The Haunting of Joni Evers

I went into the Cunningham House expecting a horror game and came out the other side having processed someone else's family trauma in a way I did not anticipate. That is not a complaint. Causeway Studios, a five-person team out of Springdale, Arkansas, built their debut title as a first-person walking sim that wears its inspirations openly, and reviewers have drawn direct comparisons to Gone Home and What Remains of Edith Finch. Those are fair comparisons, with one key distinction: the haunting here is real, or at least the game commits to it being real, and that choice threads the supernatural all the way into the emotional resolution rather than leaving it dangling. The loop is simple and the studio does not pretend otherwise. You move through the photorealistic rooms of the Cunningham House, examine mementos, clothing, and newspaper articles, and listen to Kelly Pekar narrate Joni's running inner monologue. Pekar won a 2025 Collision Gold Award for Voice Performance in this role, and the recognition is warranted. Because Joni comments on nearly everything she touches, the experience lives or dies on whether you find her voice bearable for three to four hours. Most players do. A minority find the constant narration smothering, particularly when it overrides the readable documents you have just picked up. That is a genuine structural tension: the game wants you to discover, but Joni is always a half-second ahead of your reaction. If you preferred the silent-protagonist approach of Dear Esther or the more restrained Firewatch, this may chafe. If you are comfortable with a character-led audio narration, it sings. The supernatural mechanics consist of gathering Whispering Objects to manifest Relics, working with Vestiges of Joni's family members to unlock lost memories, and occasionally contending with the Skull Man, a demonic presence that manipulates the environment. The Skull Man produces reliable atmospheric dread early on, with lights cutting out and huge hovering letters filling rooms in ways that feel genuinely unsettling. The problem is repetition. His toolkit does not expand meaningfully across the short runtime, and the scares lose their sting by the final third. The game also does not communicate clearly when object interaction is required to progress, so a handful of moments will send you circling rooms wondering what you have missed. The save system has frustrated some players who wanted more granular checkpoints, though the short runtime limits how punishing any restart actually is. What the game absolutely nails is the score. Gustavo Coutinho, who also composed for PAYDAY 3, delivers something that sounds smaller and stranger than his commercial work, all low strings and held breath. Combined with the photorealistic environments that one reviewer described as having a "vintage David Lynch" quality, the house itself becomes atmospheric in a way that many bigger-budget horror games fail to achieve. The narrative payoff, centered on understanding rather than confrontation, takes Joni from bitterness toward people she has not bothered to understand into something close to grace. It earns its ending, and a roughly three-and-a-half hour runtime means it ends before it overstays its welcome. Causeway has announced sequels within their connected Worlds Across the Causeway anthology universe, and if this debut is the baseline, that is a series worth following.

Kai · Scout Team

Indie & narrative

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