Right from its opening scene, survival horror roguelike Golden Light warns you to take nothing at face value. You’re standing in an endless, idyllic field with a woman known only as “She,” and you spot a rose in the distance. You go to pluck it to bring it to her, but an enormous, meaty hand bursts violently from the earth and drags her below. Giving chase down the deep, fleshy hole leads you to the Gut, a sentient and shape-shifting landscape whose garbled taunts appear across the top of the screen while you make your way through its corridors.

From the moment you set foot in the Gut, anything and everything is a potential threat. Any weapon, any door, and any piece of scattered furniture can instead be a mimic waiting to lash out at you when you get close. Sometimes you notice something off, like an object occupying what was once an empty space or an item slowly inching towards you. But the only way to know for sure is to grit your teeth and press onward, searching for the keys to unlock the elevator that will advance you to the next floor. All the while, the game slowly doles out its cryptic story through vignettes set in cramped rooms and bricked-up alleyways viewed through a swimmy graphical filter.

The only certainty about what you’ll find in the Gut is the total lack of certainty—even when an item doesn’t morph into a violent monster, its function is no more set in stone. All the severed fish heads, flesh masks, conjoined twin ravens, and other consumable grotesqueries change their effects from one run to the next, so that what once regenerated health may inflict poison or paralysis or “Gold Hunger” that slowly leeches away your accumulated currency. Here, too, the only way to know for sure is to experiment: Scarf down a pair of bulbous lips or lob it at an enemy, and then hope you aren’t caught in a chain reaction.

Weapons are similarly randomized—and with similar actions. You can swing an axe at an enemy, but you can also eat it or throw it or hit yourself with it because progressing in Golden Light means managing the mood of the Gut, which likes when you get hurt and emphatically dislikes when you kill its denizens. And when the Gut is unhappy, items cost more and the monsters are more aggressive.

The other way to appease the Gut is in the Eternal Field, the hub world you get kicked back to after each death. But even the hub world for Golden Light is a strange, potentially perilous place, full of secrets and items to prepare for the next run as well as other critters as capable of harm as anything lurking in the Gut. It’s a game that must constantly be learned anew, that achieves an atmosphere of total unease by eroding everything you know to be true. Each run in Golden Light has something new to discover, whether you want to find it or not.