Who Are You!?

My instinct with a debut studio putting out an episodic horror game on a shoestring is cautious optimism, and after spending time with Episode 1 of Who Are You!?, that instinct mostly holds. Haunting Humans Studio out of Argentina has built something genuinely odd here: a first-person psychological horror experience that draws on actual UFO abduction testimonies, including real research from Argentine ufologists Silvia and Andrea Perez Simondini, to construct a horror that feels grounded rather than fantastical. The creative director has been upfront that this is not a creature-feature. The fear comes from something quieter: memory collapse, domestic space that no longer behaves correctly, and a man - Ray Roswell - whose wife vanished twenty years ago and whose daughter has now followed. Gameplay sits in familiar walking-sim-adjacent territory, but with a few more moving parts than the genre usually offers. You explore environments through a first-person lens, picking apart family photographs, UFO research materials, and scattered personal objects that build Ray's backstory without cutscene handholding. There are puzzles, enemy AI encounters (this is not purely passive), a health system, and save points that keep tension from fully evaporating. One design touch that stuck with me: the VHS tapes and audio recordings that players interact with to piece together the narrative. Reviewers from the demo era flagged that the volume of material to absorb - tapes, notes, recordings - can tip from atmosphere into overwhelm at moments, so approach this with patience rather than pace. The cropfield sequence has been singled out by early players as a particular standout, where sound design and spatial disorientation do a lot of the work. The studio's decision to involve a psychological consultant in the storytelling process is the kind of quiet craft detail that should not get lost. It shows in how Ray's grief is handled: not as melodrama, but as a slow corruption of ordinary life. Environments rearrange subtly. Sounds blur between real and hallucinatory. What the game is trying to articulate is doubt as a horror mechanism, which is far more interesting than a loud alien face. Built in Unreal Engine 5 by what is genuinely a skeleton crew working on modest hardware, the visual fidelity punches above what you would expect. The no-AI-in-production commitment - every asset hand-crafted - is visible in the texture of the world's details. A few honest caveats. The voice acting drew mixed reactions during the demo period, with some players finding the delivery charming and others wishing for more naturalistic performance. The episodic structure means Episode 1 is a first chapter, not a complete arc - Episodes 2 and 3 are planned to follow for free, but they are not here yet, so you are investing in a promise as much as a product. The game also carries content involving grief, depression, and loss in ways the studio flags with thoughtful, click-through content warnings at the start. That is a small but meaningful thing. Pre-release, the game earned a Best Horror Game nomination at Argentina's EVA Awards and landed in IndieDB's Top 100 indie list, which is genuine recognition for a first release. If you want a horror game that reaches for something more human than its genre usually allows, and you can sit with a pacing that trusts atmosphere over spectacle, this is worth the hours. It asks you to pay close attention. In my experience, that is usually a good sign.

Kai · Scout Team

Indie & narrative

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