‘Crusty Proto’ – Retro Horror With Increasingly Goofy Glitches

Crusty Proto sees you trying to escape a city overrun by zombies, except something seems to be hilariously off about the game’s programming.

You and some friends narrowly avoid getting attacks, holing up inside a shop. You decide to look for a way to get out of there, but set off an alarm that gets your pals killed. Things seem tense in this moment as you rush to avoid the undead horde, but odd messages keep popping up. A dead body with a gun seems to be dancing and flopping on the ground. Maybe something isn’t loading right? Is the game acting up? It’s hard to tell for the first few minutes, but the goofy events don’t really let up.

The game is a solid take on old PlayStation horror games, having you gun down zombies (in a way that’s also comical in its own right), but the continual error messages add increasingly bizarre visual quirks and events to the game. Enemies will pile up in bizarre ways or mash together. Sometimes you’re the victim of these errors, finding yourself wriggling along the ground like a fish after a death state doesn’t load. The game straddles this wonderful line between a serious, nerve-wracking experience as you try to survive, but then some new error will pop up and another laugh-out-loud event will happen.

Crusty Proto is quite brief, but crams itself full of absurd moments that kept surprising me throughout the game. I really just enjoyed playing through something that felt instantly familiar and fun due to my love of older horror titles, but its sense of humor in the errors and the pure ridiculous joy you get when a character starts bugging out in the game put a big smile on my face as I played. If you like horror with a silly sense of humor, it’s a great time.

Crusty Proto is available now (for free) on itch.io.

About The Author

Joel Couture

Joel has been covering indie games for various sites including IndieGames.com, Siliconera, Gamasutra, Warp Door, CG Magazine, and more over the past seven years, and has written book-length studies on Undertale and P.T.. Joel is constantly on the lookout for digital experiences that push the boundaries of what games can be, and seeks to delve into the creative process, meanings, and emotion labor that goes into the work of artists worldwide.