Tim Burton Horror Lives In Weird Steam Adventure That Reminds Me Of The Creepiest 2010s Games

Its little girl protagonist has onyx eyes and hair that goes nearly down to her fingertips, so she looks a bit overgrown, like she might have washed up on some riverbank. Otherwise, she seems normal, with a thin mattress to curl on top of every night like any other lonely child. But that’s not what her mother thinks.

“See what I have to deal with?” Mother says as our little girl stares politely at a party tray of frosted cupcakes. Hell Is Other People’s Steam description explains that you won’t collect items in your inventory, but social skills, so the girl responds to her mother’s snide comment with Guilt–but it isn’t impactful. She becomes paranoid, making lines of dialogue seem to jumble and melt together as the girl explains, “When I feel bad, people become so hard to read.”

You’ll have to manage these shifting tides of emotion by consulting your notebook for how normal people behave. Initially, I was drawn to the pretty Gothic caricature of Hell Is Other People, black cats with sharp syringe teeth and patterned arsenic wallpaper, but now I’m feeling understood by it as a true social survival game. 

When I myself was a strange girl with long hair that blew around on the swingsets, I was much like the Hell Is Other People protagonist; I was desperate for my parents to understand me, and I couldn’t understand why they didn’t try. My only solace in those years was Tim Burton’s corpse bride and monsters like Slender Man–outcasts. It can be pleasant to give up and call yourself a freak, exist among freaks. So I’m excited for the gloomy nostalgia Hell Is Other People brings me when it’s out sometime soon.