Creepshow (2026)

*This review contains spoilers for the "Metamorphic Love" storyline in this game

The anthology format is tricky but when it's done right it's absolutely one of my favourite genres. I think that short story writers are underrated in this day and age. It takes a lot of skill to tell a proper story in a short amount of screen time. And in recent years we've had some really unsatisfying attempts at this format in nerd spaces (Marvel's What If?... and Amazon's Secret Level I'm looking at you!) but I'm happy to say that Creepshow gets it right.

The game starts you off in that classic horror storyline of rowdy teens sneaking into an abandoned mall! Now abandoned malls aren't really a thing in the UK but I'm well aware America has a bunch and what better place to set a story, than a decaying monument to capitalism. What struck me first in this setting was it allowed the game's writers to hide little easer eggs in the background. I'm sure I saw the hat from "I Think You Should Leave" in there, which immediately endeared me to the kind of developers that might put that in there.

The basic overview of the game is, your main nerdy kid character finds himself face to face with a haunted fortune telling machine called The Reader who makes him provide satiating stories. And we then get to play through them.

The first one I found was "Metamorphic Love" which is a cute little love story about a man and his new bug wife! As soon as I saw this man liked bugs, I knew I was in for a gnarly time. But what I didn't expect was the absolute picture of bleakness the creators managed to create with this one. You spend a horrible week in this man's life as he loses control of everything he held dear. You wake up in his filthy apartment, feed his pet beetle, check in on his dying wife and related medical bills, and then go to work in a filthy fast food place where you get no human contact unless your boss has a problem with you. The gameplay for these parts is sometimes puzzle based but most of the time it's more like a point and click game where you just interact with the environment and get through the scene as best you can.

As the week goes on the bleakness ramps up, his wife sadly passes and instead of him dealing with any of it... it silently breaks him. And this is where the game impressed me the most, the atmosphere here was so uncomfortable in so many ways I was impressed they pulled it off in a video game. The broken man continues on with his week, even still talking to the corpse in his bedroom. And this is where the bugs come in. As our main character slowly loses his mind at work, his pet bug decides to take the place of the wife by literally puppeteering her on the deathbed. And the way he no sells this horror by being the most supportive husband he can is the most unsettling part of this whole thing.

This game isn't interested in jump scares which I will admit, did make the tension wear off a bit during the gameplay parts. You get some mild psychological break hallucinations but it kinda steps back just when it's getting interesting on that stuff. As scaredy cat who doesn't play a lot of horror games, I was mostly okay with this but if you're a seasoned horror fan you might be looking for more scares. And as a puzzle fan I did find some of the puzzle elements a bit basic. They seemed like they were there for some gameplay variety rather than being the main attraction.