UFO’s Night Manor Is My Favorite Short Horror Game Of The Year

Hey, it’s October! And, as I’ve promised, 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:I will never shut up about UFO 50, which - as you may know - has 50 full games in it. I’m not going to give you the full pitch again. Nor am I going to give you more 168澳洲🌊幸运5开奖ဣ网:recommendations for fake classic game collections that give me some of the few fleeting moments of happinessꩲ I’ve ever experienced.

I’ve tried my best. I’ve made the hard sell on the collection as a whole. So, since it’s ‘spooky season’ - a phrase a 40-year-old man definitely shouldn’t be using - I’m💟 gonna pitch you just one game in the set: Night♏ Manor. It’s one of the best horror games of the year and - even better - it’s very short.

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Night Manor is a take on the old Shadowgate/Déjà Vu-style of point-and-click adventure games. You see everything fro🥃m a first-person perspective, but it’s a still image of a room with little nooks and crannies to explore with a few contextual options and, later, items. The more you explore the manor in which this night takes place, the more you find bits and bobs and clues that help you unlock more areas and potentially escape danger.

The good news is that while it looks and feels like a game from the 1980s - sort of - the gameplay itself isn’t trying🍰 to ruin your life. While a few puzzles can be difficult, the logic at least always makes some sort of sense. It’s not trying to drive you to a walkthrough to help pad out the runtime.

The main menu for Night Manor, showing the options "Start" and "Continue"

But let me back𒊎up and set the table. You play a nameless woman who crashes hꦐer car and wakes up locked in a bloody room on a bare cot. Remember the manor? This is that manor we were talking about! We’re in it!

It is rotting from the inside with fungus everywhere and a few lumps of flesh that may have once be🧸en people. Garbage blocks some of the hallways and bloody handprints stain the walls. Sometimes, when lightning strikes, you see the form of a man through the window. Scary, right? Maybe not in a game, but when that happens in real life it messes you up!

Anyway! Within that first room are items and clues that quickly let you out and into the mansion itself. As you look around and pick up journal pages scattered throughout the house, you begin to piece together what happe൩ned, to whom it happened, and why there’s a psychopath with a meat cleaver chasing you throughout the house.

A screenshot from Night Manor, showing a kitchen witha man standing in the corner

Oh, that’s the other thing. There’s a masked killer in the game who will jump scare you. Progressing in Night Manor often involves making noise in some way - turning on a music box, breaking glass, etc. Any time you do this, however, the killer will show up. Not immediately. But soon after you do it.

At which point y﷽ou can try to use items to slow the killer down (not that effective) or run (pretty much your only choice). Sometimes you’ll successfully run away entirely. Sometimes you’ll suddenly be hiding behind an object and playing a quicktime event to avoid deteꩵction. Can that part suck? Sometimes! Do I care? Not in the slightest!

A screenshot from Night Manor. It shows a mumified corpse in a bathtub, encrusted in mold and fungi.

The good news is that getting killed doesn’t end your game. Well, not really. Does getting killed have an effect on the final ending of the story? Who knows! I 🦩certainly didn’t hint at that! Bu𒁃t, regardless, when you die, you wake back up in the bloody room with all your items in your inventory and all the areas you’ve unlocked still accessible.

Even better, there is actually more than one way you can complete this game. It’s possible to see the worst ending pretty fast if you don’t know what you’re doing. And I don’t mean ‘Game Over’. I mean UFO 50 will acknowledge you beat the game but the ending is clearly not good.

A screenshot from Night Manor showing the skeletal remains of an animal

What really makes Night Manor shine is that it’s so blessedly very short. Playing through Night Manor takes as much time as it does to watch a regular horror movie. The game has no padding. Yes, 🌜there is a gem-based puzzle, as required by horror game law. No, it doesn’t feel like you’re taking a giant detour so the devs can say the game has a d🤡ozen more hours.

Despite being a point-and-click adventure, the game moves and, with the killer, it keeps you moving. The best and most annoying part is when you feel like you’re about to solve something big and then that a-hole with a cleaver 🌳arrives.

Don’t get me wrong, I love a good, full length horror game. I’ve got a lot on the docket this holiday season. I’m also pumped that apparently I was wrong about 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Silent Hill 2 and, 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:by all accounts, it’s a fanℱtastic game. I know for🍬 a fact✨ that I’m going to drop days into that remake.

But, on the flip side, sometimes you want a Stephen King short story rather than a Stephen King nove♉l. Reading The Langoliers might not be the same epic experience as reading The Stand, but I love that both exist and I love that one can be done in anಌ afternoon. Or, put another way, Night Manor is the ABCs of Death of horror games. Except, you know, just one letter.

The player hiding from someone in Night Manor

The DreadXP folks have been doing similar work for years; there’s a reason they’re considered some of the best in the business. It’s fun to play a game that you can finish fast without feeling guilty about moving on from. 🦩With DreadXP, you’ve got full collections of games to try.

With UFO 50, you’ve got… full collections of games to try. Getting one of the better endings in Night Manor in two hours didn’t feel like I got shafted. Rather, I felt like I just discovered one of my favorite new games inside of one of my f๊avorite new games.🍌 Night Manor can cut out all the fat because there’s plenty to do outside of it once you’re done. No value lost.

And being able to finish it fast makes it fun to do a 100 percent run on. I’ve played it four times now, and it’s like 🔯I’m speedrunning a horror film. I’ve loved every playthrough, even when I’ve sucked. I know the spots where to hide༺ from the killer. I know which entrances to unlock for maximum escapage.

I can do a completionist run in about thirty minutes at this point. It’s amazing. At this point it’s like meditating in a haunted house. And that’s just one game in a pack of 50. I just really need you folks to buy UFO 50.