A few months ago, I’ve been participating in this Bluesky trend where you list one game from your backlog for each like you receive on your skeet. Well, over 400 likes later, I’ve spent several weeks  trying to catch up. I’ve brought up over 250 games on that thread, but something that has begun to happen quite often is developers of these games finding my posts and replying with words of encouragement and pitches on why I should finally experience their art. This is, for me at least, more than a little embarrassing. They did their job by making a great game and getting me to buy it, they shouldn’t have to sell me on actually booting it up as well! Seeing this just filled me with immense guilt so I decided to try out one of the games that a dev reached out about. That is what brings us to this title: Without a Dawn.

I am glad to say, I really enjoyed this one. It’s a visual novel with a lot of surreal themes and imagery, and it is way shorter than I expected it’d be (50 minutes vs. 2-4 hours). You play as (or at least from the perspective of) a woman in a cabin who can’t sleep. She continuously awakens from increasingly unsettling dreams and they seem to blend more and more into reality. I won’t mention much else due to spoilers, but this is the realm the entire story takes place within. You won’t know if your character can trust anything they see or even think, and the story will keep you in the dark for much of it, especially if you try to cling tightly to logic.

As someone who never loved horror growing up, but am finding a fondness for it lately, I really enjoyed the ways in which this game creeped me out. The entire game is one hell of a slow burn, but there is sometimes a loud snap or pop of surprise sprinkled in to keep you on your toes. I love this approach because it turns what might have been a tiny scare in more extreme horror stories into something much more intense when contrasted with everything immediately surrounding it. This low hum of permeating dread is also complemented by its excellent ASCII art style, as it both evokes online creepypastas and enhances the uncanny factor by adding motion to what we know as a static style of art. It’s effective in the same way that many indie horror games use PS1 or PS2 era aesthetics to obscure visuals, as that obscurity before a threat is fully made clear is where the effectiveness of horror is most found.

I love the game as a mood piece, and I love how it plays with player choice at times, but also, I love how this game is thematically so reflective of the very structure of games (and really all art) as a whole. Without getting too specific, the entire story is about you being indirectly led somewhere, and as a player, I gleefully followed. Regardless of the dread my player character, or even me at times, felt, I was happy to take every step, experience every shock, and cross every threshold. There’s even one segment that made the hair on the back of my neck stand up primarily because I surrendered myself to the moment rather than try to peek at the inner mechanisms of how it was supposed to work. This feeling of willingly being emotionally manipulated is key to what makes art so moving. I found myself thinking about how, much like this game is leading this woman on a journey, I too was being led on one, and really any game that makes me feel anything at all does this same. I just think that’s really cool.

Anyway, I recommend the game pretty highly. There is not much in the way of actual gameplay, and the presentation is very sparse, even if intentionally so. But if you are down to experience vibes over all else, and only have an hour to spare, this is a great way to kill that hour. Definitely looking forward to playing other games like this in the future, maybe even Distraint, which is also in my backlog.