When it comes to horror games, I’m more frequently attracted to small curiosities than grand adventures. Carimara: Beneath the Forlorn Limbs falls squarely into the former category. Crafted by solo developer Bastinus Rex and published by Critical Reflex, Carimara offers a vignette of an odd little world where every secret matters.
You play as the titular Carimara, an exorcist-cum-detective tasked with a cottage-sized ghost problem. While you’re constantly warned about threats to your life, it’s not a game of survival. The Carimara’s only tools are cards acquired by interacting with creatures and objects. Flashing these cards prompts NPCs to divulge tidbits of information, which you’ll need to piece together to find out the secret of the cottage’s ghost.
Carimara Offers A Bite-Sized Horror Mystery
Sniffing Out Some Spectral Secrets
If you’re not into card-based games, don’t let Carimara scare you off. The system is hardly different from typical dialogue prompts, but it serves a dual purpose. You’ll have to select three cards to solve the mystery, Clue-style. Who killed the ghost? What tool did they use? Most importantly, who’s dead to begin with?
The mystery can be solved in a matter of minutes, but there are enough dangling threads to complicate affairs. You’ll get a lot of vague suggestions and half-answers from the game’s NPCs, which point to several possible scenarios, and it’s not hard to get sidetracked by red herrings. The right answer connects the most dots, providing a rush of gratification when you present your final findings.
You might be wondering where the horror fits into this detective game. It’s in the small things, really. Carimara is less concerned with jump scares or grotesque reveals and more with a sense that everything’s a little off. The old woman’s not all there, and the owl that lives outside is entirely deranged. The dormouse living in the walls might sound like a cuter change of pace, but believe me, it’s not.
Strong Art Design Defines Carimara’s Atmosphere
More Than Your Average PS1 Throwback
Carimara‘s art is the linchpin of its discomfort. Like many indie horror games, this takes heavy inspiration from the original PlayStation. Grungy textures wobble as you poke around its low-poly environments, and the closest thing to graphics settings is a single toggle for camera sensitivity.
While the foundation of the style is nothing new, Carimara carves out a niche. A limited palette highlights its careful applications of color. Erratic character animations have a stop-motion flair. The screen is always crowded enough to demand your full attention, but highlights on objects that can become cards make them easy enough to spot.
It’s all charmingly handcrafted, creating a densely detailed scene where you can practically feel the artist’s guiding hand. You can also practically see a hand, for that matter. Bastinus Rex cites a photo of their father’s hand as a resource for character textures, while their mother’s garden gave birth to Carimara‘s supply of vegetation.
Carimara: Beneath The Forlorn Limbs Is Brief But Compelling
An Hour Well-Spent
By the time you reach these revelations in the credits, Carimara‘s ability to sustain any discomfort will likely have diminished. Unless you solve the mystery as soon as you have the key cards, you might end up retracing your steps, exhausting the world’s ability to reveal new oddities.
Even without fear, Carimara has another sort of magic to it. It’s tender, suffused with far more love than cruelty. The ghost that haunts the cottage is a product of past affections, and the story makes wistful references to what things might have been like before they fell into disrepair.
Carimara is a game for a quiet October night when you have an hour to spare (if you’re smart about the mystery, thirty minutes will suffice). There’s a little more to do after you finish, as you can pick up a new card before returning to the start, but replayability doesn’t feel like the primary focus.
Although I’m not yet aware of the specific pricing, Bastinus notes that it’s the cost of a “good sandwich,” which sounds reasonable. If it does well, there might be more episodes to follow. For now, it feels complete enough on its own.
I wasn’t blown away by anything here, but I didn’t need to be. Carimara‘s art is what caught my eye, and it delivered on that count while spinning a pleasantly unsettling little yarn. Like a good sandwich, it’s perfectly satisfying.
- Released
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October 6, 2025
- Developer(s)
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Bastinus Rex
- Publisher(s)
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Critical Reflex
- Number of Players
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Single-player
- Steam Deck Compatibility
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Unknown
- PC Release Date
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October 6, 2025
- Fantastic art design & atmosphere
- A well-structured mystery
- Unsettling but lovable characters
Screen Rant was provided with a PC code for the purpose of this review.
