Frightence is 45 minutes of walking around a haunted house.
I recently played Martha is Dead, which was a genuinely excellent first-person horror game thanks to its engaging story and unsettling atmosphere. The wonderful musical score and visual style added to a great horror experience. Frightence manages very little of this sadly, relying on cheap jumpscares and overplayed genre clichés.
You play a janitor in Apartment block #17. The building is due to be shut down, and you need to make sure the place is free of people before the end of the evening. None of this is explained in game, this is all just from the description in the Xbox store. In game, you’re told that you need to take care of the place, perhaps implying that you’re now trapped here. Regardless, your task is to visit the individual rooms to make sure they’re unoccupied.
However, you aren’t told which rooms to visit, and only one room will be unlocked across the three floors each time you walk around. You’ll end up having to try every room, enduring the painfully slow walking speed, until you find the room you’re meant to visit. Once inside, you’ll find some items to collect, although when you find them you aren’t told what their significance is, as well as a spooky event to experience, before leaving to find another room. Occasionally, you’ll pass out and wake up back in the basement before going ahead and doing the whole thing again.
Individual rooms are somewhat unique, each with its own event that seems to be unrelated to what’s come before. There are spooky children’s rooms, abodes for a stereotypical cat lady, and even a PT homage. I think the items you collect from them are meant to tell you what sort of person lived there, but without the chance to examine them closely, or even read what they are, there’s little to delve into these mini tales. Sometimes you’ll even come across a person in the rooms, but you can’t interact with them, although they occasionally interact with you for some scripted moments. I did quite like going into each home to find out what sort of horror trope I’d run into next, and it was nice enough that there’s something of a throughline involving some ghostly figures that reside within the building.
The issue is that there isn’t a lot here, and what there is isn’t terribly exciting. My play-through clocked in at 45 minutes, including about five minutes where I got into a room I shouldn’t have and managed to break the game. Most of that time was spent walking very slowly through the building — something that the developers joke about via one of the achievement titles — pressing A on every single door. A smattering of jumpscares came and went, and then the whole thing was over.
Some credit to the developers of Frightence is due though, as the visuals are nice enough, with some genuinely good lighting in some of the rooms. The character models have some basic animations, but they are detailed, and have some solid variation between them. There were some odd graphical glitches, especially with the physics enabled objects that would occasionally fly around the environment, or even send my character careening through the air, but these were quite rare. Then there’s the voice acting which is quite solid considering English doesn’t appear to be the first language of the developers. Other sounds are perfunctory horror game fare, but serve the atmosphere well enough.
The game ran well enough on Xbox Series X, with no noticeable slowdown that I experienced. The controls were fine, although I would have sold my own mother for a run button by the end of it. There was a rather odd control choice though, with the pause button being bound to RB rather than the standard menu button, with no option to rebind it. An odd thing to include that didn’t cause a problem with the game, but something that stuck out as a bit bizarre.
Frightence is a hard game to recommend, even at the price of £5. With only around half an hour’s worth of content on offer, there isn’t really a great reason to pick it up. There’s no replay value once you’ve reached the end, no collectibles or follow up story, just the end credits and return to the title screen. If you’re an achievement hunting sort, there’s the benefit that you can get the full 1000g here without much effort, but I’m not sure that’s worth the cost of entry alone. This appears to be the first game from developers Playstige. I hope they have another go at this genre, with something significantly more fleshed out in the future.
Frightence is out now on Xbox, Playstation, and Nintendo Switch.
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