Blood Covenant Demo: I Came to Clean Blood and Ended Up Punching Five Monsters to Death
Blood Covenant is a first-person horror game where you're hired to clean an abandoned psychiatric hospital while trying not to get murdered by whatever's roaming the corridors. It's coming to Steam on November 2, 2026, with a free demo already available.
I've played that demo four times, and I genuinely don't know what to make of it. The cleaning is tedious, the monsters are laughably ineffective, and the supposedly terrifying final encounter can be beaten by running around the edge of a room for 75 seconds. Or, as I eventually discovered, by punching everything in sight.
I wouldn't recommend the demo in its current state. Which is a shame, because there's a good horror game hiding somewhere inside this idea. Unfortunately, it's doing a considerably better job of hiding than the actual player needs to.
First impressions aren't exactly encouraging
The game opens with a scream. A particularly bad one, sounding suspiciously like an audio file somebody downloaded from a free sound-effects website. At almost the same moment, a monster passes a series of doors with windows.
That's our introduction to the horror. A dreadful scream and one of the least frightening creatures I've seen in a videogame. Before I've even worked out where I am, the game has already introduced its monster and given me a fairly good reason to stop taking it seriously.
Then I receive my assignments.
Cleaning bathrooms. Seriously?
I've entered an abandoned psychiatric hospital apparently crawling with supernatural horrors, and my first responsibility is to deal with the toilets. I suppose somebody has to do it, but I'd at least expect a respectable hourly rate and some extremely comprehensive insurance.
There's also a request to collect blood samples for the van driver. Why does the van driver need blood samples? What's he doing with them? Is he driving a mobile laboratory, or is this one of those employment benefits they forgot to explain during orientation?
The actual cleaning involves spraying blood until it disappears. Quite a lot of spraying, in fact. There's no particularly interesting interaction here, just pointing at stains and repeatedly squeezing the trigger.
At one point, I entered a room and discovered RUN written in red, alongside what appeared to be blood on a mirror. Naturally, I tried cleaning it.
After approximately fifty sprays, nothing had changed.
Apparently, this red substance isn't the kind of blood I'm supposed to clean. Or perhaps it's some particularly stubborn supernatural variety that requires a different product. How the hell am I supposed to know?
I've been hired to clean blood from an abandoned hospital. There's red stuff on the mirror. I'm holding a bottle designed to remove red stuff. The logical next step seems fairly obvious.
Instead, I'm apparently expected to distinguish ordinary blood from decorative blood using powers of deduction that would impress Sherlock Holmes.
Why am I deliberately releasing the monster?
Besides cleaning, you're also tasked with hammering breaches in the walls. This makes quite a bit of noise, which is important because Blood Covenant advertises a system where noisy tools can attract unwanted attention.
That's actually an interesting idea. Imagine needing to finish a job while knowing that every swing of your hammer could bring something horrible charging down the corridor. Unfortunately, my experience with the monsters wasn't nearly that dramatic.
Eventually, I needed to collect four blood vials to open a door. A door with a monster behind it.
Now, perhaps I'm approaching this from the wrong perspective, but why would I open it?
I'm a cleaner. I've already been assigned bathrooms, wall repairs and a rather suspicious blood collection service for the van driver. Releasing dangerous creatures wasn't mentioned in my job description.
Nevertheless, the game insists.
Once released, the monster chases you, and you're supposed to survive by hiding or avoiding it. I managed to hide successfully, although the creature made that remarkably easy.
For one thing, it announces its location through sound. Fair enough. But it also comes with an enormous red glow, making its whereabouts painfully obvious. It's difficult to fear something when you always know exactly where it is.
I initially tried hiding underneath beds, which seemed a fairly sensible thing to do in a hospital.
Apparently, that's not possible. On a later attempt, however, I discovered that standing in the middle of a room could work perfectly well.
Excellent. So the monster can spot me running down a corridor but apparently struggles with the complicated visual challenge of identifying a man standing in an otherwise accessible room.
Perhaps it needs glasses.
Apparently, horror games have developed an obsession with making us clean things. At least Ambrosia Sky gives you an alien infestation worth scrubbing. See what happens when the cleaning is actually interesting.
Seventy-five seconds of Benny Hill
The demo's finale requires you to sacrifice your own blood to several pillars. Once that's done, you're trapped with a monster and told to survive for 75 seconds.
No weapon. No escape. Just you and the creature.
This ought to be terrifying.
Instead, I started running around the edges of the room. The monster followed. I kept running, it kept following, and after 75 seconds, I'd won.
That was it.
The whole terrifying climax had become an episode of The Benny Hill Show, except nobody had remembered to include the music.
I didn't discover some advanced technique or exploit a complicated weakness. I simply ran around the room until the timer expired. The monster clearly wanted to murder me, but apparently hadn't considered cutting across the room rather than following exactly the same route.
I started wondering whether the hospital had been abandoned because of supernatural horrors or because somebody had accidentally hired every creature from the local remedial athletics programme.
Either way, the finale was over. And I hadn't felt remotely threatened.
Four attempts later, the monsters became punching bags
I decided to start again, partly because I wanted to see whether the cleaning locations changed between runs.
They do, somewhat. That gives the tasks a little variety, although the underlying cleaning remains largely the same. Unfortunately, my second attempt ended about ten seconds in when the game became unresponsive. I had to use Alt+F4 to close it.
Not a fantastic start to the experiment.
On my third attempt, I discovered two particularly interesting things. First, hiding could be absurdly forgiving, including the previously mentioned strategy of standing in the middle of a room.
Second, you can punch the monsters.
This changed everything.
By my fourth run, I'd decided to stop behaving like the frightened employee the game apparently expected me to be. I deliberately made lots of noise, hoping to see just how dangerous the creatures could become.
Then I punched one to death.
It turns out that repeatedly hitting monsters can stunlock them, preventing them from properly responding. Suddenly, the whole survival-horror concept started falling apart. Why should I fear a monster that can be beaten into submission with my bare hands?
And then came the finale. This time, there were five monsters.
Five supernatural creatures, all confined to the same room with one completely unarmed cleaner. Surely this would be the moment when their numerical advantage finally made things difficult.
Nope.
I started backpedalling while repeatedly punching them, keeping the creatures staggered long enough to survive the encounter.
Five monsters. One cleaner. Seventy-five seconds. And somehow, the cleaner emerged victorious.
At this point, I'm beginning to wonder whether I've misunderstood the entire premise. Perhaps I'm not supposed to be the victim. Perhaps the monsters are the ones desperately hoping I'll finish cleaning and leave.
Imagine being a supernatural horror, trapped for eternity inside an abandoned psychiatric hospital, only to have some bloke arrive with a spray bottle and beat your entire department unconscious.
I'd haunt somewhere else.
The horror disappears once you understand the rules
This is where Blood Covenant really falls apart for me.
The premise is genuinely interesting. You're supposed to balance completing cleaning jobs against attracting monsters, collecting additional blood samples and surviving long enough to escape. There are also advertised progression systems involving commissions, equipment and black-market purchases, although my demo sessions didn't give me enough experience with those systems to judge them.
But the basic horror needs to work first.
And after four attempts, I found myself doing almost the opposite of what the game presumably wants.
Rather than avoiding noise, I deliberately made more of it. Rather than fearing monsters, I approached them aggressively. Rather than desperately searching for somewhere to hide, I discovered that ordinary movement and repeated punching were enough to trivialise encounters.
Once you understand how easily the threats can be manipulated, the game loses whatever tension it was trying to create.
The cleaning doesn't rescue it either. Spraying surfaces repeatedly isn't inherently satisfying, and the occasional randomisation of cleaning locations doesn't suddenly make the activity interesting.
I can forgive rough graphics in an indie horror game. Plenty of excellent horror games look technically dreadful but understand atmosphere, suspense and the importance of making the player feel vulnerable.
Here, the monster models are poor, their behaviour is ineffective, and the supposedly frightening finale becomes less threatening with every attempt.
There's a difference between a monster that looks ridiculous but remains dangerous and one that looks ridiculous while allowing itself to be punched into submission.
Blood Covenant manages the latter.
Had enough of monsters getting beaten senseless by the cleaning staff? Enter CRIMENET's Horror Games hub for nightmares with a little more bite. Preferably ones that know how to fight back.
Should you play the Blood Covenant demo?
Based on my four solo runs, I wouldn't recommend it.
The demo feels extremely rough, with repetitive cleaning, questionable visual presentation, weak monster behaviour and a final encounter that completely fails to create tension. I also experienced one crash, although that's hardly enough to establish how stable the game is across different systems.
The full release is scheduled for November 2, and the advertised co-op experience could potentially change how the game plays. Additional content, progression and further development may improve things considerably.
But that's a judgement for the finished game.
Right now, I can only speak about the demo I've played, and the results aren't encouraging.
There's an interesting idea here. Working as a cleaner in a haunted hospital, making noise while trying to finish increasingly dangerous assignments, could make for some genuinely memorable horror.
Unfortunately, what I actually experienced involved cleaning bathrooms, spraying an uncleanable mirror approximately fifty times, hiding in plain sight and repeatedly assaulting monsters who seemed fundamentally unfamiliar with the concept of self-defence.
If this game had been made by my twelve-year-old sister, I'd probably feel rather proud.
But as a commercial horror game approaching release?
This is dreadful. And not in the intended way.
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