Bodycam games are becoming a thing. More and more devs want that found-footage look right now. Raspberry Studio put A.A.U. Black Site into Steam Early Access on May 21, letting you try your darndest to survive the abandoned zones of Uzovnica. There’s a horror setup that’s very cool and the guns feel surprisingly solid. But the game has another thing that’s also scary: real technical issues.
Shooting and Scarecrows
A.A.U. Black Site is a game with a simple premise. It allows us to play as a framed special forces soldier stuck behind enemy lines. The gist is to survive and get out. It’s not easy, as there are many obstacles in your way. Luckily, you get about 20 weapons to mess around with. Usually, aiming in these bodycam games feels terrible, but the weapon animations here actually work well. As expected, there are no traditional crosshairs. We just had to rely on lasers and iron sights. Clicking the middle mouse button, however, snaps to a canted sight, which is a nice touch. For some reason, there are no grenades and, before you ask, slow-motion bullet time is also not a thing here. You rely on your gun and find comfort in heavy recoil and health injections.
To keep this strict and challenging design, you also don’t have any objective markers. In the haunted Yugoslav town, your first job is to figure out where to go. It makes the place feel really isolating, an effect that’s even more emphasized due to the bodycam’s way of presenting things.
The audio hugely helps with the whole immersion experience. Thanks to the use of a dynamic six-layer soundtrack, everything is quiet when you sneak. But, if you get spotted, heavy metal drums kick in. It fits the mood well; we just wished some of the tracks weren’t so generic.
It’s evident that the devs actually put a lot of work into the AI. It feels like the enemies, the so-called anomalies, watch how you play. If you keep hiding in the exact same corner, they will eventually figure it out. They caught us once or twice, making us adapt to the tactic of moving fast and moving often. Trust us when we say that sneaking around in the dark is pretty stressful.
The AI, however, is smart in the way we described above but extremely dumb in other ways. Sometimes it just throws big waves of enemies at us. When it turns into a standard shooting gallery, it kills the tension they built up so well. We only get two chapters right now, so it feels more like a short demo.
Optimization is the biggest reason why the Steam reviews are sitting at “Mixed” right now. There are performance drops and bad micro-stutters that break immersion. The devs are patching things fast, though. We got an FOV slider, proper keybinds, and a Quake-style lean slider on day one. They even reworked an annoying underground fight because players were complaining. If this doesn’t prove that they’re listening to the community we don’t know what does.
Testing a Demo?
The gunplay has weight. We like the lack of hand-holding. But the constant stuttering, the wave defense parts, and the short two-hour runtime mean we have to be patient with this little gem. It’s evident that they are doing their best. In time, when they fix the performance and finish the story, this could very well be a really cool game. Right now, as is the case with most Early Access titles, it feels like you are paying to test a promising prototype.
ID Card
- Developer: Raspberry Studio
- Publisher: IZilla Games
- Platforms: PC (Steam)
- Release Date: May 21, 2026 (Early Access)
- Genre: First-Person Action Horror
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