Dreader tasks you with moving your mouse pointer down some mazes without making a mistake as eerie things happen around you.
During the early days I spent on the internet, I had the misfortune of stumbling across a maze game where I had to lead my mouse pointer to the end. Not hard, except you couldn’t let your pointer move outside of the walls or you’d have to start again. I had a couple of clumsy restarts due to my shaky hands, but after a while, I was doing quite well. Then I reached this narrow part of the maze where you had to be super steady if you wanted to get through. Squinting and sitting close to the screen to watch every movement carefully, I was in a prime position for the game to hit me with a jump scare. Never played a game like that again.
Except now I’m playing one that draws from that same type of play and fear, but does so with much better atmosphere. Here, you need to make your way through some narrow mazes, but the scares seem to be happening around you more than they are on the computer. As your movements are played out by the on-screen character, bathed in the green glow of the monitor, the game starts to mess with you. Did you see something move just there? What’s going on with the in-game commands? Why is it showing a video of my back, and why is the footage getting closer and closer?
Dreader makes you uneasy, and for me, I found it made me start to mess up when working through the mazes. And that made the dangers feel like they were creeping closer every second, which in turn made me screw up worse, creating a cycle of failure and tension that makes this game really get under your skin.
Dreader is playable now on itch.io.
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