Asylum, Senscape designer Agustín Cordes’ 15-year Lovecraftian nightmare, checks into PS5, Xbox and Switch

Some games are made; Asylum was endured. Agustín Cordes, the Argentine designer behind the cult adventure Scratches, spent the better part of fifteen years building the Hanwell Mental Institute at Senscape, his small Buenos Aires studio. The project survived a viral teaser campaign fronted by a fictional escaped inmate, a crowdfunding drive that beat its goal, and a long stretch in which the game looked more like a rumour than a release. When it finally reached PC, it felt almost like an artefact from another era: a first-person horror adventure that still trusted dread over spectacle. Now the institute is opening its doors a second time.

SOEDESCO, the Rotterdam-based publisher, is bringing Asylum to PlayStation 5, PlayStation 4, Xbox Series X|S and Nintendo Switch. In the announcement, the publisher leans on the PC version’s Very Positive user rating on Steam, and that is the telling endorsement. Critics were more divided, praising the atmosphere and the score while finding parts of the design old-fashioned. Players, it seems, came for exactly that old-fashioned quality, and stayed.

The candlelit entrance hall and staircase of the Hanwell Mental Institute — Image: Senscape / SOEDESCO

The premise is deliberately simple. You play a former patient tormented by disturbing visions who returns to Hanwell to find out what happened to him there. The building does most of the storytelling. Cordes modelled it on the Kirkbride plan, the sprawling layout once used for real nineteenth-century psychiatric hospitals, and the game asks you to read its wards, offices and records the way an investigator would, searching for clues and slowly assembling a truth the place would rather keep buried.

That approach shapes everything else. The puzzles reward careful observation rather than reflexes, and the publisher stresses that the horror rests on suspense and atmosphere, with only a handful of carefully placed jump scares. The influences are worn openly: Lovecraftian fiction, classic horror cinema and a soundtrack that nods to 1980s genre films and the synthesiser work of John Carpenter. It is the lineage Cordes has mined since Scratches, a game about a writer and the haunted country house he buys, scaled up to an entire institution. The campaign runs to roughly ten hours.

A wood-panelled doctor office with a desk, lamp and bookshelves inside the asylum — Image: Senscape / SOEDESCO

For console players, the appeal is the chance to try a kind of horror that big-budget releases rarely attempt any more: slow, text-rich, built around a single place and a single mystery rather than combat. The port also gives Senscape, a studio that has worked largely outside the mainstream, its widest audience yet.

Asylum launches on PlayStation 5, PlayStation 4, Xbox Series X|S and Nintendo Switch on October 30, just in time for Halloween, and can already be wishlisted on each platform’s store. The PC version has been available on Steam and GOG since March 2025.

Scratches was about a house that would not let go of its owner. Asylum suggests its designer was just as possessed by his own building, and now anyone with a console can walk in.

Tags: Horror games, SOEDESCO, Agustín Cordes, Asylum, Scratches, Senscape