Those Who Remain

Those Who Remain plants you in Dormont, a small American town that looks ordinary until the lights go out - and in this game, the darkness is literal and lethal. Developed by Camel 101, this is a first-person psychological thriller where staying in the light keeps you alive and stepping into shadow means something deeply wrong pulls you under. The core tension mechanic is simple: find light sources, stay near them, push forward. It is the kind of idea that sounds like a strong foundation for dread, and in patches, it genuinely delivers. The atmosphere is where Those Who Remain earns most of its goodwill. Dormont at night has a specific texture - empty diners with fluorescent flicker, backroads lit only by your headlights, windows glowing amber in otherwise dead houses. The sound design understands restraint, using silence as punctuation rather than filling every corridor with jump-scare stings. For players who respond to place and mood rather than spectacle, there are stretches here that feel considered and intentional. The game clearly wants to sit in the tradition of small-town American horror, and the aesthetic instinct is sound even when execution wavers. The trouble is that the mechanical and narrative layers rarely support the atmosphere as well as they should. Puzzles are straightforward to the point of feeling like interruptions rather than integration. The story, which involves protagonist Edward and a web of town secrets, moral choices, and parallel dimensions, gestures at emotional weight without quite landing it. Dialogue can feel flat, and the branching choices feel more cosmetic than consequential. The "light versus dark" world-switching, which lets you flip between Dormont and a shadowy parallel version of it, is the most interesting design idea here, but it is underutilized and rarely reaches its potential for environmental storytelling. With a Metacritic score sitting around 48 and mixed Steam reviews at 67%, the reception reflects a game that divided people along predictable lines. Players who lean into the slow, lonely walk through a cursed town and forgive technical roughness - some collision issues, pacing lulls in the middle act - tend to find something worth their four to five hours. Players expecting mechanical depth, strong writing, or polished production find the seams too visible. This is emphatically not a prestige horror title. It is a small-studio swing at something genuinely atmospheric, and the budget shows. If you have a tolerance for indie horror that prioritizes feeling over polish, and if cursed small-town Americana as a setting does something for you specifically, Those Who Remain has enough genuine craft in its lighting, its sound, and its world design to justify a cautious look. Just go in knowing it is a mood piece with uneven execution, not a tightly designed thriller. The darkness at the edges of Dormont is more interesting than the story trying to explain it.

Kai · Scout Team

Indie & narrative

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