Mortanis Prisoners has a provocative setup, but it ends up as a short, low-stakes shooter that rarely delivers on either survival or horror
Mortanis Prisoners opens with a heavy setup. You are a resistance fighter captured and sent to a WWII concentration camp, then thrown into a supernatural escape after an experiment goes wrong. That premise should create pressure and dread. Instead, the game treats it as background flavor and quickly shifts into a basic run-and-gun loop.
The game claims that camp setting, but most of the actual play happens in spaces that feel generic, a hospital, an administration block, and underground corridors. The story loop is simple, something opened, monsters came through, now escape. You pick up notes and scattered lore, but there is not enough character work or worldbuilding to make any of it stick. For a horror game, that flat storytelling hurts because tension needs context to really work.
Gameplay is first-person shooting with light puzzle and inventory elements. You get a pistol, a shotgun, bandages, and lots of ammo. Resources are so generous that encounters feel routine. Enemies drop quickly, often in one or two headshots, and I rarely had to think about whether to fight, dodge, or preserve supplies.
The systems are technically there, inventory limits, healing items, simple puzzles, but they do not create real danger. Inventory management never gets tense because pickup abundance removes tradeoffs. Puzzles are functional but shallow, more of a short pause than an engaging mechanic. So while the game calls itself survival horror, it usually feels like a very basic corridor shooter in horror clothing.
Even when the game tries to spike tension with sudden encounters, the lack of meaningful stakes makes those moments fade almost immediately.
Enemy design and encounter flow also fail to build fear. Creatures look and behave like low-budget shooter enemies, not threats that force careful play. They appear, absorb a few bullets, and disappear from your memory a minute later. There is little escalation, little unpredictability, and almost no stretch where you feel truly vulnerable. A horror game can be short, but it cannot be harmless, and this one is harmless most of the time.
The full run is short, under two hours for most players. Short horror games can still hit hard when they are focused, but this feels undercooked rather than lean. When credits roll, it does not feel like you survived an intense scenario, it feels like you finished a prototype for a larger project that never got fully developed.
Presentation makes those limits obvious. Visual quality is rough, animations are stiff, and several scenes look unfinished. Audio is inconsistent, some effects land, others feel cheap or oddly mixed. On PS5, performance is mostly stable enough to finish the game, but the whole package still feels low effort rather than intentionally minimal.
This feels like one of those hotdog-and-a-handshake budget projects where the gamble simply does not pay off.
Price is the final problem. At about $18 on console, this is very hard to recommend. You are paying a premium for a very brief game with light challenge, weak horror, and little narrative payoff. Even if it drops to a deep sale, it would still be a no.
If you want to see the same rough euro-jank space done with more visible effort, read our Ebola Village review. If you want something in a similar price range that is genuinely excellent, get Crisol: Theater of Idols.
Mortanis Prisoners is a game to avoid. The story setup goes nowhere, the gameplay systems never create pressure, and the horror rarely feels like horror. I respect the attempt, but I cannot recommend buying it, especially at this asking price.
This game was reviewed on PS5 using a promo code provided by PR. Mortanis Prisoners is available on PS5, PS4, Xbox Series X|S and PC.
