Heavy Boots in the Anomaly Zone
When you first take control of Reona Minazuki, she does not handle with the snappy responsiveness of modern action leads. Her turning radius feels heavy, and her dodge roll carries noticeable recovery time before you can snap your weapon back onto target. On mouse and keyboard, default aim sensitivity is twitchy while character movement feels stuck in molasses, requiring immediate menu tuning just to track anomalies without overshooting your crosshair.
The story wastes little time pushing Reona into danger. After an anomalization tears through a shopping mall and swallows her best friend Arisa Kato, the seventeen-year-old signs up as a Diver with the government-backed Anomaly Zone Countermeasures Office. Heading into warped liminal versions of Showa-era Japan gives the game an unsettling, desolate look. The trouble comes whenever Reona has to interact with the geometry. Clambering over ledges or squeezing through narrow gaps locks you into stiff, canned animations that instantly kill your forward momentum.
Trading Shots With Warped Horrors
Combat plays out as a slow, deliberate third-person shooter with survival horror priorities. Ammunition is scarce, so every pull of the trigger has to count against mutated monstrosities that lurch through cramped corridors. Enemy attack hitboxes are generally clean, but Reona's hurtbox extends slightly beyond her clothing, which leads to frustrating clips if you try to dodge late. Because you cannot cancel reload animations or heavy swings into an evasive slide, picking your moment to shoot requires complete commitment.
Sprinting past anomalies rarely works when tight hallways box you in. You commit to each fight, lining up shots while Reona takes her sweet time recovering after every dodge. The monster attack patterns stay fairly simple across the zones. Still, miss a single burst and you end up cornered against a wall with dry chambers and no room to breathe.
Clunky Menus and Static Hubs
Between dives into the abyss, you retreat to the Countermeasures Office. Operator Yuiga Koda provides radio guidance during missions, while Chief Kyoka Sudo directs the organization after surviving her own long-term exposure to the zones. While the character art and voice work establish a grim tone, the base itself feels frozen. Supporting characters stand completely motionless in the background, never shifting stance or reacting to your return.
The inventory system leans into classic grid management, yet simple quality-of-life options are missing. When you craft new defensive gear at base, the crafting menu does not let you compare stats against what you currently wear, forcing you to back out across multiple screens just to check your loadout. World prompts suffer from the same lack of polish. Placing supply chests right next to closed doors means the single interaction button will routinely swing the door shut in your face while you try to loot scrap.
Technical Faults at Full Price
Furyu and Winning Entertainment Group launched Anomalith at ¥7,722 on Steam, and that asking price casts a long shadow over the entire experience. Two hours into the campaign, the in-game investigation tracker was already sitting at twenty percent, pointing to a story that clocks in under fifteen hours. A lean campaign is fine when the combat loop shines, but the underlying code has glaring rough spots.
Progress-killing glitches make things far worse. Dying in combat and reloading can trigger an endless load screen that wipes your gear, zeroes your investigation rate, and traps you in the zone with no way back to base. Another glitch shrinks your bag back to starting size mid-run. Any overflow ammo sits in limbo until you extract, locking you out of reloads right in the middle of boss fights. Since the game autosaves those corrupted states, you get stuck wiping the whole save file and starting from scratch.
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rtx 3080 at 3440x1440 and the framerate completely chokes in the fog corridor. huge stutters whenever the soundtrack layers kick in, and mapping doors and containers to the same key feels horribly unresponsive. turning off vsync helps the frame pacing slightly, but screen tearing on an OLED looks awful.
bugs need patch
I admire the Showa-era atmosphere and the ambient soundtrack, but ¥7,722 combined with inventory-wiping bugs is way too steep. Going to hold off until it gets a deep discount.
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@Kestutisfirst cycle is completely broken if you buffer the roll into the door trigger. you can clip right past the container hitbox and skip the recovery animation, and standing in that spot on the stairs lets you zip past the fog corridor entirely.
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@bladerunner_03Dying clears your entire inventory and pushes your campaign progress back to the prologue every single time. Having doors and containers bound to the exact same key makes things worse when you panic-click a box during a chase. Backing up your saves manually keeps your files safe, but it still won't stop the run from resetting.
@kaputt_karlManual save backup is the only workaround right now. Tried rebinding but interact stays locked to the same key. Copying the save folder after each area kept my progress safe. What gpu are you on?
runs fine on proton
@krtx 3080 at 3440x1440 and the framerate completely chokes in the fog corridor. huge stutters whenever the soundtrack layers kick in, and mapping doors and containers to the same key feels horribly unresponsive. turning off vsync helps the frame pacing slightly, but screen tearing on an OLED looks awful.
@onion dipframe time spikes are unacceptable at this price. i refunded at 116 minutes.
I admire the Showa-era atmosphere and the ambient soundtrack, but ¥7,722 combined with inventory-wiping bugs is way too steep. Going to hold off until it gets a deep discount.
The liminal corridors remind me of the abandoned school in 'Kuon' which I bought ten years ago and still have not finished; the identical door and container mapping feels like a regression from that era.
is this fun with a group or just tedious vibe? the goofy physics bugs make us laugh but the inventory wipe kills the mood fast
sunk so much time into anomalith, anything early on is basically just a demo. the survival pacing is legit but wiping inventory on death is entirely on the devs. wait for a patch before crying about price. ¥7,722 is still wild for a build that crashes on the second boss, feels like a cash grab.
@mpr98chat VANCE 150h and still defending the wipe bug 💀 that's not skill issue that's dev L 🔥!
@kramer's lawyerimagine caring about inventory bugs in a chill exploration game lol
skill issue ngl
refunded at 114 minutes
controller support works
the atmosphere looks so bleak i would hide under my blanket 🐱 the showa era corridors are pretty but too scary for me ~ not comfy at all ~ any game with a cat to pet gets an automatic pass 🐾
runs fine on linux.
155 hours logged in anomalith, anything under 100h is just a demo. People complaining about the inventory bug clearly lack the tactical awareness to avoid fatal encounters, which is a core component of the survival loop. If you treat the game like a casual walking simulator, you are going to get punished by the mechanics, and frankly, I prefer it that way. If you cannot handle the risk of a reset, stick to easier titles. Come back when you have cleared the final sequence without a single death.
bugs need patch
Anomalith more like Anoma-list of bugs lol. The showa dread is legit though. No spoilers but the atmosphere got me right in the feels. Hope the devs cook up a fix soon