In Chapel 3-D: The Ascent, becoming a monster costs you your own heart

A retro shooter, still in early access, where players cheer on its own chaos — but the same game that entertains by breaking down also wipes out all your progress every time it shuts itself off.

A sin shaped like a monster

Tear your own heart out of your chest, hurl it ahead of you and teleport to where it lands: that is the mechanic holding Chapel 3-D: The Ascent together. You begin as a frail human who learns to turn into a fire-spitting monster by pulling his heart out of his body — a mortal sin that, according to the game's official description, makes you pay for the transgression.

From there it's all flight: the story carries the player through a range of worlds while escaping the rage of enemies, mixing running, jumping and the heart itself as a teleport lure to cross each stage with what the description calls feline agility. Combat throws a variety of spells at a breakneck pace across levels with a retro look that the store page describes as carefully drawn. According to that page, the plot at last reveals the story behind the events of Cathedral 3-D, and the player comes to inhabit the very monster once seen on screen.

Chapel 3-D: The Ascent was released on 19 February 2026, made by Unfinished Games and published by Feardemic, listed as a first-person shooter with fighting elements. It remains in early access — the build on offer is still being finished, and is not the final game.

Fun that outlives its own bugs

One player, writing on 20 February, days after launch, thanked the studio and praised the range of spells at the player's disposal — the fun, in that account, lies in running loose as a mage. Later, on 24 May, another review pushed the praise toward the chaos: the game is so unstable that it has flung the player clean off the map and even to a standstill among the stars, and even so the writer called the experience fun and the level design challenging.

A German player, in a review dated 10 April, also recommended it, though with a caveat: he found the game good but short, with few levels, and mentioned glitches that skip past chunks of the game by accident — he was rooting for new stages down the line.

Across these favorable accounts the same idea keeps coming back: the game is short, rough around the edges, and wins you over regardless — the trouble starts when the flaw stops being a joke.

With nowhere to save, every crash erases your progress

A review from 26 February describes a powerful PC that had never crashed in any other game, yet here it can't get past the third or fourth wave of enemies without going down; the writer still held out hope that the studio would fix the problem. That hope went unrewarded: on 16 August someone else logged the same symptom, crashes shortly after starting, and summed the game up as impossible to play.

The Spanish-language review from 24 February is the most detailed of the bunch: it praises the visual concept and calls the game an old-fashioned shooter, plain and to the point, short but fun, with a handful of weapons and a fresh mechanic that turns up near the end. And then it turns: the same text lists constant crashes and the absence of any system for saving progress — if the game closes on its own, or even when you change levels, you have to start over from scratch.

A complaint posted on 19 July steers clear of the crashing theme: it's about ammo and health that drain far too fast against swarms of enemies, a difficulty this person found unbalanced for a game this size.

For those willing to lose their progress, not their patience

You sit down for a quick session, turn into the monster, cross stages by ripping your own heart out to teleport between platforms — and the game drops mid-wave, having saved nothing. That's where the call gets made: anyone happy to start over from scratch each time this happens, and who still finds the bug that hurls you off the map funny, will find in Chapel 3-D: The Ascent a rough shooter that nonetheless has a character all its own. Anyone who needs to pick up where they left off, or who plays in sessions too short to risk losing everything, runs straight into the very problem the most recent accounts still describe: a crash with no warning, no save point, no second chance. Turning into a monster is the easy part; surviving the game that hands you that power is the real test.