Ryo The Haunted Office

I went in hoping to find a quiet little gem that nobody covers - a one-person horror project with enough personality to justify a write-up. What I found is a top-down pixel survival horror experience that clocks in at roughly thirty minutes, asks you to play as John, a paranormal enthusiast investigating a supposedly haunted New Jersey office building floor by floor. The loop is simple: collect silver and golden key cards, move through areas like the basement, cafeteria, and meeting rooms, dodge spirits and demons, avoid environmental traps like lasers and spikes, and eventually find your way out alive. On paper, that is a perfectly reasonable scope for a micro-indie. The problem is context. Anamik Majumdar is a prolific solo developer with a large catalogue of titles on Steam, and community observers have pointed out that many of these releases share the same foundational GameMaker Studio structure, reskinned across different haunted locations. Ryo The Haunted Office fits that pattern. The retro pixel art is functional rather than expressive - fluorescent office tiles and dark corridors do the job, but they do not carry the kind of intentional visual craft that makes a short game linger in your memory. There is no graphics settings menu, and the game locks to a 4:3 pillarboxed display, which in 2023 feels less like a stylistic choice and more like a limitation carried over from the base template. Those are not small complaints for a paid product. Where I will give some credit: the backstory, set across several decades of workplace tragedy in a 1970s New Jersey office building, has a genuinely uncomfortable texture to it. Collapse at a desk, suicide on an upper floor, an elevator accident - it is bleak source material, and if the execution matched the concept even halfway, there could be something worth sitting with here. The spirit world section, where you venture beyond the physical office entirely, at least gestures at something stranger than a standard haunted-building crawl. The game also supports Linux natively, which is worth a note for that audience. For the Scout Team's usual reader - someone comparing options and asking whether this is worth time and money - the honest answer is no, not as a standalone purchase. The half-hour runtime, the absence of any resolution options, the near-zero community footprint, and the heavily templated structure all point in the same direction. If you are deep into paranormal investigation micro-games and want to tick another one off a list, or if you pick this up as part of a bundle where it has essentially no marginal cost, the thirty minutes will pass without major incident. But as a first choice for someone who genuinely loves short, handcrafted horror? There are better-paced, more visually distinctive options waiting a few clicks away.

Kai · Scout Team

Indie & narrative

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