Puppet Combo puts a lot of jumpscares in their games. There, I said it. Some of them don’t need jumpscares to be scary, but Puppet Combo put them in anyway, because they work.

The one I have the biggest problem with is Power Drill Massacre, which seems to be a loud, obnoxious jumpscare of a game. It’s scary, sure, but is it scary in a good way?

That’s a question I’m going to answer somewhere else at a later date, because I want to recommend their twenty to thirty minute Night Shift experience, a first-person retraux horror game.

It all starts fairly innocuously, as basically all good horror should, of course. You’re being dropped off at your night shift at a lonely gas station somewhere along a fairly deserted highway. The guy working the last shift has done none of the jobs he’s supposed to do, the phone hasn’t been looked at by the phone company, and the bathroom doors are both broken. So you meander around, putting unsold stock back on the shelves that someone left in their basket, sweep the floor for an awfully long time, and maybe even play a bit of Power Drill Massacre on the arcade machine.

It’s the way the sounds work that make the place feel so foreboding. Have you ever been alone in a place that’s meant to be filled with people? You’d swear the building is noisier somehow. That’s how it is in Night Shift. Stand anywhere near the arcade machine and the whirring, bleeping sound it makes is oddly unsettling. The sound of a car radio outside seems much, much louder than anyone would ever turn it up to. And the creak of a door – well, that pierces your heart.

Night Shift is scary because Puppet Combo restrains themselves. There’s only really one screeching, awful jumpscare, and that’s painfully effective simply because the game has only unnerved you up until this point. There’s no obvious, shlocky horror tropes used to create false jumpscares or anything like that.

A white van appears every now and then, if you look and listen closely enough. Some guy asks whether or not you’re alone here; you can tell the truth, or you can lie, saying your co-worker is in the back. People linger in the store, and you swear they are watching you.

It’s worth noting that Night Shift is the prologue to another game from Puppet Combo, hopefully releasing this year, called Stay Out Of The House. But you can be assured, when that house is open for business, I’ll be one of the first in.

Night Shift feels real. The tension builds and builds until it coalesces into one, final, terrible moment that I did not see coming. Fans of horrific atmosphere and 80’s slasher movies, Night Shift is a step into that world – for better, or worse.

You can play Night Shift by buying it in this bundle of other scary Puppet Combo stories, or by downloading the free demo available on Steam.