Here’s a question that sounds like a contradiction: can a game that plays out in calm, orderly turns actually be scary? I went into Vultures – Scavengers of Death convinced the answer was no. A turn-based Resident Evil sounded like it would sand away everything that makes survival horror frightening — the panic, the fumbling, the split-second “do I run or shoot” decisions. I was completely wrong. Vultures is one of the tensest games I’ve played in ages, and it builds that dread precisely because it slows everything down.
This is the debut from Team Vultures, published by Firesquid and Gamersky Games, and it wears its inspirations on its blood-soaked sleeve. Set in 1993, one month after a mysterious explosion levelled the metropolis of Salento Valley and turned everyone inside into the shambling dead, you play as an operative scavenging the quarantine zone for materials and clues that might lead to a cure. If the first location reminds you of the Raccoon City Police Department, that’s not an accident — this game loves Resident Evil 2, and it isn’t shy about it.
How stillness becomes suspense
The trick, it turns out, is all in the encounter design. Outside of combat, Vultures plays in real time: you creep through eerie corridors choosing between sneaking, walking, and running, while a strict fog-of-war system hides enemies and environments beyond your character’s line of sight and the reach of nearby light sources. That moment of opening a door and not knowing what’s on the other side never stops being nerve-wracking. Then the instant a zombie catches your scent, everything snaps into a rigid, grid-based battlefield of Action Points and Movement Points.
And here’s where the tension lives. Lock a player in a small room, surround them with the undead, and give them a limited pool of bullets, and every single turn becomes a calculation soaked in dread. Do I spend my AP shooting, repositioning, or reloading? The undead are genuinely menacing — they advance on you turn by turn and land a near-automatic hit if you try to simply back away, so retreat is rarely free. Tension rises as you take risks, and only releases once the room is finally clear. Nearly every mission had me muttering some version of “how do I get out of this one?” — which is exactly what I want from horror.
The two playable operatives keep the tactics fresh. Leopoldo is the muscle, able to shove and reposition enemies around him (stunning them by slamming them into walls), while Amber wields a grappling gun that yanks foes toward her or pulls her across the map. Learning to stunlock a cluster of zombies by pushing them into the perfect position is deeply satisfying, and the mechanical overlap between XCOM-style tactics and Resident Evil-style scarcity turns out to be a match made in hell — in the best way.
The rough edges under the blood
I’ll be honest with you, because Vultures earns that honesty: this is a brilliant idea whose execution is a little rough. It’s a genuine diamond, but there’s still some grit to wipe off.
The technical issues are the main culprit. Across my playthrough I hit menu problems where the inventory UI didn’t resize properly and obscured key buttons, and worse, the occasional crash when reloading after a death — a pointed reminder to save often. Others have reported progress-blocking bugs and getting stuck in the void outside a room. The developers are actively patching, and none of it broke the experience for me, but it’s the difference between “a stone-cold classic” and “a rough gem.” The story also leans hard on familiar corporate-conspiracy tropes without much of its own spin, and the enemy roster skews heavily humanoid, so you rarely get that “what in the world is that” jolt the best horror delivers. A little more objective variety beyond “survive and extract” wouldn’t have hurt either.
What genuinely surprised me, though, was the difficulty curve — it’s inverted. Most survival horror front-loads the tension and eases off once you’re stocked up, but Vultures does the opposite. My early missions left me swimming in ammo and medkits; the later ones burned through that entire surplus and had me scraping by on fumes. That mounting pressure, rather than a mid-game power fantasy, is a big part of why it stays gripping start to finish.
A love letter in a muddy, murky package
I have to gush for a second about how Vultures looks, because the visuals do so much heavy lifting. It absolutely nails the chunky, muddy PS1-era survival horror aesthetic, and that’s a deliberate, clever choice — horror is often more effective when your imagination fills in what the low-fidelity graphics leave vague. The murk is the point. Paired with an atmospheric soundtrack full of pregnant pauses and interludes of white noise, it conjures exactly the oppressive mood the game is chasing, even if the turn-based pacing means the audio doesn’t always land quite like it would in a real-time game.
So who’s this for? If you’ve ever loved Resident Evil, XCOM, or ideally both, Vultures is close to essential — an ambitious genre mash-up that has no business working as well as it does. My honest advice: if you’re bug-averse, keep an eye on the patch notes and jump in once the cleanup crew has finished mopping up. But make no mistake, there’s a real and gripping horror experience buried in here, one careful, breath-holding turn at a time. I couldn’t put it down, and I don’t think you’ll want to either.
