Two utterly unique and long lost '90s PC horror classics have been exhumed, and they're coming to Steam soon

Andrew Spencer didn't license an engine. He didn't tweak one. He wrote his own from scratch in a London bedroom, and he built it around ellipsoids — not triangles, not quads, but squashed spheres that made his characters look like they'd melted in the sun. In 1994 that looked like the future. In 2026 it looks like a fever dream someone forgot to wake up from. Ecstatica and its 1997 sequel are finally climbing out of the shareware grave, headed for Steam and GOG later this year courtesy of SNEG, and the timing feels almost deliberate: we've spent a decade polishing the same three survival-horror templates until they shine like chrome. These games don't shine. They bulge.

The first Ecstatica is the one that matters. Medieval setting, survival horror bones, tank controls that fight you harder than the monsters. Fixed camera angles that hide death around corners. Puzzles that kill you instantly for the crime of curiosity. It's every '90s PC horror cliché stacked into a single unstable tower — except the tower is made of flesh-colored ovals that wobble when they walk. Spencer told Next Generation in 1996 that ellipsoids created "organic-looking characters" and "more rounded, human alternatives" to triangular rigidity. He was right about the theory. He was wrong about the aging. No modern eye will call these figures organic. They'll call them grotesque. And that's exactly why they're worth playing.

Ecstatica 2 retreated. The horror thinned out. The ellipsoids stayed but the dread evaporated, replaced by something closer to a dark fantasy romp. It's still recognisably Spencer's work — the engine sings the same bulbous song — but the first game's suffocating medieval dread is the harder fossil to find. SNEG's reissue bundle also includes Pool of Radiance: Ruins of Myth Drannor, Dark Earth, Warlords 4, and Soldiers at War. Competent titles, some cult-followed. None of them look like a programmer dreamed in geometry and woke up with a horror game. Ecstatica does.

Tank controls are the tax you pay. Fixed perspectives are the toll. Modern players will hate both, and they should — those systems were compromises masquerading as design, born of hardware that couldn't render a corridor and a monster simultaneously. But Ecstatica turns the compromise into atmosphere. When the camera locks at a low angle down a stone hallway and your ellipsoid knight lumbers forward, the blind spots feel intentional. The instant-death traps feel like the castle itself hates you. The wobbling geometry makes every encounter feel like you're fighting inside a corrupted save file. That sensation — of playing something that shouldn't exist, that feels broken in a way no QA team would approve — is the rarest commodity in preservation.

Preservation usually means polish. Scale the resolution. Map the controls to a gamepad. Sand the edges until the thing fits a 2026 shelf. SNEG hasn't announced enhancements yet, and I hope they don't. The roughness is the point. The ellipsoid engine is a closed aesthetic argument: Spencer proved you could build human shapes from fewer primitives than polygons demanded, and he proved it looks uncanny in motion. That argument still holds. Uncanny is not ugly. Uncanny is not dated. Uncanny is a specific artistic voltage that modern homogeneity has grounded out of almost everything.

The medieval setting sharpens it. Stone walls. Flickering torches. Latin chants. A knight whose helmet is a perfect oval and whose gauntlets are two rounded cones clanking together. It reads like a parody of grimdark fantasy, but it plays straight. The horror doesn't wink. The instant deaths don't joke. The game believes in its own grimness, and the ellipsoids — bulbous, soft, wrong — make that belief feel like madness. That's the experience no remake can replicate. You can't remaster madness without curing it.

Later this year you'll be able to buy both games on Steam and GOG. You should buy the first. You should suffer the controls. You should die to the same spike pit three times because the camera refused to show it. You should watch your ellipsoid knight wobble into the dark and feel the specific chill of a vision that had no contemporaries and has no successors. The '90s produced thousands of horror games. Only one built its skeletons from squashed spheres and called them human. That one is coming back. Let it stay weird.