Been a minute since I played one of the Midnight Scenes games but the description of this one intrigued me so I picked it up, and it was a pleasant way to spend an hour.

This is more of a note for the series as a whole but the games go for a sort of "Twilight Zone" vibe and I think they nail the aesthetic but don't quite pack the same punch as the real article because the stories... don't really say anything. They're just kind of "hey wouldn't it be fucked up if-" type stories, which I actually enjoy because low-stakes spooky tales are fun every now and then! And this dev team is very good at making those.

But the penny dreadful approach fell flat on this entry in particular because "Safe Place" is, for most of its run time, a pretty cutting examination of the loneliness and self-destruction that arises from anxiety, so the rug pull felt kinda out of place. It fell into this weird middle ground tonally where it's kind of a character study of a young man with anxiety but also kind of a horror game about a man trapped in his room being tortured by shadow figures, and both aspects feel a bit strapped for space.

All that being said, for the hour and a half that it took me to play this game I did feel like I was sitting in this cold, sleepy small town, so I can't say that it wasn't effective in that regard. For all of the missed potential it was still a very creepy little tale that kept me clicking, and I'm gonna have to go check out some of the other Midnight Scenes I've missed.