The Strange City

I want to root for The Strange City. Newmatic is a small Korean XR studio making its horror-adventure debut on Steam and Xbox, and there is something genuinely atmospheric about the premise: Agent G wakes in a wrecked car, follows two drifting lights into the dark, and stumbles into an otherworldly city where every shadow seems to breathe. That opening sequence has a quiet dread to it that almost earns the comparisons players draw to Little Nightmares. Almost. The structure is five chapters, each built around a distinct pursuer with its own hunting style. The idea is sound: learn the monster's pattern, scour the environment for escape routes, survive a climactic encounter at the chapter's end, then move on. On paper, that loop has rhythm. In practice, the camera works against you more often than the monsters do. Angles shift at inopportune moments, the checkpoint placement is unforgiving in ways that feel accidental rather than intentional, and the escape sequences, which should be the tension peaks, frequently devolve into frustration because the controls feel sluggish when speed is exactly what the game demands. Players have called out the unresponsive input as a consistent sore point, and that criticism lands. What holds up is the visual presentation. Newmatic comes from animation and VR backgrounds, and that craft shows in the environments. The 3D environments carry a stylised, slightly anime-inflected look that sits somewhere between cute and unsettling, which is a difficult tonal balance to strike. The soundtrack props up the atmosphere too, with audio design that understands how silence and sudden sound cues work together to unsettle you. For a debut game with a compact runtime sitting around two hours, those details matter. The story, though, does not capitalise on that atmosphere the way it should. G is searching for a missing partner, the city holds dark secrets, the shadows are closing in, and then it ends. There is no meaningful payoff layered beneath the chase sequences, and players expecting the kind of slow-burn revelation that justifies a short runtime will come away underwhelmed. A six-hour game that knows when to end can be extraordinary. A two-hour game that does not know what it wants to say is a different problem entirely. Who is this for? Honestly, it is a narrow window. If you are a completionist who wants a quick achievement list or a horror-curious player happy to experience a mood piece despite rough execution, The Strange City has a specific kind of scrappy charm. Fans of polished pursuer-horror, or anyone for whom controls and checkpoints are non-negotiable, will find the experience more aggravating than tense. Newmatic shows enough raw talent here that a follow-up with another year of polish could be genuinely special. This one, as it stands, is a rough first step worth approaching cautiously.

Kai · Scout Team

Indie & narrative

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