This year has been a bit of a renaissance for retro horror games. Not only have we gotten a killer blast from the past thanks to Bloober Team’s Silent Hill 2 remake but the indie scene has returned to the era of lo-fi horror in a big way. Games like Crow Country and Fear the Spotlight have brought us back to the days of fixed cameras and blocky heroes. Now you can add another great throwback to the list of 2024 alt-horror greats: Sorry We’re Closed.
A debut title from à la Mode Games, Sorry We’re Closed is both familiar and unlike anything I’ve really played. On its surface, it’s another ode to Silent Hill with some light puzzling and tight resource management. Below those clear inspirations, though, is one of the year’s most stylish and inventive games, one that’s not easily classifiable by genre. If you think that there’s no uncharted territory left for retro horror to explore, think again.
Neon-soaked horror
If you were jumping into Sorry We’re Closed blind, you might not realize that it’s a horror game at all in its opening moment. The most immediate red herring is its striking, neon-soaked art style that looks like a cross between Killer7 and Neon White. Even beyond that, the story opens up with a bickering couple and our hero, Michelle, working a shift as a despondent convenience store cashier. It all looks like a mundane slice-of-life story … until Michelle goes to sleep and meets a paralysis demon that places a curse on her. That kicks off a twisted — and at times convoluted — tale as Michelle works with angels and demons to both break free from her curse and fix her struggling relationship.
It’s a creative setup that fuses modern indie sensibilities with classic horror, and that extends to Sorry We’re Closed’s inventive gameplay. I figure I’m not in for many surprises when I start exploring a dreary underground train station. I’m walking around in search of puzzle items and avoiding creepy rat-like creatures all through the watchful eye of fixed camera angles that obscure my vision. It’s a pitch-perfect throwback that’s not too far off from Crow Country, right down to some water pipe puzzling.
That familiar structure gets a few major shakeups. When I press down the left trigger, I’m suddenly viewing what’s directly in front of me in first person. It’s a neat magic trick that has a big impact on exploration. Sometimes I need to jump into first person to find something that a fixed camera angle is hiding from me. I can’t figure out how to progress in one room until I hold the trigger down and realize that what I think is a flat floor is actually the top of a staircase I can descend. It makes for some clever problem-solving that’s new for a game cut from this cloth.
That’s only the tip of the innovation iceberg. Early in the story, Michelle’s third eye is opened as she explores the dream world she’s trapped in. That’s not just a turn of phrase; it’s a superpower. By pressing a button, a circle spreads out around me and reveals what the space I’m in looks like in the real world. For instance, impassable vines may block my path in the dream world, but they vanish while my third eye is open. It’s another spatial puzzling layer that goes beyond the genre’s classic lock-and-key item-hunting hook.
The third eye bleeds into combat too, creating Sorry We’re Closed‘s most striking feature. When I aim my weapon at an enemy in first person, I can open my third eye to reveal a weak point in them, represented by a crystal heart. When I shoot at it, sometimes another appears. My goal in battle is to hit those weak points with a sort of rhythmic accuracy to maximize damage (thus saving my precious ammo). Doing so also charges up a “heartbreaker” shot, which allows me to deliver a kill-shot to any enemy. In boss fights, I need to nail that pattern to charge up my shot and take them out. One battle against a squid monster has me dodging its gnashing beak, quickly switching to first person to hit its weak points, and then firing off my heartbreaker. All of that looks incredibly stylish too, peppering bright neon colors and UI flourishes on top of the lo-fi aesthetic.
As a creative swing, this may sound like a lot of ideas to throw out at once — and it is. As sharp as all the individual parts are, the adventure can be a little messy at times. The perspective switching is a great idea, but I’m often left fumbling with controls as I try to get enough distance between me and approaching creepers to switch to first person, get the right weapon equipped, and open my third eye quickly. It doesn’t help that it’s a little hard to judge what distance an enemy can actually strike me at (and vice versa), which led to a few surprise deaths during my playthrough. Combine that with a story that gets a little too wrapped up in its demonic lore, and you’ve got an eclectic horror game that doesn’t fully snap all its ideas together by its ending.
I’m always willing to forgive a lack of polish when in a game that’s this loaded with creative energy, though. It may be indebted to PlayStation horror classics, but it brings me back to the first time I played Killer7 more than anything. I was a teenager at the time and I’d quite literally never played anything like it at that point in my life. I still haven’t, honestly. The strange on-rails shooting setup made for an otherworldly experience, like I was playing a shooter from another planet. Sorry We’re Closed has that same feeling, which makes it easier to get lost in its strange world. You can play plenty of more polished horror games this year, but none of them will open your third eye quite like this.
Sorry We’re Closed is available now on PC.
