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Who needs Silent Hill? The ‘anxiety horror’ game I’m most looking forward to is this freakish, grotesque thing about who you let stay at your house in the apocalypse

By Joshua Wolens

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Who needs Silent Hill? The 'anxiety horror' game I'm most looking forward to is this freakish, grotesque thing about who you let stay at your house in the apocalypse

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Who needs Silent Hill? The ‘anxiety horror’ game I’m most looking forward to is this freakish, grotesque thing about who you let stay at your house in the apocalypse

Joshua Wolens

15 September 2025

Sorry to all the people who got sorted into bin bags overnight.

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(Image credit: Critical Reflex)

I’m a trusting soul. When some poor unfortunate raps on my door after the end of the world, I don’t have it in me not to let them in. When their teeth are a suspiciously perfect white, I attribute it to a rigorous before-bed hygiene routine. Their red eyes? We’re all tired. Their hairless armpits? They must be a swimmer.

And when I wake up the next morning and find one of my other guests has been perfectly trisected into a series of hot, damp bin bags, I reason they must have had an accident using my Kai Shun knife set.

(Image credit: Critical Reflex)
No, I’m Not A Human is a Papers Please-like—in the way that we describe any game that makes ‘looking at a guy’ a part of its gameplay loop as a Papers Please-like—about making room at the inn in the midst of an apocalyptic solar event. The Sun, finally tired of us, has turned up the temperature to ‘kill you instantly’ levels in daytime, and people need a place to stay.

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I played Lovecraftian doctor simulator Do No Harm, and let me tell you, my brother in Cthulhu, I did some serious harm

I’m diagnosing survivors of a zombie apocalypse and only occasionally mistaking cold symptoms for the zombie plague in this military base management sim

It’s a golden age for weird Eastern European games—you can tell because I’m in love with a horror puzzler about 2 old men trying to find evil in the woods

What complicates this is that, on top of the Sun situation, a species of doppelgangers has clawed their way out from under the Earth’s mantle. Called the Visitors, they’re perfect simulacrums of humanity—in that they look like the same kind of hideous freak everyone else does—save for their pearly teeth, dirty nails, red eyes, and hairless pits (or at least, these are the only tell-tale features revealed to you over the course of the demo).

So, every night you get knock after knock after knock at the door. Peer through the peephole and you will, invariably, be confronted by someone who looks melted and deranged begging you for a place to stay for the night. Many are human, some are not, and you can’t just turn everyone away: the monsters prey on people who stay home alone.

(Image credit: Critical Reflex)
There’s no good way that I found to identify who is and isn’t a Visitor just through the peephole, so I ended letting all bar one caller in (and the one I rejected was entirely based on vibes). Far better to use your limited pools of energy in the daytime to run physical checks on your guests—to look at their teeth, eyes, nails, bodies for evidence of otherness.
If you suspect your guest of ill intent, you can pull a gun on them as they cry and cower, and it’s here, reader, that I dug my own grave. Old softy that I am, I find it very difficult to obliterate a person who is tearfully begging me not to.

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‘Maybe the white teeth are just white teeth,’ I say to myself as every new day opens with the phrase “It smells like someone died overnight,” and the number of people in the living room dwindles to a single, grinning woman picking flesh from her teeth.

(Image credit: Critical Reflex)
It’s a very enjoyable, eerie, and stylish nightmare that I am entirely unequipped for, and I’m very eager to get my hands on the full game—with surely even more opportunities to doom myself and the people around me—when it hits later today.

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Joshua Wolens

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News Writer

One of Josh’s first memories is of playing Quake 2 on the family computer when he was much too young to be doing that, and he’s been irreparably game-brained ever since. His writing has been featured in Vice, Fanbyte, and the Financial Times. He’ll play pretty much anything, and has written far too much on everything from visual novels to Assassin’s Creed. His most profound loves are for CRPGs, immersive sims, and any game whose ambition outstrips its budget. He thinks you’re all far too mean about Deus Ex: Invisible War.

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I played Lovecraftian doctor simulator Do No Harm, and let me tell you, my brother in Cthulhu, I did some serious harm

I’m diagnosing survivors of a zombie apocalypse and only occasionally mistaking cold symptoms for the zombie plague in this military base management sim

It’s a golden age for weird Eastern European games—you can tell because I’m in love with a horror puzzler about 2 old men trying to find evil in the woods

I had low expectations for this upcoming FMV ‘interactive horror’ game, but its hour-long demo turned out to be one of the most entertaining things I’ve played all year

Square Enix’s new murder party game is like Among Us in a mansion, with a hefty helping of team deathmatch

Cronos: The New Dawn’s sci-fi survival horror channels RE4 and Dead Space, but it took Bloober awhile to realize it ‘subconsciously’ is also a game about Covid

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