Days Under Custody

My honest reaction when I first loaded this up was relief that someone still makes games this small and this sincere. Days Under Custody is a 2D side-scrolling pixel art horror adventure made almost entirely by one developer, Abraham Carreola, and it wears that origin without apology. The premise drops you into the skin of a person with a fractured memory: a mysterious phone caller who claims to know you, a home that starts behaving wrong, and a shapeless shadow that begins trailing you before the first chapter closes. It is not subtle. It does not need to be. The core loop is classic point-and-click-adjacent adventure logic mixed with survival horror tension. You explore environments, collect and read a substantial number of handwritten notes that carry the real weight of the story, and solve puzzles that the developer describes as randomised across runs. Whether that randomisation meaningfully changes a replay or just shuffles drawer combinations is unclear from the outside, but the two different endings give collectors and completionists a concrete reason to return. The stalker mechanic is the tension spine of the whole thing: an ever-present threat that makes you second-guess how long you spend reading lore versus moving. It is not a sophisticated AI, but it does the job of making silence feel loaded. The pixel art draws comments, and not always kind ones. The style is rough in a way that reads as deliberate-meets-budget, which will either charm you or create friction immediately. The soundtrack, however, is the part that earns genuine affection from people who finish it. It leans into ambient dread with the kind of quiet consistency that only solo developers who care deeply about atmosphere tend to achieve. If you play with headphones, the sound design alone justifies the runtime. Average playtime data puts a full run around four hours, which for a horror game driven by mystery is a reasonable proposition, assuming the story lands for you. The caveats are real. The translation from Spanish carries rough edges throughout the dialogue, and some players have reported launch issues related to a background process that does not close cleanly. The Steam review pool is tiny at twelve reviews, sitting at forty-one percent positive, which signals genuine divisiveness rather than a consensus verdict. This is not a game for people who want mechanical polish or a horror experience comparable to bigger-budget survival horror titles. It is a game for people who find something moving about a single creator trying to tell a dramatic, personal story through a genre they love, even when the seams show. For the right kind of patient, curious horror fan, there is something genuinely worth sitting with here. The note-collecting story structure, the two-ending design, and the soundtrack are all signs of someone who thought carefully about what they were building. Whether that care was fully realised is the question you answer by playing it yourself. Kai, Scout Team

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