A former animator returns to the abandoned Joey Drew Studios after thirty years and finds it overrun by ink-born cartoon horrors, a dark post-mortem of golden-age animation ambition rendered in a rubber-hose 1930s aesthetic that remains unmatched in the medium. The environment is the storytelling: signs detailed to the last corner, plush figures given real care, and a studio decaying around the evidence of its creator’s megalomania. It plays as horror but lands as atmospheric exploration, with a surprisingly dark meta-narrative about artists consumed by their founder’s dream. Silence does more unsettling work than any monster.
Audio logs and letters carry the lore, and the writing rewards hunting every recording. Joey Drew’s memos chart the megalomania, Susie Campbell’s arc toward Alice Angel plays as genuine tragedy, and Sammy Lawrence’s cult ramblings build a background mythology that pays off in the finale. The Joey reveal recontextualises the entire mystery, and it is the kind of payoff that makes the earlier tape-hunting feel essential rather than optional. Collecting recordings becomes the real game, and it is the best game here.
Navigation is deliberately self-directed, and the trust is mostly earned. Nothing is telegraphed with flashing markers, objectives are discovered by reading the environment, and finding a solution unaided produces the specific satisfaction of a design that assumes attention. The trade-off is rough: the Chapter 1 record hunt consumes most of a 27-minute chapter, and the game never bridges the gap between trusting the player and stranding them. Interactables blend into the monochrome ink palette so completely that even flashing objects vanish into the background, and a persistent visibility problem follows the whole campaign.
The hide-or-die pursuit system is trivially exploitable. Interacting with any hiding spot instantly drops all aggro, even with a pursuer inches away, which breaks the logic of every chase the game stages. The system asks for dread and delivers a cheat code, and the illogic is immersion-breaking in exactly the moments built for tension. Combat fares little better: axe, pipe and gent-wrench swings are functional but shallow, with no dodge mechanics, no way to avoid being hit and no ability to sprint backwards, so encounters are damage races without depth.
Mobility restrictions chafe throughout. There is no jump, no crouch or sneak despite hiding mechanics built around concealment, slow default movement and a sprint bound to holding the stick, a combination that makes traversal feel deliberate to the point of sluggishness. The restrictions suit the era-flavoured design in theory but the execution gives no compensating benefit. Chapter 5’s repeated pipe-fetching stealth loops wear the patience thin, running the same gauntlet three times with the same trivial hiding exploit as the only tool.
The connecting vertical layout of Chapter 3 is the design highlight. Discovering that the levels link together recontextualises the map and rewards the attention the navigation demands, and the interlocking structure gives the middle of the campaign a genuine sense of place. Escort and companion segments with Boris and errand-running for Alice Angel vary the loop without transforming it. Pacing evens out after the slow start, once the game’s refusal to telegraph becomes legible.
Predictability defines the horror. Jump scares are visible from a distance, the age rating telegraphs the ceiling, and nothing frightens, yet the creepiness carries the atmosphere regardless. The aesthetic detail, the quiet and the lore make the case that this was always closer to a haunted-house tour with excellent production design than a test of nerve. As a horror game it underdelivers; as an atmospheric adventure with lovable lore, it overdelivers.
Overall, this is a charming, well-realised cartoon-horror exploration game whose rubber-hose studio aesthetic and audio-log storytelling far outweigh interactables lost in the ink palette, a trivially cheeseable hiding system and basic combat. The scares never land, but the atmosphere, the lore and the meta-narrative about animation’s golden age make the trade a fair one, and the studio it depicts is worth the visit.
