Parasite Mutant explores the horrors of running circles around not-quite-Xenomorphs, and its demo is out now

To be fair, how else would you kill time until your character can be bothered to shoot them in the face?

I'm jogging around. Has the gauge filled up to one bar yet? No. Well, back to jogging around it is. Time to politely salute the horrific mutant trying to attack me as I double back past it for the third time. Ooh, we have a bar. Right, time to whip out my pistol and - BANG, BANG. Shit, I forgot to wander up to point blank range and so have hit absolutely nothing. Well, back to jogging I go until the gauge fills again.

Thus far, the above pretty much defines the experience I've had fighting some admirably fleshy and weird mutant creatures in the freshly released demo for Parasite Mutant. Billed as a survival horror RPG, this latest work of Chinese studio IceSitruuna wears its old school influences on its sleeve. Scarcely have you fired it up and it introduces itself by offering the option to turn on some retro rendering and a CRT filter. Come on, it begs, I really like 90s/early 2000s vibes, please enable potato vision for the spooks I'm about to dish out.

As you might have guessed by the name, late 90s Square Enix spooker Parasite Eve's the principal inspiration for Paradise Mutant, but even as a non-horror buff, I'd say the crowds who love the likes of classic Resi will likely find it akin to slipping into a warm and familiar bath.

You wake up in a puddle as Nova, a treach-coated psionic agent sent to work out what's up in an abandoned and secluded island city filled with mutant creatures. Each of these mutants look like something out of H. R. Giger's casual doodle collection, or at the very least like two insects have decided to mate with an extraterrestrial. There's some nice variety to them, even if there haven't been any which have struck me as particularly unique in their spookiness.

Armed with a knife and a pistol, Nova spends the demo running around deserted night-time streets, a vaguely industrial facility, and some dingy sewer tunnels. Every so often, one or two of the mutants poof in out of thin air, and thus begin combat encounters who lock you into a certain area and mix live-action movement with turn-based attacks. IceSitruuna call this system "Active Time Chains", since it aims to build on the active battles of late 90s RPGs with the addition of deciding whether to wait until more of the gauge I mentioned earlier fills up so you unleash a larger flurry of shots or swipes in one go.

Because your time spent not attacking is spent jogging around the limited battle area hoping to step out of the way of mutant attacks, I usually couldn't be bothered waiting for more than one bar to fill up, at which point I could fire off two shots or swipes. In its current form, I'd say that the wait between actions in which you and the mutants essentially just wait around for each other to move really hampers the tension these survival horr encounters feel like they'd pack if they were able to move a bit more frenetically. It's hard to panic when you're going for a run until Nova can be bothered to actually deal with these terrifying threats to her life and limbs.

There wasn't much in the way of plot or puzzling in the section of demo I've tried, but certainly some potential for the breadcrumb trail of potential survivor escapes and mystery of how the mutantpocalypse was unleashed to go in intriguing directions. If you fancy checking Parasite Mutant's demo out for yourself ahead of the game's launch at some point in 2026, you can find it on Steam.