The Creepy Syndrome Xbox One Review 7.5/10 "Frightening Fun For Under a Fiver!" 👻 @JanduSoft @BoomfireGames #IndieGames #GameDev

I was lucky enough to cover Boomfire Games’ prior release - Cards of the Dead - back in 2021 around Halloween time. I was a big fan of the deck-based storytelling and simple, yet tense premise - escape from the zombie-ridden city without dying! In fact, I enjoyed the artwork and game so much that I backed the Kickstarter for the actual card game release of Cards of the Dead – and recently played through a few rounds of it during an extremely nerdy weekend board game retreat with a  group of equally nerdy friends.

The game went down a storm, and I’m already keen to play again! 

And so, a few months ago when Jandusoft began to tease the release of The Creepy Syndrome, my britches were full of twitches! 

Thankfully keeping the pixel-horror vibe that Boomfire nails so well, The Creepy Syndrome is split into four chapters, each splintering off around the backbone of the narrative which is the unseen player character visiting an extremely heavy-breathing psychiatrist with a wonderfully maniacal laugh. You can play the sequences in any order, and your decisions in each can alter the overall ending – once all four chapters have played out. The whole game can be completed in a couple of hours, and it feels absolutely perfectly pitched in terms of length.

The scenarios all take different forms, with one being a nightmare/dream-walk through a seemingly endless corridor whilst being stalked as you piece together events from found newspaper clippings.

Whilst the second is a really cool top-down C64-esque affair with simple visuals that casts you in the role of a policeman that gets embroiled in the ravings of a rural cult.

The third sequence was my least favourite and has you handling a possible nuclear holocaust by pottering around a bunker (some of the audio in this section did grind on me a little!), and the fourth puts you in the shoes of a girl that performs a seemingly harmless ritual that goes…awry.

Each of these is a fantastic, brief, and extremely self-explanatory vignette that feels Creepshow-ish in how each starts off innocently enough, but soon devolves into spookiness.

There’s a clear limit in the budget of the games, but Boomfire really nails the atmosphere, and those graphical/audio limitations somehow work to make the game feel even more charming and personal. Quite often the spoken audio won’t match the on-screen text or will be slightly wooden in delivery - but to me, it all adds to the B-movie charm.

I am a big fan of bite-sized horror, and Boomfire Games quickly became a personal favourite for me through their chunky pixel art and micro-budget horror games in Cards of the Dead and now The Creepy Syndrome.

SUMMARY

The Creepy Syndrome may be too tame in terms of Blood ‘n Guts, or overly simplistic for some, but I had a fantastic couple of hours getting lost in this interactive horror story collection, it may not be a game that will shake the genre to its foundations but for the price, it’s a great way to spend an evening and has an Amiga-like pull to its design charms, I’m already looking forward to seeing what Boomfire come up with next!

PURCHASE LINK

https://www.jandusoft.com/thecreepysyndrome/