There is something uniquely unsettling about empty video game spaces. Blown wide open in the wake of Backrooms, the concept of liminal horror has seeped out from internet forums and chat rooms to become a subculture all its own. But while a photorealistic house filled with blood and corpses has its own macabre dread, there’s something even more unsettling about PS1-era graphics, where blocky textures and eerie lighting can make even a mundane street corner feel steeped in Lovecraftian horror.
It’s a feeling written into the code of some of the greatest PS1 games ever made, from Tomb Raider to Metal Gear Solid. Often born from the limited memory and technical constraints of mid-’90s consoles, such games inadvertently — or deliberately if you’re Silent Hill — turned empty digital spaces into breeding grounds for a sense of unease. This idea would be taken to an even stranger extreme long after the PS1 became a legacy system, thanks to Bryce Bucher’s surreal 2020 horror adventure Fatum Betula. Almost six years after release, it remains one of the clearest examples of how PlayStation-era 3D environments can transform even the emptiest spaces into something deeply unsettling.
Crafted solely by Bucher, Fatum Betula turns a simple fetch quest into a surreal exploration of agency and decay. Tasked with nourishing an ancient birch tree that holds the fate of the world in its roots, you wander a melancholic world inhabited by uncanny figures, with progress relying on disturbing bargains and quiet tragedies across its low-poly landscape. You might offer poisonous fruit to a gluttonous beast, consult a ghostly fisherman whose head is a human hand, or plunge through a dead ocean floor into a bizarre suburban living room to harvest blood from your own doppelgänger. With ten distinct endings dictated by your choices, the narrative functions less like a linear campaign and more like a feverish dream of cause and consequence.
Fatum Betula also feels like a missing link between the surreal exploration of 1998’s LSD: Dream Emulator and the modern fascination with liminal spaces that eventually gave us the Backrooms. LSD: Dream Emulator famously turned the PlayStation into a kind of dream machine, throwing players through disconnected environments where the rules of reality changed from one moment to the next. But where LSD was content to let players simply wander through its bizarre dreamscapes, Fatum Betula takes that same sense of disorientation and builds an adventure around it. The environments that make up its setting serve as pieces of a larger puzzle, filled with characters, items, and secrets that slowly reveal a space far stranger than it first appears.
Nowhere is that dread more palpable than in Suburbia, a pocket of domestic normalcy tucked impossibly into the game’s trippy world. Its carpeted floors, patterned wallpaper, and the warm, static glow of an old television initially evoke a familiar comfort, but as you linger in the silence, the space morphs into a disorienting liminal tomb. The game excels at dropping recognizable architecture into impossible contexts, contrasting fantastical landscapes with a fully furnished living room resting quietly where it has no right to exist. Fatum Betula weaponizes the uncanny stillness of these locations, forcing you to inspect the mundane for clues to the world's survival. Deciphering these spatial secrets is the core experience, making a stroll through an eerie residential home feel like stepping deeper into an ever-shifting dream.
Fans of the Backrooms, whether it's Kane Parsons’ version or the original internet horror phenomenon, will immediately see the parallels. The Backrooms became a kind of shorthand for the terror of being trapped inside ordinary spaces that somehow feel profoundly wrong. Although it may have started with yellow rooms, empty offices, endless hallways, and fluorescent lights, the concept has given way to an unimaginable breadth of random architecture stripped of its original purpose, from “pool rooms” to Exit 8’s unending Japanese metro corridors. Fatum Betula similarly taps into the profound effect of kenopsia — the atmosphere of an abandoned space once teeming with people — on the human mind.
Far from being a simple coat of nostalgia, Fatum Betula uses the limitations of PS1-era 3D to make its world feel strangely intimate and incomplete. The models look stiff and blocky, with jittering textures, and rooms can feel conspicuously empty, but they all give every space room to breathe. Bucher said in a 2021 Vice interview that the fifth-generation aesthetic “lends itself well to creating environments that force the player to engage with them rather than just being set dressing,” and you can feel that philosophy in practically every corner of Fatum Betula. Rather than filling its world with visual noise, Bucher leaves just enough missing for your imagination to take hold, turning crude polygons and vacant spaces into something far stranger than a more detailed game could ever achieve.
Fatum Betula is proof you don't need high-resolution textures, elaborate monster designs, or enormous set pieces to make a game feel haunted. Sometimes all you need is an empty room, a strange sound, a handful of polygons, and the creeping suspicion that there is something waiting just outside the limits of the game. It's a love letter to an era when video game worlds were small enough to feel mysterious — and crude enough to let your imagination run wild.
