Who needs Silent Hill_ The 'anxiety horror' game I'm most looking forward to is this freakish, grote

I'm a trusting soul. When some poor unfortunate raps on my door after the end of the world, I don't have it in me not to let them in. When their teeth are a suspiciously perfect white, I attribute it to a rigorous before-bed hygiene routine. Their red eyes? We're all tired. Their hairless armpits? They must be a [[link]] swimmer.

And when I wake up the next morning and find one of my other guests has been perfectly trisected into a series of hot, damp bin bags, I reason they must have had an accident using my Kai Shun knife set.

is a Papers Please-like—in the way that we describe any game that makes 'looking at a guy' a part of its gameplay loop as a Papers Please-like—about making room at the inn in the midst of an apocalyptic solar event. The Sun, finally tired of us, has turned up the temperature to 'kill you instantly' levels in daytime, and people need a place to stay.

What complicates this is that, on top of the Sun situation, a species of doppelgangers [[link]] has clawed their way out from under the Earth's mantle. Called the Visitors, they're perfect simulacrums of humanity—in that they look like the same kind of hideous freak everyone else does—save for their pearly teeth, dirty nails, red eyes, and hairless pits (or at least, these are the only tell-tale features revealed to you over the course of the demo).

So, every night you get knock after knock after knock at the door. Peer through the peephole and you will, invariably, be confronted by someone who looks melted and deranged begging you for a place to stay for the night. Many are human, some are not, and you can't just turn everyone away: the monsters prey on people [[link]] who stay home alone.

There's no good way that I found to identify who is and isn't a Visitor just through the peephole, so I ended letting all bar one caller in (and the one I rejected was entirely based on vibes). Far better to use your limited pools of energy in the daytime to run physical checks on your guests—to look at their teeth, eyes, nails, bodies for evidence of otherness.

If you suspect your guest of ill intent, you can pull a gun on them as they cry and cower, and it's here, reader, that I dug my own grave. Old softy that I am, I find it very difficult to obliterate a person who is tearfully begging me not to.

'Maybe the white teeth are just white teeth,' I say to myself as every new day opens with the phrase "It smells like someone died overnight," and the number of people in the living room dwindles to a single, grinning woman picking flesh from her teeth.

It's a very enjoyable, eerie, and stylish nightmare that I am entirely unequipped for, and I'm very eager to get my hands on the full game—with surely even more opportunities to doom myself and the people around me—when it hits later today.