Below makes the camcorder the only light, and the battery the clock

Three months ago a research outfit walked away from a dig beneath the Great Pyramid, admitting only that they had found colossal pillars down there and blaming a lack of funding. A freelance reporter went in a month after the site was sealed and never came back out. What did come back is a badly degraded VHS tape of his last hours, and that tape is the game. You play the footage.

The verbs are small and they repeat: raise the camcorder, switch on the night vision, read a black corridor through a grainy green rectangle, scavenge batteries to keep it powered, crawl through gaps too tight to turn around in, and run when a mummy stops being scenery. There is no weapon in that list. Every one of those actions is done with the same object you are looking through.

That is the part worth pointing at. In most first-person horror the light source and the viewpoint are separate things — a torch is an item the character holds, and the camera is the invisible contract the game has with you. Below welds them together. The camcorder is the flashlight, the lens, the HUD and the fuel gauge at once, so looking, seeing and spending are a single action rather than three.

It also makes the failure state legible in a way a health bar never is. Night vision is a narrow, monochrome, noisy way to read a room, which means you are always seeing badly on purpose, and running makes the picture worse exactly when you most need it to be good. Batteries are the timer, but the timer is not a number ticking in a corner — it is the room going dark around you while something in it keeps moving.

The Challenge of Cameras argues that a camera is never just a viewpoint: it decides what the player can read, how close they feel to the character, and whether the action still works once you are looking at it that way. Below takes that argument literally by putting the camera inside the fiction. Every limitation — the tunnel vision, the grain, the shake, the way it whites out and gulps for detail — stops being a restriction the designer imposed and becomes a property of a thing the character is carrying. You do not resent a bad camera when the bad camera is the story.

Why Metro Exodus is so Immersive is the resource half. Metro earns the word through physical menus, gear you maintain by hand and supplies kept deliberately thin, so that housekeeping happens in the world instead of in a pause screen. Batteries are Below’s version of that: a consumable whose whole job is to make you weigh two seconds of seeing against ten minutes of being able to see later. A scarcity system only bites when spending it is a decision you can feel, and pointing a dying camera down a corridor you have not cleared is exactly that decision.

How Stealth Game Guards See and Hear makes the point that how much of an enemy’s sensory machinery you expose decides whether the game feels tense or tactical. Vision cones and alert meters turn a chase into a solvable puzzle. Below is on the far end of that dial — you get a green rectangle and a noise behind you, and nothing that tells you what the mummy currently knows. That is the right call for the horror, and it is also the risky one, because unreadable pursuit is only frightening while the player still believes there was something they could have done.

Below is made and published by Gamedev Guy LLC, out now on Windows, listed under Action, Adventure, Indie and Simulation. It is single-player, has Steam achievements and full controller support, and the store page is refreshingly blunt about what it is selling: jump scares yes, nervous breakdowns yes, spiders maybe. Nobody is going to buy this expecting a walking simulator.

The found footage framing does a quiet second job beyond the visual style. A recovered tape means the ending is already known to the people who handed it to you, which is why the loop can be short and repetitive without feeling thin — the tension comes from watching a man run out of light, not from wondering whether he makes it.

If the appeal here is the light being a resource rather than a convenience, Flick is the closest sibling on this list. It also charges you for every second the room is visible, and also puts something in the dark that benefits from your hesitation — the difference is that Flick changes the room while you are not looking, where Below just makes sure you cannot look for long.