The Chaput's Baby

I have a soft spot for the kind of horror game a single person builds from scratch and quietly drops on Steam with almost no fanfare, and The Chaput's Baby is exactly that kind of release. Gundes is a solo developer, and the fingerprints of one committed person are all over this short first-person horror set inside a former church that now doubles as the Chaput family home. You play as Samantha, a babysitter hired for a single night, and the game genuinely makes you settle into that mundane role before it starts pulling the floor out from under you. The loop is deceptively domestic at first. You tend to a chores list, feed the infant Henry, poke around the converted church rooms. That domestic rhythm is a deliberate tension-builder, and it works better than you might expect. The environment has a strange, quietly sacred quality, stained wood and repurposed altar spaces sitting alongside ordinary furniture, and the atmosphere does a lot of heavy lifting for a small-budget production running on Unreal Engine. When the supernatural layer arrives, it comes through secret passageways, puzzle sequences, eerie adversaries to hide from, and an anonymous caller on the phone guiding Samantha deeper into the Chaput family's history. The story touches on demons, generational darkness, and whatever Henry actually is, and while the writing never reaches anything literary, the premise has a genuine unsettling pull. Honesty requires flagging the rougher edges. The community forums document a recurring fatal error on launch that some players hit when starting a new game, with a workaround involving spamming the interact key through the title screen. There are also reports of bugged achievements, including one that appears to require placing specific items in a cooking pot, where the items cannot actually be removed from the fridge. These are the kinds of friction points that remind you this is a one-person project with limited QA bandwidth, and they are worth knowing before you sit down expecting a polished experience. For players who can get past the launch quirk, the game sits comfortably in the sub-two-hour walking horror space alongside titles like Dagon or the earlier Puppet Combo releases, short, atmospheric, a little rough around the seams but alive with a specific intention. The Steam user base has responded warmly, with the majority of reviews landing positive, which for a micro-budget horror with no marketing muscle is quietly remarkable. If you already enjoy lore-rich, story-driven horror with a female protagonist and puzzles woven into environmental exploration, this scratches that itch in a compact, affordable form. The Chaput's Baby is not going to replace your genre benchmarks, but it does not need to. It knows what it is: a short, hand-built haunted-church story with chores. The chores are the point. Give it the patience it asks for in its opening minutes and the atmosphere pays you back.

Kai · Scout Team

Indie & narrative

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