I’m becoming a DreadXP fanboy lately. The indie publisher has quickly established a great track record for bizarre, experimental horror, and even though I’ve only seen a few minutes of its new game, Amanda the Adventurer, I’m already obsessed. DreadXP’s game seems to be made exclusively by mid-00s Creepypasta writers that graduated to game design, and I’m here for it. If you spent countless hours of your childhood reading about abandoned Disney resorts or searching for the real Squidward&💛rsquo;s Suicide, Amanda the Adventurer is will be right up your very traumatized alley.
The demo, which you can download on Steam right now, isn’t very long, but it paints a great picture of what to expect. You begin in an attic surrounded by interactive objects - a grandfather clock, an ov💮en, a wardrobe with a padlock, an alarm clock - and an eerie feeling that something is definitely wrong here. Make your way to an old CRT television in the corner and pop in the tape, and an episode of the faux children’s cartoon Amanda the Adventurer will play.
I don’t know what it is about kid’s shows and old video tapes, but they’re so effective at conveying creepiness. Haunted kids shows are such a ubiquitous trope throughout Creepypasta stories that Cꦛhannel Zero even based its first season on one - Candle Cove. Amanda the Adventurer is a parody of Dora the Explorer, about a potentially murderous little girl that likes to play with knives, and her best friend Wooly the Sheep who appears to be self-aware and trapped in the program. The way the show uses quick cuts, subliminal images, and surrealism immediately put me on edge. It’s clear the duo dev team at Mangledmaw Games knows this brand of analog horror extremely well.
In the episode, Amanda is teaching the audience how to bake an apple pie (while Wooly begs for help), and when it ends you’ll need to follow her direction using play food and a toy oven to make your own pie. Solving the puzzle produces another tape, and I was alr🦄eady feeling trepidation before I even popped it into the TV. It seems like this is the general loop: watch a cursed tape, then solve a puzzle in the attic to produce another, even more cursed tape. Right before the demo ends, the door to the attic bursts open and some kind of unspeakable horror emerges from it. Even though I just spoiled it, you’ve gotta see it for yourself. It’s one of the best hook🎉s I’ve seen in a horror game in a long time.
DreadXP has only just recently started publishing standalone games, following the success of its micro-horror series Dread X Collection 1-5. Amanda the Adventurer is its second kid’s show send-up after My Friendly Neighbor, a survival-horror shooter about a demonic Saturday morning puppet show. Picture Bert and Ernie crawling along the ceiling and clamping their felt mouths down on your throat. Is DreadXP planning on turning all of my childhood memories into nightm♎ares? Is it weird if I say I hop🐟e so?