| Post Trauma | |||
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| Release Date | Gameplay & Story | DLC & Pre-Order | Review |
Post Trauma is a survival horror game which follows three different people who find themselves trapped in a distorted version of reality. Read our review to see what it did well, what it didn't do well, and if it's worth buying.
Post Trauma Review Overview
What is Post Trauma?
Post Trauma is a survival horror game that channels the spirit of PS2-era classics. Set in a world of eerie, atmospheric environments, you play as three different characters—Roman, Carlos, and Freya—each facing their own terrifying challenges. The story unravels in a mysterious, otherworldly setting, where strange creatures and ominous events threaten your sanity.
Post Trauma features:
⚫︎ Engaging Puzzles
⚫︎ Classic Survival Horror Vibes
⚫︎ Multiple Playable Characters with Different Perspectives
⚫︎ Immersive Sound Design
⚫︎ Atmospheric Environment
For more gameplay details, read everything we know about Post Trauma's gameplay and story.
| Digital Storefronts | ||||||||
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 Steam |
 PlayStation |
 Xbox |
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| $14.99 | ||||||||
Post Trauma Pros & Cons
| Pros | Cons |
|---|---|
 Nostalgic Survival Horror Experience Great Atmosphere Intriguing Puzzles That Require Thought and Attention |
Combat Feels Clunky Story is Confusing and Underdeveloped Lack of Depth in Character Development and Setting Bugs and Glitches Detract From Immersion |
Post Trauma Overall Score - 70/100
Post Trauma captures the heart of old-school survival horror, but struggles to carry it into the modern age with the same grace. Its strong atmosphere and audio design elevate the experience, while its muddled story and frustrating mechanics drag it down. It’s a game made with love, and that love shows — but it doesn’t always play well. For fans of the genre, it delivers just enough, but rarely more than that.
Post Trauma Story - 6/10
The setup is great, drenched in tension and mystery, but the payoff is muddy and unsatisfying. Characters feel more like set pieces than people, and the world never quite reveals its full purpose. It’s a story that gestures toward depth without committing to it. While the mood is strong, the narrative clarity just isn’t there.
Post Trauma Gameplay - 6/10
At its core, the gameplay is survival horror 101—manage your resources, solve puzzles, survive. But janky combat and slow, inconsistent controls bog down the flow. Switching perspectives and characters adds variety, and the puzzles are genuinely rewarding, especially the sound-based ones. Still, technical hiccups and sluggish design choices hold it back from being truly satisfying.
Post Trauma Visuals - 7/10
The game nails its PS2-era aesthetic, with cinematic framing and some hauntingly beautiful angles. Its locked camera shots often enhance the dread, and the creature designs are surprisingly distinct. But the bugs—like locking in an angle with no-head glitch—break immersion, and the transitions between camera modes can feel clunky. It’s stylish and evocative, but not always polished.
Post Trauma Audio - 8/10
This is where Post Trauma shines brightest. The characters are fully voiced, its soundtrack evokes the eerie brilliance of Akira Yamaoka, and subtle sound cues add layers of dread that visuals alone can’t achieve. Every creak and beep feels deliberate, and the design often outpaces the rest of the game in quality. It’s not just good—it’s the backbone of the game’s horror.
Post Trauma Value for Money - 8/10
At $14.99, Post Trauma offers a solid six hours of content and multiple endings to explore. While replayability is limited by its linearity and narrative weaknesses, the initial run feels worthwhile. For fans of retro horror, the price is more than fair. It’s not a game you’ll keep returning to, but for what it is, it’s priced just right.
Post Trauma Review: Traumatic Throwback
Horror isn’t just something I enjoy—it’s the very thing that runs through my veins. I didn’t just stumble into it one day. I grew up with it, wide-eyed, watching the adults make their way through games that turned fear into entertainment. And when I was finally old enough to take the controller into my own trembling hands, it wasn’t some watered-down intro-to-horror title I started with. No, I was lucky to have a PlayStation 2 and a burning desire to be scared. The Silent Hill and Resident Evil franchise weren’t just my first horror games. They were the foundation of everything I now crave from the genre.
There’s something sacred about those first few games that leave you scarred in the best way. The heavy fog in Silent Hill, the brittle tension of saving ammo in Resident Evil—they imprint themselves on you. And once that seed is planted, it grows. You chase that feeling again and again. I’ve chased it across decades of horror titles: the surreal psychological depths of Mouthwashing, the decaying cruelty of KARMA: The Dark Worl, even the quiet dread in A Quiet Place: The Road Ahead. Horror games keep evolving, mutating, trying new tricks—and I love that. But every now and then, I want to go home to the basics.
Not to replay the same game and erode its magic with repetition. I want something that feels like home—something that remembers the way fear used to taste but isn’t afraid to season it differently. That’s where Post Trauma comes in.
At first glance, it doesn’t just lean into nostalgia—it practically drowns in it. Fixed camera angles. Grainy textures. That quiet kind of dread that clings to the corners of a scene like mold. But as I played, it started to feel less like a modern imitation and more like a lost sibling. Post Trauma is the kind of game that could only be born from the DNA of Silent Hill and Resident Evil, but it’s also weird and new in ways that caught me off guard. It’s like finding a forgotten room in your childhood home—familiar, but changed, and not necessarily in comforting ways.
You first play as Roman, a middle-aged man who wakes up in a grim, otherworldly version of a subway station. The Gloom—a name as vague and ominous as the world itself—is a place stitched together from guilt, memory, and decay. As you dig deeper, you also shift perspectives, taking control of other characters like Carlos and Freya. It’s a fragmented story, with pieces of yourself and others scattered through rusted halls, buzzing lights, and rooms that feel like they’re holding their breath. It’s survival horror with its boots sunk deep in PS2-era mud. So, without further ado, let’s turn the lights off, put your headphones in, and descend a little deeper into the Gloom.
A World of Angles and Atmosphere
Before Post Trauma ever scared me with a creature, it had already gotten under my skin with a single, tiny sound. I had just passed through a gate at a subway station, one of those mundane ticket gates that chirp when someone walks through. It beeped when I crossed—harmless, expected. But several steps later, down a dark staircase and almost out of earshot, it beeped again.
It’s a small moment, but that’s exactly what makes it brilliant. It’s restraint. It’s the deliberate, quiet cruelty of sound design used not to startle, but to haunt. The game is soaked in this kind of subtle terror. Every hallway groan, every footstep on wet tile, every distant noise that might be someone—or something—just out of frame… Not only that, the soundtrack itself reminded me of Akira Yamaoka’s work, particularly his earlier Silent Hill compositions.
Sound is where Post Trauma wears its influences with the most pride, and the most care. If you’ve been hungering for horror that sounds like the ghosts of PS2 survival horror, this game gets it.
Visually, it tries to walk the same path—and for the most part, it works. It doesn’t just slap a filter on and call it a day. Post Trauma commits to the aesthetic. The locked camera angles aren’t just there for flavor, they’re used thoughtfully, often to disorient or frame a scene with deliberate intention. There’s a moment where the camera shifts to a dutch angle, tilting the scene unnaturally as you walk down a hallway that already feels wrong. It messes with your spatial awareness in this quiet, effective way—like your brain is trying to stand up straight while the world leans sideways.
I’ll be honest, I’m not the biggest fan of locked camera angles as a rule. They’re often clunky and frustrating. But here? When it works, it works. It gives the game this constant feeling of being watched—not just by an enemy, but by the level itself. Like the Gloom is sentient and has opinions about where you should look.
That said, it’s not all clean execution. There are bugs. A fair few, actually. One time, while playing in first-person mode, I got stuck in this bizarre angle where I was just… staring at the back of my own playable character—headless. Just floating torso, awkwardly bobbing in front of me like some twisted selfie from a cursed phone. It wasn’t scary. It was just broken. And these technical hiccups happen often enough that they do wear down the atmosphere a bit, reminding you that you're in a game instead of trapped inside a nightmare.
The shifting perspectives—from third person to first, depending on the character—are an interesting touch, though uneven. Third-person fits the aesthetic and vibe better, in my opinion. The first-person sections feel sluggish, like wading through molasses. I ended up switching from controller to mouse and keyboard just to make it feel less like I was wearing cement shoes. I appreciate the ambition, but the execution stumbles.
When it comes to creature design? Color me impressed. For a game at this price point, I didn’t expect to see such a variety. The monsters are distinct, not just in looks but in behavior. There’s a grotesque, dreamlike logic to them, as if they crawled straight out of a trauma therapist’s sketchbook. Some skitter. Some stalk. Some just exist in the corner of your eye until you’re foolish enough to look at them directly. They feel curated, as if someone spent a lot of time wondering what kind of monsters sadness would wear if it had teeth.
So yeah, the visuals can be inconsistent—moments of brilliant composition tangled with janky glitches and awkward transitions. But the atmosphere? That’s the real star. It’s in the sound, in the angles, in the way it makes you hesitate before turning a corner. Post Trauma gets the emotional math of horror right, even if the technical side sometimes forgets to carry the one.
Fighting Shadows
For all its angles and atmosphere, Post Trauma eventually does what all survival horror must do—it puts a crowbar in your hand, throws you into a hallway, and tells you to survive. The gameplay loop is familiar, and that’s part of the appeal. You explore unnerving environments, solve puzzles, manage limited resources, and try not to die while some unnamable horror breathes down your neck. There’s backtracking, item-gating, doors that don’t open until you really wish they would—all the classics. But while it embraces the formula, it doesn’t really refine it.
One of the more interesting mechanical flourishes is the character switching. Throughout the game, you rotate between Roman, Carlos, and Freya—each navigating their own isolated chunk of the nightmare, each bringing a different pace to the experience. Roman, the central figure, feels like the game’s emotional anchor. Carlos, meanwhile, is a bit more emotionally wrecked. And Freya? Freya’s the wild card. Her sections felt the most distinct, both narratively and mechanically.
That said, the switch in perspectives between third-person and first-person depending on the character is… less successful. First-person segments with Carlos can feel sluggish to the point of frustration. There’s a floaty, disembodied vibe to it, like trying to steer a shopping cart through a swamp. I ended up swapping from controller to mouse and keyboard just to make those sections feel playable. Which isn’t bad, but it breaks immersion when you’re toggling hardware just to move like a person again.
Combat, meanwhile, is where Post Trauma stumbles the hardest. It’s not the main course, which is good, because what’s served is tough to chew. Weapons are sparse and clunky—which is fine for survival horror—but the real issue is how unresponsive everything feels. Firing your weapon comes with a slow recoil animation, leaving you frozen for a full beat. It’s not tension-building, it’s just awkward. You shoot, and then wait to regain control while something claws at your face.
I quickly learned that avoidance wasn’t just smarter—it was necessary. Much like in early Resident Evil games, dodging enemies often makes more sense than trying to mow them down. There’s satisfaction in choosing your battles, in slipping past threats instead of confronting them head-on. But when I had to fight? It felt more like a chore than a choice.
Where the game redeems itself is in its puzzles. This is where I felt the most engaged, where my brain had to work through layers of logic, observation, and inference. These aren’t just fetch quests or "find the key" scenarios. Many of the puzzles are interconnected, with one solution feeding into another, and failure to grasp one often means getting stuck further down the line. It can be brutal, but in that satisfying way that makes you mutter "ohhhhhh" when you finally crack it.
My favorite came during Freya’s section—the sound-based puzzle with the metronome. Up to that point, I’d been taking screenshots of every scrap of paper, every flicker of wall graffiti, hoarding clues like a digital detective. But this puzzle made me listen. I had to match the beat, not by reading a number or watching a dial, but by tuning in, by paying attention to rhythm and timing. It was almost elegant, immersive, and a genuine highlight. More than anything, it reminded me of what horror games can do. Not just scare you, but engage you, draw you into the moment through interaction, not exposition. So yeah, the combat’s a slog, and the movement’s uneven. But the puzzles? The puzzles are clever little traps, baited with just enough mystery to pull you in.
The Gloom of Confusion
Post Trauma opens like a dream—the kind where something’s wrong, but you can’t explain what, and the world folds in on itself the more you try to understand it. It has that perfect Silent Hill energy: thick atmosphere, cryptic whispers, a broken reality stitched together with trauma. For the first hour or two, I was hooked. I wanted answers. I needed to know: what is the Gloom? Who are these characters? Why is this place bleeding into liminal hell?
That kind of premise is my weakness. Set me in a world that feels wrong and ask me to make sense of it? I'm in. The first act gives you just enough: Roman is trapped in this rotting space with no memory, while Carlos is a deeply unsettled man, trying to escape his own prison. There are hints of guilt, of something tragic clawing at the edges of memory. That’s the setup. That’s the hook. And for a while, it works.
But then… nothing happens. Or rather, things do happen, but they don’t add up. The mystery never escalates into revelation. It just… spreads out and dissolves. Instead of peeling back the layers of this world, the game feels like it’s adding more fog to avoid showing what’s underneath.
By the time the credits rolled, I felt like I had been walking in circles—not just physically, but narratively. Post Trauma builds tension with such care, then forgets to reward it. The world implies meaning, but never quite delivers. Important events happen, people appear and vanish, and you’re left piecing together fragments that don’t seem to belong to the same puzzle.
Worse still, the characters—Roman, Carlos, Freya—never become more than names. There’s no real arc, no emotional crescendo. You play through their sections, you see their pieces of the world, but their motivations and connections remain vague. Roman, especially, feels like he should have a devastating backstory, some great tragedy that led him into the Gloom. And maybe he does. But the game only gestures at it, never explores it with any conviction.
It’s not just the characters that suffer, it’s the setting too. The Gloom is such a promising concept, a fractured, decaying reflection of trauma, full of hostile echoes and twisted space. But outside of a few memorable visuals, the game doesn’t seem that interested in exploring what it all means. Why does this space exist? What do these monsters represent? What’s the internal logic of this world? I kept waiting for a thread to pull, something to unravel the mystery in a satisfying way. Instead, I got a handful of disconnected ideas, two endings that don’t explain much, and a general sense that the story was a second thought—a vehicle for vibes rather than a destination worth reaching.
Which is a shame. Because with just a little more narrative care, Post Trauma could’ve been emotionally devastating. It has the scaffolding of a truly powerful story—broken people trapped in a world shaped by their own pain—but it never fills in the walls. It’s like the Gloom itself, intriguing, haunting, but ultimately hollow.
Is Post Trauma Worth It?
Worth the Walk, If Not the Destination
For a few hours of Post Trauma, it really felt like going home to the classics. The fixed camera angles. The sluggish controls. The slow tension that builds in silence, not in screeches. The puzzles that don’t hold your hand. The cryptic environments that trust you to look, not just click. But here’s the thing about nostalgia: it’s a filter. It softens edges, brightens memories, forgives flaws. Post Trauma tries to be the kind of game we remember loving, not necessarily the kind of game that would hold up now.
It’s in that space, between memory and modern expectation, where the cracks really show.
The puzzles sing, but the combat stumbles. The atmosphere thrives, but the story falls apart. It gives you the look and feel, but not the weight. Not the soul. And when a game leans this hard into the legacy of something like Silent Hill, that missing soul becomes impossible to ignore. Because the games we remember weren’t just scary. They were sad. They were full.
If you’ve been starving for something that looks, moves, and sounds like the horror games you cut your teeth on, Post Trauma is a solid—if flawed—offering. It’s a strange, atmospheric little tribute wrapped in grit and grain, the kind of game that reminds you more of what used to be than what could be. It’s not perfect. Far from it, but for fans of Silent Hill, Resident Evil, or even obscure PS2-era horror gems, there’s a comfort in the way this game leans unapologetically into its inspirations. For $14.99 and six hours of your life, it’s a haunted hallway worth walking down once. Just don’t expect it to linger like the legends it honors.
| Digital Storefronts | ||||||||
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| Steam |
PlayStation |
Xbox |
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| $14.99 | ||||||||
Post Trauma FAQ
How To Solve North South East West Puzzle in Post Trauma?
The numbers corresponding to each cardinal direction represent how many pegs you have to move each piece in that direction from the center.
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Post Trauma Product Information
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| Title | POST TRAUMA |
|---|---|
| Release Date | April 22, 2025 |
| Developer | RED SOUL GAMES |
| Publisher | Raw Fury |
| Supported Platforms | PC (Steam), PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X|S |
| Genre | Adventure, Horror, Puzzle, Simulation |
| Number of Players | 1 |
| ESRB Rating | M |
| Official Website | Post Trauma Website |
