Don't Knock Twice

I went into Don't Knock Twice with honest curiosity, because Wales Interactive have earned goodwill for crafting small atmospheric experiences that punch above their budget. What I found here is a game living two very different lives depending on how you play it. In VR, strapped inside an HTC Vive or Oculus Rift, there are genuine stretches of sustained dread. The audio work is the real star: a thunderstorm pressing at the windows, floor-boards groaning on the wrong floor, something knocking from inside a door you haven't opened yet. The sound design received a nomination at the 2018 Develop Awards, and you can hear why. It wraps around you in a way that the flat-screen version simply cannot replicate. The premise threads Slavic folklore into a mother-daughter reunion gone horribly wrong. You play Jessica, a guilt-ridden woman with a history of drug abuse, navigating her enormous Welsh manor after her estranged daughter Chloe is seized by a demonic witch rooted in Baba Yaga legend. That backstory, told through scattered diary entries, letters, and Chloe's frightened text messages, is genuinely interesting in outline. The problem is that the game never earns the emotional weight the story is reaching for. Chloe fires one-directional messages at you across the whole run, but Jessica exists mostly as a cursor with a candle. The relationship at the center of everything stays surface-level. If you haven't watched the 2017 film beforehand, some of the context lands as noise rather than narrative. Gameplay sits at the lighter end of the walking-simulator spectrum. You will collect five gems scattered through the manor, hack off door handles with an axe you find mid-game, pull-start a generator, and build a makeshift flamethrower by combining two items late in the run. That last detail is a tiny surprise in an otherwise minimal mechanical vocabulary. The puzzles are structured more like guided tour stops than actual problems to solve, with notes and texts pointing you to every next step. Doors sometimes unlock on their own schedule regardless of what you've done, which produces the particular flavour of confusion where you're not sure whether you missed something or the game is just moving at its own pace without telling you. The two available endings do exist, but replaying from scratch to reach the second one tests patience in a way the slim runtime doesn't quite justify. Played flat on a keyboard and mouse or standard controller, the cracks are harder to ignore. The VR origins show in movement speed, the manual door-grabbing mechanic, and interaction design that feels slightly off when you're holding a mouse. Reviewers consistently noted that stripping out the headset strips out most of the atmosphere too, which is a genuine concern on a platform where the majority of players will do exactly that. For VR owners chasing something short to unsettle a friend on Halloween, this serves the purpose well. For flat-screen horror fans who've spent time with Amnesia or Outlast, the lack of threat, stakes, or mechanical depth will register quickly. There is craft here. The manor is detailed, the soundscape is the kind of considered work I always want to defend, and the witch design itself is effective when the game deploys her correctly. But the whole thing clocks in under two hours, the story needs its film as a prerequisite, and the puzzles exist more as pacing filler than challenge. The atmosphere is worth something. Just be clear-eyed about how much of it survives outside the headset.

Kai · Scout Team

Indie & narrative

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