Anthology of Fear

I came into Anthology of Fear hoping OhDeer Studio had done something interesting with the liminal-horror wave, and for about the first thirty minutes, I was genuinely unsettled. The game drops you into an abandoned medical facility as Ethan Sorren, piecing together what happened to his missing brother Nathan through documents, VHS tapes, and the blurred memories of people who crossed paths with a Dr. Hypno and his dream-therapy experiments. That premise, strange patients, subconsciousness as a physical place you walk through, is exactly the kind of thing I root for in indie horror. The visual style holds up too: there is a subtle lens distortion at the edges of the screen that you barely notice until you suddenly do, and then you cannot unsee it. The environments carry genuine liminal weight, the wrongness of rooms that feel like they were designed for someone else's fever dream. The structure unfolds across chapters, each shifting your perspective to a different person connected to the facility. You watch VHS tapes that pull you into their memories, and the second tape in particular goes to some genuinely dark, heavy places. The first-person framing serves the tension well. There are mannequins that relocate when you look away, the occasional gun sequence where you can only fire when a phone rings, item-placement puzzles, and a walkie-talkie contact who guides you with the kind of clipped calm that implies she knows far more than she is saying. These are small, deliberate touches. The problem is that the game runs on borrowed genre vocabulary almost from start to finish: shifting rooms, demonic doctor enemies, blood, and darkness. Everything here has been assembled from the P.T. and Layers of Fear playbook, and the construction is visible. The core complaint across nearly all coverage is repetition, and it is a fair one. The hallways cycle. The same environmental logic repeats. There is a reported issue where the full anthology the title promises never actually arrives: expect two chapters and a curtain drop rather than the broader anthology structure the framing suggests. Some players on console also hit progress-blocking bugs tied to a teeth-extraction sequence, though the PC version appears more stable. The atmosphere, the part OhDeer clearly care about most, does its job until the game starts reusing it. When the atmosphere is building fresh, this is an effective, quietly nasty little horror experience. When it is recycling, the short runtime starts feeling padded rather than paced. For a certain audience, those who treat atmospheric walking games the way others treat short horror films, this is a reasonable two-hour sit. The sound design draws criticism in some corners for lacking adjustment options and for jumpscares that announce themselves too loudly. But the quieter moments, just the low ambient hum and the wrongness of a corridor that should not bend that way, are where the game earns its keep. If your tolerance for slow-burn liminal horror runs high, and you have made peace with the possibility of an ending that does not tie things together neatly, there is something real here. If you need your horror to actually terrify, go elsewhere.

Kai · Scout Team

Indie & narrative

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