The Next Door

My first twenty minutes with The Next Door felt like stepping into someone else's half-remembered nightmare. Labory's 2016 release is a first-person walking experience with light puzzle elements, built around a surreal, psychological atmosphere rather than any conventional gameplay loop. You move through strange spaces, you interact with the environment in small ways, and you let the mood wash over you. That is more or less the entire proposition. The Steam community tags tell you a fair amount: surreal, first-person, psychological, walking simulator. What they don't tell you is how short it actually runs. Completion data points to somewhere between 45 minutes and a couple of hours depending on how lost you get, and the average playtime sits around three hours for those who linger or revisit. This is not a game that hides its brevity. It is comfortable being a single sitting, and in some ways that restraint is the right call for something this mood-dependent. A longer runtime might dilute what little atmosphere it builds. The honest trouble is that the execution is uneven. The surreal imagery and first-person framing carry genuine strangeness, and for a small indie with almost no coverage, there is a raw handcrafted quality to the space design that I found quietly interesting. But the puzzle logic is thin and the conclusions players are left with feel abrupt rather than deliberately cryptic. Steam reviews land at roughly half-and-half positive over several hundred votes, which is about the most accurate summary I can give: half the people who played it connected with its dreamlike intentions, and half felt shortchanged by the lack of substance beneath the aesthetic. Both reactions are completely fair. The game also carries some red flags worth naming. The publisher, SA Industry, has a history of titles that spiked in player counts without organic momentum behind them, which means the ownership numbers you see don't reflect genuine word-of-mouth enthusiasm. The community is sparse. If you need a living hub of guides and discussions around a game, this one won't give you that. What it might give you, if you come in with adjusted expectations and a tolerance for obscure indie oddities, is one quiet hour inside something genuinely strange.

Kai · Scout Team

Indie & narrative

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