The videogame equivalent of clickbait, mascot horror titles clog up digital storefronts nowadays in such incalculable volumes that your eyes are liable to just glaze over them, in much the same way that you might overlook another cheapo shark flick intruding upon your Amazon Prime recommendations.

Shamelessly riding the coattails of Five Nights at Freddy’s (a franchise that has, itself, proliferated a thousand times over like some kind of malignant tumour), these releases don’t need clever design, artful scares, or unique mechanics to get eyes on them. All they’ve got to do is reproduce the same hackneyed formula that’s enabled FNAF to become a multi-film, multi-game, multi-million-dollar franchise.

You know the drill by now: a blank-slate protagonist finds themselves trapped overnight in some deserted hotspot that we’re accustomed to seeing densely populated (toy store/ gimmicky restaurant/ shopping complex: delete as appropriate) and is then hounded by preposterously creepy children’s entertainers. Having forsaken their original mission to bring joy to families, these anthropomorphic stalkers now harbour much more sinister intentions. More often than not, their diabolical plans involve getting right up in your face and shrieking at ear-piercing decibels, so that (equally shrill) streamers can performatively overreact to something that the rest of us are utterly desensitised to.

In case it’s not apparent, this subgenre’s mass appeal eludes me somewhat. Whenever I am forced to endure the hysterical caterwauling of a thirtysomething YouTuber —suffering from what John Hammond would call “a deplorable excess of personality” — playing through one of these cash grabs, it makes me feel like Tommy Lee Jones at the end of No Country for Old Men. I’ve become a man out of time, despairing at a senseless world that he can no longer understand or relate to.

You’d be forgiven, then, for assuming I went into Dark Pals: The 1st Floor with an axe to grind. After all, it follows the genre’s blueprint to the letter. Not only does it have the stock premise described above, but, just like FNAF, it substitutes proper storytelling for inscrutable lore (which you have to consult ancillary materials to have a cat in hell’s chance of penetrating). Meanwhile, it also has an episodic structure, à la Poppy Playtime, that leaves you on an inherently unsatisfying and abrupt cliffhanger (in this case, The 1st Floor is chapter one, and it concludes with you counterintuitively taking a lift down to the second floor).

All of which is to say, Dark Pals was at an immediate disadvantage for me. It looked like a creatively bankrupt Five Nights at Freddy’s clone, sounded like a creatively bankrupt Five Nights at Freddy’s clone, and was lumped together on its Steam page with a bunch of creatively bankrupt Five Nights at Freddy’s clones.

Yet I honestly didn’t hate it! For all the red flags, within just a few minutes of booting up Dark Pals: The 1st Floor, it becomes very clear that it was a labour of love for its six-person development team. Skunx Games didn’t just churn out some low-effort shovelware here, as they probably could have, and instead delivered a solid experience with slick presentation, an intriguing world, and a welcome reliance on puzzles over worn-out jump scares.

Adult Supervision Required 

The title casts you as a (presumed) grown-up who returns to a familiar place from their half-remembered childhood, known as “UpWard”. A sort of amusement park mixed with a behavioural conditioning camp; this old haunt appears to have been caught in stasis ever since we left it in the 1980s, stuck now playing the same Tannoy announcements and infectious earworm tunes that we recognise from over forty years ago.

To put it mildly, the venue could do with a bit of TLC. The fairground attractions have all fallen into disrepair, the lobby balloons seem to have deflated long ago, decades-old stains have accumulated around the busted soda fountains, cockroaches scuttle through the commissary areas, and the roof is quite literally crumbling around your head.

Suffice it to say, it’s not quite the whimsical wonderland that our prodigal son recalls from their youth, although further inspection reveals that this was always just a façade anyway. Indeed, we soon learn that — back when UpWard was still fully operational — management employed brainwashing techniques to keep the kid guests in line and would turn to even more unsavoury methods to root out any behaviour deemed “non-compliant”.

The latter was policed by a cast of ostensibly jovial and kid-friendly characters who, for whatever reason, still linger in the abandoned building today. And it’s these ghosts from the past who will try to halt your investigation into UpWard and its sordid history, by any means necessary.

Never Work With Children or Animals

On a surface level, Dark Pals’ narrative doesn’t really offer anything you haven’t seen before in this genre. Yet the well-defined setting and kooky denizens that inhabit it are unique enough to give the game an identity of its own.

From the second you pass through the UpWard admissions gate — your arrival heralded by a band of ill-serviced audio-animatronics — you can tell that serious thought went into how this place would actually work if it were to exist in real life. It’s got a coherent geography (echoing the hub-and-spoke layout of Disneyland), detailed operations, and all of the facilities you’d expect a twisted theme park like this to have. Everything from the diner to the sports centre and the Main Street USA analogue feels authentic, balancing a sense of playful childishness and sinister authoritarianism without overdoing the contrast.

Crucially, the actual mascots in this mascot horror are distinctive as well. First, you’ve got Chompy Chasey, a sprightly dog with an oversized head, play block jaws, and an especially deadly case of the zoomies. And then there’s Binky Drinky, a hulking enforcer whose stomach is lined with razor-sharp teeth and who has a pacifier for a head.

The latter is a truly striking creation and can be found at the centre of some of Dark Pals’ most imaginative scenes, including one where (and trust me, dear reader, I tried to think of a more delicate way of phrasing this) he forcibly sucks himself off to prevent his sentient maw from trying to eat you. It makes more sense when you see it in context … Kinda.

On the subject of that bizarre image, which will forever be etched into my brain, the characters’ various actions and behaviours are consistently well animated here. For a team of just six developers, Skunx Games did a very impressive job bringing their antagonists to life, imbuing them with expressive facial features, ensuring that their movements are fluid, and integrating them seamlessly with their surroundings. They don’t ever look real — on account of their cartoonish designs — but they are believable as characters, and that’s what matters most.

I particularly liked how Binky Drinky’s pacifier will deform whenever it bumps against a doorway lintel, or how Chompy’s eyeballs exaggeratedly bulge outward when he’s trying to squeeze through a tight corridor. There’s even a fun scripted event near the end that has the two villains interacting, and it looks far more polished than you might expect from an indie title of this scale.

Paint-by-Numbers Mechanics

The other major UpWard resident you’ll meet is Inky, a stitched patchwork octopus who serves as both your stalwart companion and a multi-purpose tool. When held aloft like a gun and squeezed, this cutesy cephalopod will discharge ink out of his sack (again, I promise I’m not trying to be gross) for use in various situations.

It’s this shooting mechanic that serves as the basis for much of Dark Pals’ gameplay, although it’s interestingly never used for combat purposes. Contrary to what you might assume, enemies will be completely undeterred if you attempt to drench them with your gun, and the resulting splat barely even registers on their character models.

That’s because Inky is not meant to be used as an offensive weapon, but rather as an aid for solving puzzles. When aimed just right, his painterly discharge can propel objects, trigger mechanisms from afar, or add a splash of colour to monochrome illustrations. All of which will be required to progress through the facility.

His utility is cleverly demonstrated in an early tutorial, where you must compete in a series of carnival games to gain access to the first major zone of UpWard. You know, tin-can-alley type stuff!

From there, the interactions get trickier and more in-depth, but it’s still hardly Blue Prince. For instance, there’s a bit where you’ve got to identify the right sequence of steps for navigating a library of rotating bookshelves —  while using Inky’s colour-coded projectiles to open up new paths —  and another wherein you’re required to interpret audio-visual clues so that you can figure out the correct recipe for a childhood favourite dish.

Again, none of these brainteasers are especially taxing, but they’re varied, integrate nicely with the wider theming, use the Inky mechanic in creative ways, and give you just enough breadcrumbs to be able to solve things on your own. Indeed, the difficulty is appropriately judged in terms of how much the developers hold your hand. I rarely deciphered the answers to riddles on my first go, and often had to stop and think about things for at least a couple of minutes. However, I equally never found myself getting too frustrated because I had no idea what on earth the developers wanted from me.

My Kingdom for Some Yellow Paint

Alas, the same cannot be said for Dark Pals’ patience-testing chase sequences. Mercifully kept to a minimum for much of the game’s runtime, these dominate the last act and severely dampen my enthusiasm for the overall experience. Because whenever I was thrust into one of the poorly signposted, rage-baiting sequences, I felt an overwhelming desire to knock another half-star off my rating.

The problem is that the enemy encounters here are extremely choreographed and don’t let you stray an inch from the predetermined path. Granting little in the way of leniency, they’ll fussily demand that you follow a rigid script that you’re never privy to as a player, leaving you in a confounding trial-and-error loop until you eventually decipher the exact steps needed to progress.

Sometimes you’re supposed to turn left when everything about the situation at hand would appear to scream “turn right”. Other times, they’ll want you to double back on yourself without any clear indication that was an option to begin with. At one point, you’re asked to sprint forward towards danger, despite that going against your every gut instinct. And then there’s a fucking doozy of a sequence, wherein you’re meant to take refuge in a particular hiding spot (a bunk bed), even though it isn’t appreciably different from about a dozen other identical assets in the area. I guess you’re just meant to extra-sensorily intuit that it’s the specific one the level designer had in mind.

Worse still, you’re often expected to make these very precise deductions in a split second, because the game is insanely unforgiving when it comes to assessing your reaction times. The reality is, unless you have some kind of psychic connection with the developers, you’re bound to get stuck during at least one of these insta-kill sections. And it completely ruins the tension! After all, when you’re forced to watch the same unskippable cutscenes over and over again just to have another try, it’s inevitable that the threat of death will lose some of its power.

Of course, it’s entirely possible that this is a case of user error and/or a gaming journalist skill issue. Hell, maybe I’m just profoundly inobservant and need the entire level to be slathered in yellow paint for me. Yet I don’t think that’s true, given that I rolled credits within the developer’s anticipated 90-minute window and didn’t have any real trouble with the puzzles.

Regardless of whether I’m an incompetent who should have his credentials summarily revoked, I’d still maintain that this isn’t a great way to design horror gameplay. These ultra-scripted encounters are fine when used in small doses, but you need to have more substantial mechanics propping them up, whether it’s in the form of combat, stealth, or even dynamic chases that aren’t quite so staged. Otherwise, you might as well just be watching one of those YouTube Let’s Plays!

Putting these reservations aside, though, I liked Dark Pals: The 1st Floor more than I expected to. It falters on the gameplay front, but I was engrossed by its singular world, its polished visuals, and its memorable characters. Perhaps enough to want to come back and see what mysteries its second floor holds.

Review code provided by publisher. Dark Pals: The 1st Floor is available now on Steam.