The Heilwald Loophole is a paid first-person adventure that reimagines the cliched trope of rundown hospitals and asylums, captivating the player with its smart premise as well as its interesting background story. It’s up to you to uncover the horror inside Heilwald Klinikum.

With every horrific death advancing the story and opening new pathways, The Heilwald Loophole will keep you until you find the secret that holds everything together, leading to one of its multiple endings. It uses a PSX aesthetic like Bloodborne PSX, the hospital horror from Silent Hill 2, and the overall unpredictability of The Stanley Parable.

Where death is just another door

In The Heilwald Loophole, you play a nameless individual mysteriously transported to the formerly prestigious asylum. As a part of the anomaly, you can’t die in this game. You can run as much as you want. Still, the doctors, nurses, and orderlies will find you, and they will harm and perform inhumane experiments on you over and over again since your character is basically immortal—leading you to progress in-game.

This inability to die is used to advance the story in an ingenious manner. When the nurses and doctors capture you, they use you for their wicked experiments and procedures. You survive, but you also get sent to a different part of the hospital. From the disgusting sick ward to the unsettling trash yard, get ready for some exhausting infinite looping until you get things right.

The use of its PSX aesthetic might not appeal to players. It features jagged, low-poly designs in both characters and the environment. Although each of the hospital staff and the other patients are recognizable enough thanks to traits and color palettes, facial details are virtually nonexistent. The same can be said for its audio, which mostly comes across as low-quality rambling, although the character voice lines are in German.

Hard to put down

The Heilwald Loophole feels like one of those games that don’t look immediately stunning. It uses dated graphics and audio and is set in the genre-favorite location of a medical facility. However, it takes away a central aspect of most survival horror games: the need to survive by all means. Here, you can just go ahead and get yourself taken out in order to progress with the story.