Hey —

I've been thinking about small spaces.

Not literally. I mean the kind of small spaces that only exist in a certain type of horror game. A gas station at 2am. A rented house in the woods. A snow-covered trail that might be a shortcut or might be a trap. An apartment window across the street where someone just did something terrible.

You don't get those spaces in big budget horror. You get mansions, laboratories, sprawling infected cities. You get scale. You get spectacle.

What you don't get is intimacy.

And intimacy is the thing that actually scares me.

The video I just put out is about exactly that. It's about indie horror – what makes it different, where it came from, and why a game made by one person in a bedroom can haunt you longer than something with a hundred-million-dollar budget.

It's about fourteen minutes long. I talk about Amnesia, Slender, FNAF, liminal spaces, jump scares, and a handful of specific games that I think are doing the best work in the space right now.

The thing I cut that I wish I hadn't

I had a whole section about Cry of Fear that got trimmed down to a couple of paragraphs.

For context: Cry of Fear was originally a Half-Life mod. It came out in 2012. The lead developer, Andreas Ronnberg (ruMpel), was going through a genuinely difficult period of his life. He took photographs of real streets in Stockholm. He used them as textures. He built a version of a city from memory and pain.

You play as Simon. Nineteen years old. Severe depression and anxiety. And the game doesn't hide that – it's the entire point. The monsters aren't monsters. They're what depression and trauma look like when you turn them into creatures.

In the script, I described a specific moment in the game's asylum level. There's a room where you find a painting on the wall – a self-portrait of Simon with his head replaced by a void. And there's a voiceline that plays, quietly, almost inaudibly: "This is how you see yourself, isn't it?"

I cut that detail because the video was already running long and I couldn't do justice to how that moment lands without spending another two minutes on it. But I think about that painting all the time. It's not a jumpscare. It's not a monster. It's just a painting and a whisper.

That's indie horror. It doesn't need to be loud. It just needs to be honest.

The games I couldn't fit in at all

I mentioned Fears to Fathom, Missing Hiker, Cry of Fear, Terpenie, It Happened at Night, and Gas Station Case.

There were at least five more I wanted to talk about.

The Closing Shift – by Chillas Art. You play a cafe worker, alone at night, closing the shop. The game is twenty minutes of cleaning, restocking, and locking doors. And then something is wrong with the window. And then something is wrong with the back room. And you realise the game has been teaching you the layout so that it can use your own familiarity against you.

Welcome to Kowloon – a walking sim in a brutalist Hong Kong housing complex. No monsters. No story, really. Just a space that feels genuinely bad to walk through. Every corner looks the same. The lighting is fluorescent and ugly. You get lost. And you start to feel watched without any evidence that you are.

These games are all under an hour. Most of them are under five dollars. Some are free.

And none of them would exist in a world where AAA publishers decide what gets made.

The liminal coziness thing

I mentioned this in the video but I didn't get to fully sit with it.

There's a quality to small, contained horror games that feels almost cosy. Not in the moment – in the moment you're scared. But afterwards, looking back, there's something comforting about the scale of them. You're not saving the world. You're not stopping an apocalypse. You're just trying to get through one night in one house, or one shift at one gas station.

That's relatable. That's human.

Big horror games are about global catastrophe. Indie horror is about the catastrophe that can fit inside a single apartment.

What I'd like to do next

I'm thinking about a follow-up video. Not a sequel, exactly – more like a companion piece. Focusing entirely on games that cost less than ten dollars and can be beaten in under an hour. A curated list for people who want to dip into indie horror but don't know where to start.

If that sounds interesting, hit reply and tell me. I'll prioritise it.

Also – if you've played a horror game recently that got under your skin, I genuinely want to know about it. The weirder, the better.

Thanks for reading. And thanks for being here.

– Respwnz

P.S. The indie horror video is here if you haven't seen it: What Makes Indie Horror Games So Unsettling