I’ve always said that horror should entertain and intrigue, not just scare. Take my favorite horror movie as an example: The Woman in Black. Yes, it’s got the jump scares and a few moments of grim imagery, but it’s also got a decent and somewhat touching story behind it. It’s not just Harry Potter wandering a big house while some deranged dead lady runs around after him. There are characters to get invested in and a story with a proper arc, though — spoiler alert — it’s a little bittersweet in its ending.
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Do Not Open, the debut game from Spanish developer Nox Noctis, is a horror game that will deliver the scares, but I’m hoping it will deliver a bloody good story, too.
The game begins with a short introductory cutscene that sets up the premise with Mike, the playable character, seemingly losing his grip on life. Mike, a family man, a husband, a father — he has lost it all when the game finally handed me control in a dark and disgusting basement room. Mike comes to and the first thing I noted was the busted noose laying on the floor. Do Not Open is not shying away from the heavy topics, then. The walls were adorned with odd paintings. The sofa bed lay unmade and suspiciously stained. The toilet and sink… well, the less said the better, but it’s clear that Mike hasn’t been living the life of luxury down in the dumpy, dingy basement, and it’s time to get out.
My first task was to leave via the locked door which required a number combination. I searched the basement from top to bottom looking for clues to escape the subterranean squalor. I thought I’d found the solution when I noticed that the paintings hanging from the walls had numbers scrawled on them. But in what order did they go in? I tried, in vain, to force my way through the door by trying random combinations of the numbers I’d found on the paintings. That… did not work.
You could play this room a hundred times and never get the same solution, and that’s part of the game’s allure.
Eventually, I went back over the room and took a second look at the notes, supposedly left by Mike’s daughter, Julia. This is where I let out a long, loud “well…shoot” as I noticed that the notes described the different pictures on the walls. Furthermore, each note had a small number scrawled in the top corner, though you’d only see this number if you rotated the note as you held it. I missed this the first time around and spent half an hour hoping the game would throw a solution at me. And, because this is a pre-release preview, I couldn’t even go on Google to search out a handy guide. Not that Google will help once the game is out anyway. Let me explain.
After rebooting the game a couple of times to see if I was the unfortunate victim of a pre-release bug, I noticed that things changed ever so slightly in my dirty basement dwelling. The pictures on the walls changed. The notes were slightly different. The collectible newspapers were in slightly different places. You could play this room a hundred times and never get the same solution, and that’s part of the game’s allure.
After escaping the basement and making it up to the house, things got creepy.Very creepy. Each room you enter is an escape room of sorts. You’ll have to find the clues and figure out the puzzle, or in some cases, run for your life or hide from the killer beings roaming the rooms. Failing to do so in time means restarting. But, unlike other games where you may take your previous knowledge and get a little further ahead, Do Not Open demands you to pay attention the first time around every single time. Sure, you can get the basics and figure out what needs to be done, but compiling the clues and solving the puzzle is never the same due to the ever-changing layouts of rooms and their objects. Just to put it in perspective, there are over two million variants. Throw in some unnerving, sentient dolls and some blink-and-you-miss-it jump scares and you’ve got an escape room game with a difference.
The demo I played was on PS5 using my regular TV setup. However, Do Not Open will also get aPSVR 2update at some point in 2023. I found Do Not Open to be terrifying on a regular flat screen, never mind actually being plonked into Mike’s twisted mansion and the monsters of his mind.
Do Not Open will release on November 15th for PS5 and PC, while the PS4 version will release sometime in early 2023. The PSVR 2 version of the game will also release sometime in 2023.
