7/10

This short experimental found-footage game does many things at the same time and it's one of the creepiest and most fascinating playable experiences I have ever had.

First, it's another example of how great Puppet Combo is in building haunting experiences through game and level design. Your character is slow and lame, you can't run, it's even hard to turn your head and watch the surroundings. Plus, the VHS filter make very hard to understand what you're actually watching. In this way, the game emphasises disempowerment - you are as vulnerable as you can be. Level design doesn't help: most levels can be summed up as a corridors, at the ends of which there are only closed doors. Once you reach on of the dead ends of the environment, you cannot but turn back and head to the other one. As you do this, you find you in an ankward position: at any time, someone/something can assault you from behind (the door is closed but, perhaps, not from both sides). At the same time, you cannot backtrack by looking at the closed door you found - the killer may also come from parts of the environment you still have to explore. In this way, the game enhances disempowerment and vulnerability through controls, visuals, movement, and level design in a quite simple but effective way.

Being a found footage, the game also leverages ambiguity. Being behind the camera, you don't know who you are. Being the action reduced to walking and recording things, you don't even know what you're doing. As most found footage movies, this can be a recording some unlucky victims made before getting slaughtered by some killer. If you have played other games by Puppet Combo, you kinda expect this. The first sections of the game could be you exploring abandoned buildings just for fun, and then being killed by who still inhabits them. But as you proceed things become more and more ambiguous. The meta-fictional framework of the found footage in this sense makes fun of both fear and purpose: you don't even know if you should be afraid, if you're the killer or a designated victim.

At the same time, you are also in a double position: you're both the subject who's recording and someone who watches the recorded material. The game makes explicit the twofoldness of every virtual experience: you're both acting and witnessing yourself acting. This becomes more and more interesting as the game progresses. At times, I have found myself recording detail and stuff to scare my audience - and I was the very audience of myself. When too scared to proceed, at times I stood still and wait some time by staring at walls or corners. In those moments, I found myself thinking not in terms of 'how scared I am, I cannot proceed, I will wait here for something to happen' but rather of 'how scary this tape is, what is this guy doing here staring at this corner??'. In this sense, the game provides perhaps one of the best reflections on found footage I have ever found, and especially played.

Spoilers ahead.

Last but not least, the game also engages with memory play in a very interesting way. The game features both a scream from the Ruth Price 911 call (as in Lisa Germano's 'A Psycopath'). The ending scene is also a direct reference to an actual recording of an arson in California. In both, you find yourself amid fictional and actual events, as in a re-enactment of tremendous crimes. In the very end, I was recording the fire and feeling like Benny in Haneke's Benny's Video. Another brilliant way to make you feel uncomfortable and to make your very agency ambiguous.