If there is one maxim that exists about horror games that were made in the wake of Hideo Kojima’s haunted hit P.T. (7780s Studio / Kojima Productions 2014), it is there will be a section about cycling through suburbia, where you are pursued by a ghost from the past. P.T.’s influence on the game world is deserved, of course. It’s a scary game with a novel idea, even if it doesn’t look it now. The way in which a space decays and deforms around you is haunting as the narrative reveals itself and its disturbing depths. You are stalked all the while by a woman made monstrous, Lisa. Lisa was made monstrous by a male figure that committed familicide, violently gouging out Lisa’s eye and killing her by shooting her pregnant belly. Lisa recalls the haunted spectre of the Japanese folklore creature the ubume, the ghost of a pregnant woman. The familiar video game structure of control is turned back on the player. The house prevents passage, confounds our feelings of progress, and frustrates our capacity to defend  with Lisa manipulating the player at every turn, turning the comfort of suburbia into a playable monstrosity.

You can see this in so many games, subtle or ripped wholesale. Games like Anatomy (Kitty Horrorshow 2016) use space against the place, corroding or corrupting the environment like P.T. Other games like Visage (SadSquare Studio 2020) lean into the feeling of being stalked through suburbia while solving obscure puzzles – it is perhaps what P.T. would look like if it was another ten hours long. Games like Infliction (Caustic Reality 2018) make obvious the parallels between P.T.’s purgatory and hell, using a black-haired ghost woman to terrorize the player (with much less effect). I could go on and on and on, creating a screed that complains about people misunderstanding P.T.. P.T.’s effectiveness is not to do with Lisa (although Lisa is pretty bloody scary). In other words, it is not enough to throw a ghost woman into a house and have blood run down the walls sometimes. Scary though that could be, P.T. shows a deceptive mastery of its space, and a mastery over horror game design.

P.T.’s effectiveness stems from its willingness to pull back. The decay is subtle at first, but as things get worse, and the single looping corridor ramps up the distressing noises (or even cuts back to dead silence), we are left wondering what will happen next. Our guts churn as we move through a hallway that never ends. It is the feeling of inescapability that is key to P.T.’s horror, the use of the medium of the video game taken to extremes. One space, very few controls, and a perspective that forces us to examine details we do not want more detail from.

Umfend (AIHASTO 2018) is one of the few successors to P.T. that tells its narrative more through space than other methods. There’s a whiteboard where the spectre haunting you scrawls notes, and late in the game dialogue starts to creep in. That’s where the game starts to become less effective. But it is in its first thirty minutes or so that Umfend works its magic. I don’t want to claim the game is scary. I am a particularly jaded horror game player at this point, and I feel that the atmosphere has to be incredibly immersive to frighten me. Umfend did not frighten me, but it did impress me. I knew that maybe six or seven years ago, Umfend probably would have got to me. So to that earlier version of myself, this is a recommendation for you, enjoy.

Trying to assemble a time machine – or a machine to move across dimensions – is a difficult task when the lights all go out and various spectres begin to infiltrate your house. As the game progresses, things get weirder, before going back to normal, before getting weirder again. Chairs end up on the ceiling; doors swing shut as you walk towards them, sealing you in pitch black rooms; love hearts appear in innocuous places; a monstrous figure goes through your fridge, oblivious to your presence til you step over the threshold into your kitchen. Umfend has hearts everywhere, beating hard in your ears, right behind you; Umfend has grass growing out of your floor, arms slithering like intestines across your floorboards, and vision that distorts just when you need it the most.

It is a very short game – it took me less than an hour to finish. While once I also would have claimed this is a problem, the game’s brevity does it a lot of favours. Unlike Visage, which is monstrously long given that it plays almost exactly like P.T., Umfend’s short timespan allows all of the little moments to land much more effectively. Writing appearing differently on the whiteboard is much more effective when you notice the difference in seconds or minutes rather than in half-hour increments. A slow decay can still be interesting, but is much harder to pull off. Hence Umfend’s success – it is a game about the breakdown of reality and the desire to connect dots that no longer exist. As a P.T.-like, it succeeds in ways some of its fellows do not, and defies those initial expectations to create a haunting, touching story about reconnection in the face of existential breakdown. Its graphics support the gentle darkness in the game’s narrative, disturbing you in subtler ways than something like Infliction. Well worth playing. This is a special little horror game with heart.

You can buy Umfend from Steam.