A Short Tale of Solitude is a creepy horror game with dolls, choices, not many colours

You know what I miss? Survival horror. That used to be a thing, right? It wasn't just some cheese-induced nightmare? Sure, we have Alan Wake and Resident Evil 6 (well, we don't have that on PC yet), and of course Amnesia, Slender Man and the more recent Imscared , but sometimes I miss exploring a spooky building from a fixed perspective. I'm suitably intrigued by A Short Tale of Solitude, then, which brings back the much-complained-about camera angles of yore. It's also an interesting adventure-horror in its own right, set in a creepy orphanage during World War I.

As the website puts it, A Short Tale of Solitude puts the player in the role of Sebastian, "a boy who was sent away to the orphanage because his mommy and daddy suddenly died." Which, to be fair, is exactly when you'd expect a child to be sent to an orphanage, as emotionally scarring as that might be. Sebastian seems to imagine the world in black and white, with horrible sack-puppet-things taking the place of actual people. You'll be able to customise your own sack-puppet, oddly enough, and RPS note that you'll make choices which will have "long-lasting impacts on the rest of the game".

Interesting! There's a demo coming "maybe soon", but in the meantime, scare your eyes rigid with following video.

Tom loves exploring in games, whether it’s going the wrong way in a platformer or burgling an apartment in Deus Ex. His favourite game worlds—Stalker, Dark Souls, Thief—have an atmosphere you could wallop with a blackjack. He enjoys horror, adventure, puzzle games and RPGs, and played the Japanese version of Final Fantasy VIII with a translated script he printed off from the internet. Tom has been writing about free games for PC Gamer since 2012. If he were packing for a desert island, he’d take his giant Columbo boxset and a laptop stuffed with PuzzleScript games.