Perfect Vermin is a free short action horror video game wherein you must smash up suspicious-looking furniture. Developed by Maceo bob Mair and Angad Matharoo, this surreal first-person indie game gives you the task of hunting down the so-called vermin hiding inside an empty office building. However, you’ll soon find that not everything is as it seems as soon as you’re urged to hunt faster.

No need to hold back

Perfect Vermin starts with you getting out of the elevator and seeing the floating tutorial instructions. With the W, A, S, and D keys for movement and the left-click mouse button for interacting or smashing, you’ll soon find yourself armed with a trusty sledgehammer that can destroy almost any object. There are no further hints to your task—simply a number on the top-left of the screen that decreases for every “vermin” you find.

Once finished, the screen suddenly goes static and a mustached news anchor suddenly shows up, with your first-person view shrunken to the size of the TV screen. He’ll instruct you to go back to the elevator and restart—this time, with a 90-second timer. He won’t leave the screen but you can still control your character and go through the same map again, and the previous vermin are still usually where you first found them.

After this, you’ll continue through other maps—some repeatedly—to find more and more vermin but it quickly becomes obvious that the environment and even the news anchorman are slowly changing. The vermin are actually easy to find since they hide pretty poorly but you have to find them quickly. It can be hard to avoid smashing other furniture, however, as their breaking animation inflicted by the hammer can be quite satisfying.

Violence upon objects is okay

Overall, Perfect Vermin is surprisingly well-made and thought-provoking for such a short horror game. Not only is the 3D art style simple and the 2D cartoon graphics a bit grotesque, but the object physics is also pretty weighty. The lack of a goal at the start is also deliberate and plays into the ending—as well, as the numerous small foreshadowing items in the environment. Unfortunately, this game is not compatible with older Intel computers.