BLACKSHARD Review – A World Worth Getting Lost In

BLACKSHARD doesn’t bombard you with tutorials, menus, markers and maps. Instead, it drops you into a massive world of brutalist architecture, backed by a striking visual and audio identity, and asks you to do little more than move forward and pay attention to your surroundings.

It’s a “simple” game that doesn’t ask much of you, but in return it offers something games are increasingly reluctant to provide: the feeling that you have actually stepped somewhere, rather than entered yet another virtual space stuffed with content for the sake of having content.

And that is where BLACKSHARD’s charm lies.

I played BLACKSHARD on PlayStation 5, and it didn’t take long before I found myself genuinely enjoying the process of exploring its world. There’s no combat, no endless stream of systems to unlock and no mountain of equipment to collect. Exploration is the entire point, and the world itself is strange enough that simply moving through it becomes its own reward.

And what a world it is.

Massive brutalist structures stretch in every direction. Corridors lead to rooms that seem to serve no obvious purpose, while staircases and platforms form a seemingly endless vertical maze. Before long, the line between architecture and something far stranger begins to disappear.

Everything feels cold, monumental and slightly unsettling, yet somehow incredibly inviting.

BLACKSHARD has an exceptionally strong visual identity.

What impressed me most is the way it uses light. Vast concrete surfaces, deep shadows and enormous empty spaces create a striking contrast that often made me stop simply to look around. On an OLED display, that effect becomes even more pronounced.

The PS5 version really shows what this kind of visual style can achieve when deep blacks, contrast and subtle lighting come together. This is absolutely one of those games that deserves a good screen.

But BLACKSHARD isn’t impressive simply because it is huge. What makes it stand out is the constant feeling that there is something behind everything you see — something you don’t fully understand.

The game doesn’t hand you answers. You gradually piece the story together through the things you discover, the places you visit and the events you experience. A large part of the enjoyment comes from trying to understand what is actually happening around you.

That approach fits the world perfectly. If the game explained every location, every character and every event, much of the mystery would disappear.

Of course, there is a price to pay for that freedom.

Navigation can be seriously confusing.

There’s no map drawing a route for you, no precise marker telling you where to go and no constant reminder of what you’re supposed to be doing next. Combine that with enormous structures that can look remarkably similar, and getting lost becomes almost inevitable.

There were plenty of moments when I thought I had finally found the right path, only to realise a few minutes later that I had somehow ended up back where I started.

That occasionally became frustrating, especially when I knew what I was looking for but had absolutely no idea how to reach it.

Interestingly, though, that same lack of direction also works as part of the atmosphere.

BLACKSHARD wants you to feel small and lost. It wants you to feel as though you have wandered into something far larger than yourself. The problem only appears when that sense of exploration stops being interesting and turns into simply searching for the next corridor.

Fortunately, the game rewards curiosity often enough that I found it relatively easy to forgive those moments.

The music plays a huge part in that experience as well.

The soundtrack fits the world perfectly, further reinforcing the feeling of isolation. When you find yourself completely alone inside some enormous structure, the music can make the difference between simply exploring an interesting environment and feeling like you have wandered into a place where you absolutely should not be.

And perhaps that is the best way to describe BLACKSHARD.

This isn’t a game that constantly tries to entertain you.

It wants to pull you into its world.

That also means BLACKSHARD won’t be for everyone. If you’re looking for a traditional adventure, constant action or a game that is always pushing you toward the next objective, you may run out of patience rather quickly.

But once you accept that the experience itself — the atmosphere, the exploration and the mystery — is the main attraction, everything starts to make much more sense.

For me, BLACKSHARD was an extremely enjoyable experience. Playing it on PS5, particularly on an OLED display, only amplified the things I liked most about it: the atmosphere, the visual identity and that constant sense of isolation.

It has its problems, with navigation being the most obvious one, but we rarely see games with such a clearly defined atmosphere and such a distinctive identity.

BLACKSHARD never tries to be something it isn’t. It doesn’t bury you under unnecessary mechanics, and it doesn’t artificially stretch its runtime just for the sake of it.

Instead, it creates one enormous, strange world and simply invites you to explore it.

And I was more than happy to accept that invitation.

BLACKSHARD isn’t a game you rush through. It’s a game you wander through. And that’s exactly why it’s worth getting lost in.