In Toilet Spiders, there sure are a heck of a lot of toilets, and a heck of a lot of spiders
With a name like Toilet Spiders, it’s not exactly hard to work out what’s going to be creeping you out in a game like this, or where those horrors are going to appear from. Really, it should be the least scary horror game you ever play, as you know exactly what you’re up against the moment you load it up. But nothing, I’d argue, quite prepares you for the sheer number of possibilities that exist within this abandoned and blooded nuclear facility, as this is a place with a truly obscene number of toilets inside it, and a worrying number of important items to find beneath their grimy, cobwebbed lids.
Fullbright Presents: Toilet SpidersDeveloper: FullbrightPublisher: FullbrightPlatform: Played on PC Availability: Out now on PC (Steam)
Quite why the former inhabitants of this place decided to leave their keys, security passes and spare lightbulbs in the one place these giant, eight-legged death traps can actually get you is a question that never gets answered. The only working theory I have is that, judging by the lo-fi blood smears everywhere, everyone must have been dragged arse-backwards and disembowelled down the pipework, leaving nothing behind except the contents of their conveniently clean and empty pockets. Whatever the reason for their somewhat contrived location, however, this is ultimately a game about lifting toilet lids and hoping against all hell that there isn’t a spider waiting there to eat you alive and gobble you down along with them.
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Considering that’s essentially all this game is, Toilet Spiders is a surprisingly effective little horror experience. Like the Fatal Frame games (or Project Zero for us in the UK) before it, its tension comes almost exclusively from that moment of anticipation before anything actually scary takes place – only instead of watching your hand slowly reach out toward an ominous doorknob, say, here you’re psyching yourself up to lift a gosh darn toilet seat. Indeed, I spent most of my time in Toilet Spiders just staring at shut toilet lids while the all-caps instruction to ‘OPEN TOILET’ jittered nervously at the bottom of the screen, craning my ears (in vain, I think) to see if I could hear anything scuttling around in the pipework, or indeed, detect any other sign to indicate whether I was about to be nobbled or not.
That nobbling, I think, comes down to pure chance at the end of the day, which is perhaps Toilet Spider’s biggest weakness in its current early access state. An alternative name might have been ‘Toilet Gambling’, or ‘Spider Roulette’, as there simply didn’t seem to be any rhyme or reason to when the spiders appeared or not. And yet, the game gives you the impression there should be. When you first begin your foray into this cursed facility, for example, you can pick up a Geiger counter that immediately ticks into action the moment you cross the threshold into the many, many grungy bathrooms where a spider is present. But there’s always a spider present somewhere, and there are no obvious deviations in the meter’s needle movement to reliably discern if one toilet is safer than another. That’s when I started listening out for them through my PC speakers, which maybe helped on some occasions, but most of the time I could have sworn I’d be safe, there it was, waiting for me all along.
