Welcome to the SCP Foundation
SCP – Containment Breach is a free indie supernatural horror video game wherein you must survive and escape from a dangerous secret facility that’s been overrun by paranormal anomalies. Developed by Joonas “Regalis” Rikkonen, this action-packed first-person survival game is directly based on the fiction stories of the popular SCP Foundation website and is centered around its lore.
For humanity’s sake
The SCP Foundation is an online community-based collaborative-fiction project that documents a fictional secret organization of the same name. This Foundation is tasked with locating and containing individuals, entities, locations, objects, and phenomena that defy the natural law—colloquially known as “SCPs.” Anomalous in nature, if they are left uncontained, they could pose a direct threat to humanity’s life and perception of reality. The website itself is known for its scientific and academic writing style that denotes various genres aside from horror, like science fiction and urban fantasy.
The entire premise of the SCP Foundation hinges on the necessity to hide these SCPs. As such, Foundation facilities are hidden deep beneath the earth and the entire organization is governed by three strict rules or “strict containment procedures” that also make up its acronym: Secure, Contain, and Protect. There are thousands of SCPs under surveillance and the Foundation employs different types of jobs to keep everything in order. However, in SCP – Containment Breach, one facility goes into lockdown mode when these anomalies escape.
On your own
In this single-player game, you play as D-9341—a “Class-D” personnel who is an expendable test subject for SCP research. Everything goes haywire after a system malfunction in the facility happens during an experiment with SCP-173—a statue that moves when not stared at and kills people—and now, you have to escape before any of the hostile SCPs find you and kill you. Most of the important personnel have been evacuated while the rest are already dead. Your security clearance doesn’t grant you any weapons, either.
Thus, you have to rely on various items found by exploration—documents found in each holding cell to learn how to handle a specific SCP, and scattered objects like keycards and electronic devices to access locked areas and puzzles. You can also encounter safe SCPs that won’t harm you and may even be helpful in certain situations, such as a machine that can refine objects and a pair of one-eyed creatures that can trap the dangerous stalking SCP-173. There’s even a blink mechanic and meter to use for this enemy.
What makes the game really challenging, however, is the procedurally-generated map for every new playthrough. The whole facility is divided into three fixed zones but each contains a unique set of randomly-chosen rooms and hallways—and with this scramble also comes the uncertainty of where each SCP is located when you start the game. The SCPs aren’t the only things that will actively kill you either, as the mobile task force unit “Nine-Tailed Fox” is deployed at one point to secure the facility and kill stray any D-Class personnel.
Don’t judge a book by its cover
Compared to other games inspired by and based on the SCP Foundation, SCP – Containment Breach is its most popular title for a good reason. Its gameplay mechanics are quite solid and really forces you to stay alert as you progress through each room. The main issue here is the graphics, with the cheap-looking game assets that will remind you of low-budget titles. However, this doesn’t detract from the experience at all—and if you want visual upgrades, there’s always the game’s spiritual successor, SCP Unity.
