Reveiwing Horror Game Demos

I’m a big fan of video games, I’m an even BIGGER fan of buying video games and barely playing them. So to combat this urge, and spare my bank account, I’ve evolved this habit of scouring Steam and itch.io for interesting looking free games and demos. To further encourage myself to actually play these games, instead of leaving them rotting in my steam library and clogging up my PC, I’ve decided to review the demos I play so you can get to see some of the games I’ve managed to dredge up from the depths of the free page on the Steam store.

Lost Wiki: Kozlovka

• Playtime: 21 Minutes
• Did I buy the game?
  • Yes – £4.29
• Was I scared?
  • No

Lost Wiki: Kozlovka is a mystery thriller about uncovering the dark hidden history of the fictional Eastern European town of Kozlovka. In order to uncover this history you read through a series of wiki articles, following hyperlinks down rabbit holes, until you stumble across the information you need to put the pieces together. It’s a relatively simple but still engaging game that leaves you hungry for information. It left me so hungry in fact that after reaching the end of the demo I immediately purchased the full game! Visually the game is a delight for me as someone who has a certain fondness for the aesthetics of the old internet. The satisfying clicks of going from page to page seal the immersion and you really start to believe you’re uncovering some real mysteries. The only thing that could improve the full game in all honesty is if it were longer. Currently it feels as though there isn’t enough world here to build the immersion needed for the horror to work effectively, and the mystery ends up being tied to more natural causes than I’d like, which for me means it fails to provide the player with an appropriately scary atmosphere since everything feels so removed from the gameplay. Personally, I would love to see this be the first in a series of games where you get to uncover mysteries of all kinds of different towns and they have interconnected themes. But, if you’re looking for something to do on an afternoon and have £5 to spare I would recommend buying the full game just to try it.

The Mailroom

• Playtime: 39 Minutes
• Did I buy the game?
  • I want to, the game will be fully released on October 26th, 2026
• Was I scared?
  • A little

The Mailroom is a job simulator where you work as a mailroom employee sorting letters and packages. And, as it happens, the mailroom you work in is in hell. This is the entire premise of the game. The demo takes place over the course of your first day, and as soon as I got to the end I rushed to the store page to see when the release date was only to be greeted with (at the time) coming soon: end of 2026. The part of the game thatmade me really yearn for its full release was everything else that happened outside of sorting the mail. There’s a strange back room down a slightly too long hallway, an incinerator room that makes ominous noises, a bathroom with no door, and far too much toilet paper, and your helper who appears at the ring of the bell. It scared the shit out of me the first time he appeared. There are so many unanswered questions I have from this demo that I desperately need to be answered with the full game, the main one being why are we in hell and stuck in the mailroom?? Anyway, I can’t wait for the full game to release so I can figure it out.

Creature Kitchen

• Playtime: 32 Minutes
• Did I buy the game?
  • Yes – £6.69
• Was I scared?
  • No

Creature Kitchen is not a horror game, it just looks and feels like one in almost every way. From its sound design to its lighting, everything about this game tells you that this is going to scare you, except for the actual gameplay. Creature Kitchen is about cooking food for various cryptids and animals.

Last Report

• Playtime: 37 Minutes
• Did I buy the game?
  • No – available for £4.29
• Was I scared?
  • No, except one jumpscare

In Last Report you work as a National Park Ranger tasked with processing incident reports. The catch? You work alone in a secluded cabin that only occasionally gets visitors from the other rangers, and on this particular night there’s a huge storm that causes the electricity to periodically go out. This darkness lets something into the cabin. With you. 

This is a very simple game in terms of mechanics, all you need is a mouse to play. Most of the time, when I play something with gameplay this simplistic I find that I can enjoy it as an idle game I can play whilst sick or doing other tasks, but with Last Report I found myself bored quite quickly. I will say that I haven’t played the full game as of writing this, so I can’t speak to if this is a demo only problem, a full game problem, or just a me problem. But personally I feel that the characters weren’t fleshed out enough for me to care about anything bad happening to them, and when it comes to the mechanics they felt too minimal for me to feel like I was actually involved in what was happening. As much as the concept and the art style interests me, from the demo alone I can’t say I’d recommend Last Report. But it is less than a fiver so if you have cash to spare go for it! I’ll never say no to supporting indie devs.

Forbidden Solitaire

• Playtime: 29 Minutes
• Did I buy the game?
  • I want to! – available for £14.99
• Was I scared?
  • No

Forbidden Solitaire has one of the best combat systems in a game I’ve seen for a while. As someone who spent a lot of their first year lectures playing solitaire on their laptop, I LOVED this game. The dungeon crawler mechanics, the dark fantasy vibes, and the early 2000s visuals all tick my horror check boxes for something incredible. It also has an ongoing meta narrative about the in universe developers of the game akin to games like Inscrypytion which is one of my favourite games ever so that’s another point in its favour. It’s ALSO made by Night Signal Entertainment, the same people who made the hit game Home Safety Hotline, which features a whole host of terrifying creatures and themes of “capitalism is a nightmare” which are again all right up my alley, so I’m going to highly recommend you check out Forbidden Solitaire, but also make sure to keep an eye on whatever Night Shift Entertainment is doing, even if you don’t end up playing the game because the stuff they’re putting out is truly incredible.

Closing Remarks

Regardless of my reviews here, I recommend you play all of these demos if you can and form your own opinion on whether or not you want to buy the whole thing. After all, they’re all free to play! And by playing them you’re supporting indie horror games, which is never a bad thing. So, if you’ve got a spare 30 minutes, download some demos and jump into a brand-new freaky world for a while. You might just discover your new favourite game! If there is a horror game demo you think I would enjoy playing or that you just desperately want someone to play, send us a message on our socials and I might just write another one of these!

For now, so long Bog Dwellers!