I am not, and I hope I never will be described as a “TikTok kind of guy,” but the videos of creator Molly Moonn are one of the best things I’ve seen come out of the whole vertically oriented short video deal. These surreal, horror-infused videos present as ’90s point-and-click adventures with pre-rendered graphics derived from real photos, short little suburbia horror stories by way of Myst.
You’ll look at the comments of these things and see a lot of “damn, I wish I could play this game,” and now, finally, we can! As reported by Alpha Beta Gamer, Molly Moonn and collaborators Airdorf (Faith: The Unholy Trinity), Torple Dook (Hand of Doom), and Jesse Cox (Monster Prom) have produced a free demo for their upcoming horror point and click adventure, Excuse Me Sir.
The result has a ton of promise. In search of your missing brother, you follow an unsettling young woman played by Molly Moonn into this barren, sterile suburban house. It controls like the original Myst, having you move scene by scene, clicking on objects and following directions from your mysterious host.
The game nails the kind of queasy, vaguely nostalgic-but-wrong feeling of the original videos. It’s completely silent until Moonn speaks or you reach the “oh crap” portion of the demo and you get some choice horrific droning in the background, and the whole thing has the bad vibes of being alone in a house in the suburbs (but you’re not alone).
There’s even a chase sequence whose tension is magnified by the deliberately chunky interface, and it replicates some Amnesia-style hiding in a closet, hoping your pursuer turns away nail biting. I do have one gripe with the demo, and I can’t believe I’m saying this: I wish the jump scares in it were more unpleasant, I need the “horrific imagery” dial turned up a few notches.
Moonn’s original videos have some odd shit in them. I’d like to see some freaky cyclops grandmas or rendercore clock men ripped straight outta Courage the Cowardly Dog in the finished game. There is a pretty gnarly bit where you sacrifice a strange creature that scratched this itch for me, but I just don’t think the death scenes here are freaking me out enough yet.
I understand there’s a balance to be struck, though—with the trial and error nature of the gameplay (it’s effectively a choose your own adventure book), full-on Five Nights at Freddy’s scare chords could get tiresome. Whatever the case, this is only a taste of the full game, so there’s plenty of time for the team to add more thoroughly unsettling imagery to assault my senses. You can check out Excuse Me Sir for yourself on itch.io.
