Sometimes unashamedly riffing on the biggest genre hits works – just ask Nightghast, a creepy budget horror game in the vein of P.T., Resident Evil and Silent Hill

To be fair to Nightghast, I'd been exploring the darkest pockets of its abandoned country house setting for a full 20 minutes before encountering its first shameless jump scare. It's also worth noting up front that despite taking my time with Playstige Interactive's first-person exploratory horror game – launched last week on PS5, PS4 and Nintendo Switch – I reached the end credits in less than an hour. The game's modest length is reflected in its £2.49 / $2.99 price tag, which, admittedly, was enough to inspire me to buy. 

And I'm glad I did. Nightghast wears its inspirations firmly on its cobweb-covered sleeve, while also feeling like a lesson in genre successes. Yes, Nightghast borrows heavily from some of the horror sphere's biggest hitters, but it also does so in a tightly-contained way that walks the line between influence and imitation with precision. 

Tip-toeing on the shoulders of giants

"I have received an invitation from a widow named Mildred Bartgis, who resides in the countryside," reads the blurb on the Nightghast PlayStation Store page. "She claims that her house became haunted after her divorce. She insists that an entity by the name of 'Schnabelperchten' is angry with her because her house is never clean enough. Perhaps, due to her depression after the divorce, she has become obsessive-compulsive."

"However, I'm not a psychologist, so I'm not concerned about her mental state. This case is perfect for me as it holds many paranormal clues. I must search her house to determine whether it is genuinely haunted or not."

A strange invitation to a haunted location? That's Silent Hill 2 ticked off the list. A first-person investigation of a country house in disrepair? There's P.T. and Resident Evil 7. Myriad trinkets, battered photographs, wandering apparitions, jump scares, incongruous puzzles and genre tropes by way of blood-smeared hallways, doors randomly creaking open independently, and inexplicable power cuts? I mean, that could be a whole host of horror games, but there are definitely Layers of Fear vibes throughout in your bid to get to the bottom of what the hell is going on in Nightghast. 

Movement in Nightghast is a little stilted as you stumble around the country house's dimly-lit hallways and darkest recesses, and there are scores of items that can be examined for no reason beyond satisfying curiosity. But where the game shines is in its OG Alone in the Darks-style memos, newspaper snippets and police reports that serve to fill in some of the blanks around the hows and whys of Mildred Bartgis' story – and likewise why you're so invested in her unsettling tale. 

Throughout its short run time, I made some off-the-cuff presumptions as to where the story was ultimately heading, most of which I got wrong. This is testament to the efficiency of which Nightghast weaves its narrative, rarely offering more than required while leaving plenty of room for speculation and dead-end guesswork. Again, given how compact Nightghast's story is, it's difficult to share more here without spoiling its main beats, but the fact that this game flies so closely to so many other horror games and still leaves scope for misinterpretation speaks volumes for its execution.

I once argued that horror games are best served on handheld consoles (more specifically, I pined for Dying Light to scare me on the toilet), and I reckon experimental, narrative-led indie ventures like Nigthghast fit that rhetoric perfectly. Having watched a handful of PS5 let's plays on YouTube, Nightghast definitely looks a little sharper on Sony's flagship hardware, but for me there really is something to be said about playing games of this nature in a dark room, with your headphones on and your nose just a few centimetres away from the screen; soaking up every horror trope and leaning into every single cheap jump scare.

Check out what else we've been enjoying in our Indie Spotlight series, or see out what's on the horizon with our roundup of upcoming indie games.