Heartworm Hits Switch 2: PS1 Horror Made for Handhelds

Heartworm has been sitting quietly on PC since last year, and for anyone who plays horror on a handheld, that was a problem. You don’t play a game about a flashlight-and-camera crawl through pitch-black corridors on a desktop monitor at noon. DreadXP has finally fixed that: the game is now out on PS5, PS4, Xbox Series X/S, Xbox One, Nintendo Switch 2, and the original Switch, joining the existing Steam release. For a handheld owner, the Switch and Switch 2 versions are the headline, and the Steam build quietly means this thing should run on a Steam Deck without breaking a sweat.

Developer Vincent Adinolfi’s pitch is a PS1-era throwback — Silent Hill, Resident Evil, Clock Tower — with a camera flash that briefly lights spaces that would otherwise be pure black, and a unifying TV-static aesthetic that gives the whole thing a distinct identity. It runs 4-6 hours depending on how often you panic-save, ships at $15 across every storefront (it’s currently discounted to $8.99 on Steam), and lets you choose whether to suffer through tank controls or leave them off.

A 4-6 Hour Campaign Is Portable Horror’s Sweet Spot

This is the number that matters most for anyone playing on a commute, a flight, or the twenty minutes before bed: Heartworm is a five-hour game, not a thirty-hour investment. More importantly, GamesRadar+ notes each area is clearly delineated with easy break points — the kind of deliberate chaptering that makes suspend-resume actually usable rather than a gamble. On Switch and Switch 2, where you can drop the console into sleep mid-corridor and pick it up three days later, that structure is the difference between finishing a game and abandoning it.

Compare that to the genre’s usual handheld problem. Classic survival horror’s save-room anxiety — the tension of not knowing when your next typewriter is — punishes short sessions hard. Heartworm’s shorter runtime and readable pacing mean a fragmented play schedule costs you tension, not progress. If you bounce between a Deck and a Switch, this is a game you can genuinely finish in a week of scattered sessions, not bookmark forever.

The Camera Flash Only Works If Your Screen Can Sell the Dark

Heartworm’s central mechanic is a camera flash that briefly illuminates otherwise pitch-black spaces, and the game leans on these moments hardest in its opening hours. That’s a mechanical dependency on display contrast, and it changes how you should think about which handheld you buy it on. On the Switch 2’s HDR-capable screen or a Steam Deck OLED, genuine black levels let the flash read as a real burst of light out of nothing — the effect the developer is actually going for. On an older Switch or an LCD Deck, dark spaces skew gray and washed, and the flash becomes a brightness shift rather than a horror beat.

It’s not a dealbreaker either way, but if you own both an LCD and an OLED device, this is the rare game where that choice is load-bearing. On the Steam side, the PS1-aesthetic art direction and low geometric complexity suggest this should sit comfortably at 60 FPS on Deck well under 15W — though DreadXP hasn’t published verified Steam Deck numbers, so treat that as reasoned expectation, not a confirmed target. Budget sleep-battery monsters like this are exactly what the Deck does best; a five-hour horror game is a long-haul flight’s worth of play on a single charge.

Tank Controls, Optional: DreadXP Lets You Choose Your Own Suffering

The control options deserve a callout because they’re unusual for a genre that usually enforces its purism. Heartworm lets you turn tank controls on or off, and adjusts difficulty more broadly — so you can dial the hardcore PS1 authenticity up or down to taste. For handheld players specifically, that flexibility is welcome: twin-stick-style movement on a Switch 2 or Deck stick is more forgiving in a cramped seat than deliberately stiff directional tank steering, and the game doesn’t punish you for choosing comfort.

At $15 — and $8.99 on Steam right now — this is one of the easier recommendations in the current horror lineup. It’s a tight, atmospheric love letter that doesn’t ask for your whole year, runs on essentially every device you own, and was built for the kind of dark-room, headphones-on session that handhelds are made for. If you’ve been circling it since the PC launch, the console versions are the excuse to finally commit.