In what’s probably the oddest combination for a horror game, developer Mac n Cheese Games has announced Dust till Dawn, a cozy paranormal cleaning game. Coming to Steam next year, the game draws inspiration from Japanese horror manga, specifically Junji Ito himself.
The story casts you as the newest maid of an all-too-quiet Japanese village, where a mysterious dust has begun appearing across homes, businesses, and community spaces. Your duties are simple: answer cleaning requests, “zen out” while you restore each location, and try not to ask too many questions. Drawing inspiration from Junji Ito’s visual language and slow-burning style, Dust till Dawn uses a manga-influenced art direction that aims to make familiar spaces feel uncanny over time.
As you might expect from one of these cleaning sims, you’ll be busy sweeping away dust, wiping down surfaces and cleaning rooms from family homes and shops to public buildings and other corners of the village. The longer you remain, the more rewarding the job can become. And the more likely you are to encounter something that isn’t right…
Despite refraining from asking questions, the underlying issue is just where this dust came from, and why does it keep appearing. The dust shouldn’t be here. Neither should the objects that seem to move, the rooms that refuse to stay in order, or the traces of something passing through, even after you’ve finished cleaning. As you revisit locations and stay later into the evening, you’ll begin finding clues that point toward a larger mystery.