Bonbon

I keep a short list of games that earn their running time completely, where nothing is padded and nothing is missing. Bonbon, the solo-developed first-person horror from Aetheric Games, belongs on that list. It is set in a 1980s suburban UK house, and it puts you in the body of a toddler who can barely walk a straight line. That sluggish, lurching movement is a design choice, not a flaw: it makes you feel genuinely small and defenseless in a way that most horror games spend hours trying to manufacture and rarely achieve. The structure is loose but purposeful. You toddle through a handful of scenes, garden, lounge, dinner table, bedtime, picking up toys and babbling at them in that half-formed baby-language the game uses instead of dialogue. Your objectives come from a mother whose voice filters in from off-screen. She never appears. Neither does your father, though you hear him too. The adults are present only as sound, which is exactly the right call. The horror here is not monsters in corridors; it is the feeling of being too young to parse the grown-up world going on just out of sight. The game handles suggestions of domestic darkness through subtext and atmosphere rather than anything explicit, and that restraint gives it a weight that cheaper horror cannot touch. Bonbon himself, the creature, is a giant humanoid rat who shows up in your world and refuses to leave. The dinner-table scene in particular is the kind of thing that stays with you: confined to your chair, unable to leave, feeding cake to something ravenous while it gets louder and closer and more wrong. There is also one genuine jumpscare near the end, and it has been called one of the most effective in recent memory by critics who cover this genre seriously. The game earns that moment because it has spent the entire runtime building dread instead of relying on it. The weakest spots are minor but real. Object collection is the primary mechanic for progression, and occasionally the item you need blends into a cluttered floor or sits just off-camera long enough to break the spell. The wobbly carry physics, charming in concept, can tip into mild tedium when you are hunting a specific toy across a dark room. None of this kills the experience, but it is honest to mention it. The game runs between twenty and forty minutes depending on how thoroughly you explore, and it includes six Steam achievements that can all be unlocked in a single run without a guide. Who is this for? People who understand that a short game can cut deeper than a long one. Anyone who grew up in 1980s Britain will find the era-specific details, the in-game television clips, the Fisher-Price aesthetic, unexpectedly affecting. Horror players tired of jump-scare compilations will find something that works through accumulation and implication instead. And anyone who has ever suspected that games about childhood fear have not yet been done correctly should sit with this one in a dark room and decide for themselves.

Kai · Scout Team

Indie & narrative

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