Whilst short and simple, Creepy Shift: Roadside Diner offers cheap thrills for horror heads and streamers.
Whilst the heyday of YouTubers uploading videos of them playing a scary game and screaming incessantly at the camera is over, there are still plenty of streamer-bait horror games that do the rounds, especially around Halloween. Creepy Shift: Roadside Diner certainly fits that mould, but it’s still enjoyable in its own right. This may have been released on PC a year ago, but now it’s the turn of consoles to get their spook on.
Playing a chap who wants to make surprisingly good money for a night shift at a roadside diner, you head into the empty building to carry out your duties. You’ll be restocking shelves, washing up, and cleaning the tables over the course of a few hours. But you get the feeling that something’s a little off when you find a note with some special rules, such as making sure the external doors are closed, and ensuring the jukebox doesn’t play any music. Those feelings are exacerbated when you get a phone call telling you that things can get very strange in that diner when there’s a blood moon. Shockingly, tonight happens to be a blood moon.
From a gameplay standpoint, this is a solid enough work simulator game like you’ll have seen so many times before. Pick up items from the delivery area outside and take them to the appropriate place, use a sponge to clean messes on tables, and clear the dining area, putting crockery into the dishwasher. It’s satisfying as these games often are. What’s quite nice is that each activity rewards you with money. You can’t spend this on anything, but it kind of gave the game a score-chasing element that I didn’t know I wanted from it. Even when the scary stuff was happening, I still wanted to try and make that number go up. Maybe it’s my old man, arcade game brain kicking in.
Anyway, spooky things do happen, and you’ll be under threat from them before too long. Keeping the doors closed is easy enough as there aren’t any shenanigans involving them beyond you opening or closing them to pass through. The jukebox, though, is more irritating. Occasionally it will start playing music and you’ll need to go and switch it off. Easy enough, but it becomes annoying once it starts teleporting around meaning that you’ll need to go and hunt it down. Even more annoying is that you might not even be able to hear the music in the first place, and seeing as you failing to switch it off results in your death, that can get a little frustrating. After a while though, you start to know which places it’s hiding, and once you spot the vignette appearing around the screen you know to go and check those locations quickly.
That alone isn’t all that challenging, and after a few in-game hours, more mechanics are added in. At various stages you’ll be teleported into a previously inaccessible area that will develop the story as well as add an extra feature. You’ll end up in the manager’s office where you’ll need to fend off the land’s previous owner by ensuring there’s always a candle in front of his portrait. Then you’ll find yourself in the basement where a vengeful ghost will start pursuing you. By the last hour of your shift, you’ll be trying to keep on top of your tasks whilst searching for a moving portrait, chasing down that jukebox, and hoping the ghost is still in a good mood.
There are a few jump scares around all this too, especially when one of these elements needs your attention. I know that jump scares are pretty cheap in terms of horror, but they kept catching me off guard, and honestly I’d rather have these so I know what I need to deal with rather than the irritating jukebox. At times though, I felt as though the game screwed me over by forcing me to hide from the ghost, find the candle, and deal with the jukebox all at once, and in those moments there’s really nothing to do other than resign yourself to starting that section of the game over. This feels unfair and really should be better balanced, as having to redo sections is a little tedious after a while. Redoing chores whilst you wait for the spooks to start up again isn’t fun for the fourth time. In this regard, I consider Creepy Shift: Roadside Diner to have something in common with the Five Nights at Freddy’s games in that you need to keep track of and manage a number of different elements that can stack up if you let your concentration slip.
Still, the plot is interesting enough, even if you can get through the whole game in an hour or so. The low cost of entry certainly doesn’t hurt, and I quite like how the Creepy Shift series seems to be leaning into shortform creepypasta inspired games. The story here really could fit into that internet ghost story format, with a man arriving at a mysterious place of employment before being terrorised and trying to escape to tell the tale.
The art style is nice enough, but isn’t something you won’t have seen before. They certainly aren’t so impressive as to justify the drop in framerate when the vignette starts affecting your vision. That was really quite obnoxious when playing on performance mode on Xbox Series X. The music on the other hand is really good. There’s only a little ambient sound indoors, but the jukebox has some really fun tunes on it that are clearly inspired by roadside diner music you’d hear in movies. As much as you’re meant to turn the jukebox off, I would rather have left it on a lot of the time.
Whilst Creepy Shift: Roadside Diner isn’t going to win any awards for originality, it’s certainly a fun enough experience as a light, quick horror game. The diner maintenance element is engaging enough, and the story has enough to it to keep things interesting for the runtime. For just over a fiver, you can’t really complain too much, and I’m keen to take a look at the other games in the series too.
Creepy Shift: Roadside Diner is available now on PC, Xbox, and PlayStation.
