Hollow Steps

I went into Hollow Steps expecting little and came out with a genuine appreciation for how quietly strange it is. QuickSave built a first-person puzzle-adventure inside a corporate virtual world called Dartom Inc., and the conceit, a beta tester running quality-assurance trials in a simulated environment, gives the whole thing a cool, slightly eerie detachment. You are not the hero. You are a test subject. Something about that framing works. The structure is lean and deliberate. The world holds three main puzzles and three gating mini-puzzles that unlock access to them, plus a fragment hunt threaded through everything. Collecting all eight hidden fragments opens a secret safe that shifts your surroundings in small but tangible ways. The puzzle types themselves span torch sequencing, pressure-plate step patterns, lamp-based environmental reads, and gate logic, each zone marked with a brief in-world tip from the company before you go in. That guidance lands somewhere between helpful and unsettling, which I suspect is the point. Dartom Inc. is watching. The ghost in the system, the unnamed disruptive presence that twists your session, adds a low-key dread that surfaces in smart environmental ways rather than jump scares or heavy exposition. Where the game has friction, it is mostly structural. Community discussions from players who have spent time hunting every fragment hint that post-update changes moved collectibles without updating guides, and a few puzzle states can bug out around the tile-board sections. For a session this short, a single broken puzzle carries real weight. The v2 patch added autosave, which addresses the most painful version of that problem, but it pays to check that your puzzle state is reading correctly before committing to a sequence. The Steam review pool is small and sits in mixed territory, which I read less as a verdict on quality and more as a reflection of the game's very niche pitch: a one-hour atmospheric box-puzzle, no combat, no hand-holding after those company tips, and an ending that arrives without fanfare. The soundtrack is tagged by the community as a genuine highlight, which tracks with what I heard. It has that quality some micro-indie games nail, where the audio does more emotional work than the visuals can, and the ambient tone sells the simulation premise better than any cutscene could. If you play with headphones, the space inside Dartom Inc. feels bigger than it geometrically is. The honest recommendation: if you have an hour, want something that sits closer to walking-sim-with-puzzles than to a proper puzzle-platform challenge, and find the idea of a glitching corporate VR world appealing on its own terms, Hollow Steps earns that hour. It is not polished at every seam, and the content is genuinely slim. But it knows what it is, it ends on time, and the ghost in the machine lingers a little after the credits.

Kai · Scout Team

Indie & narrative

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