96 Mill

My instinct when a horror game clocks in at roughly sixty minutes per run is to expect padding dressed up as content. With 96 Mill, that instinct was wrong in the best possible way. Ethereal Darkness Interactive is a tiny outfit with three Steam releases to their name, and this one, set inside a condemned nineteenth-century industrial complex on Mill Street in Woonsocket, Rhode Island, shows exactly the kind of deliberate, focused craft that bigger studios often forget to bring. The setup is classically simple: you play a worker for Hamilton Demolition Company, sent in alongside explosives expert Frank Galvani to rig the Edmont Worsted Industrial Complex for implosion. Standard horror-game pretext, sure. What lifts it is the visual treatment. The whole game is filtered through a grainy, surveillance-camera aesthetic that turns even static rooms into something that feels watched. Flicker a bathroom light, hear a slow drip from somewhere unseen, and the lo-fi presentation stops feeling like a budget limitation and starts feeling like a design choice. The sound design carries similar intentionality: no ambient score, just the specific quiet of each room, punctuated by footsteps that may or may not belong to you, dripping pipes, and the creak of things that should not be moving. That restraint is rarer than it sounds. The point-and-click bones are familiar: pick up objects, solve light environmental puzzles, talk to characters through fully voiced dialogue, and work through a handful of side objectives alongside the main push. Over fifty distinct locations sounds generous for a game this short, and while many are small, the variety keeps the pacing from stalling. The inventory holds a brick, a molotov cocktail, scattered documents and tools, and the game invites you to experiment with them. Eight separate endings reward that curiosity; this is a game designed to be replayed two or three times over a single evening rather than treated as a one-and-done experience. The branching is real enough that a Steam community guide dedicated to mapping all eight outcomes exists, which tells you players found the variation worth chasing. Honesty demands noting the rough edges. Some players have hit technical hiccups on launch, including a white-screen load failure that required file verification. The voice acting sits in that particular indie zone where effort is audible but consistency is not always there. And if you come in expecting Scratches-level puzzle depth or a Whispers of a Machine narrative, you will be disappointed. This is a mood piece with genre ambitions, not a genre classic. What it does well, it does cheaply and without pretense, which in horror is often the better path.

Kai · Scout Team

Indie & narrative

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