilities lets you change the time of day, from day to night, and later, change the weather, from rain or haze to a clear sky. This is where things get interesting.
The world is broken and gravity is all over the place. So when you switch from day to night, for example, big floating pieces of the environment start to move around, creating paths for you to traverse. Some doors might be locked and require electrical power to open. Switch to day, and the sun hits the solar panels, and boom, the doors open. You might come across a destroyed building that's already flooded. Switch the weather to rainy, the rain pours down and raises the water level, allowing you to swim up. These world-manipulation abilities make The Beggar a really interesting game. And since it's a short experience, around 2-3 hours to beat, it never gets too stale or repetitive.
As for the presentation, the game looks really good, thanks in part to Unreal Engine 5 and the vast assets available in the UE Marketplace, which allow even solo developers to craft visually striking games on a budget. Don't get me wrong, this is not a shoddy asset flip game. On the contrary, you can truly feel the love and care the developer has put into designing these fairly big and detailed environments with some pretty spectacular skyboxes. It's really cool to see the time of day and weather shift in real-time as you activate your abilities. Sure, there's a lot of jank in terms of UI, menus, fonts and cutscenes, but that doesn't really affect the core gameplay much.
Honestly, Horror Tales: The Beggar surprised me in the best way possible. The premise is interesting but doesn't really go anywhere, and while there are horror elements, I wouldn't call this a horror game. The real reason to play this game is the real-time world-manipulation abilities and how those can be used to solve the interesting puzzles that you come across. Give Horror Tales: The Beggar a try. Thanks for reading!
The game was reviewed on a Quest 3 via a promo copy provided by the developers. Horror Tales: The Beggar is available on PlayStation, PC and Xbox.
