Valley of Shadows – a short first-person psychological horror film from BadTaste Studio, released on March 7, 2024. Set in a 1990s American suburb, the entire story is approximately half an hour long and contained on a single videotape.
An empty house and a cassette tape on the doorstep
The protagonist, James, an ordinary family man, returns home late from work to find his house empty. His wife and daughter have disappeared, and a strange videotape, left by an unknown source, lies on the porch. From this moment on, normal life ends. James feels constantly being watched, his paranoia grows, and paranormal events begin to occur around him. He tries to piece together what happened to his family.
Fear without cheap jump scares
Genre-wise, it's a walking simulator: you wander around a house, searching for clues and solving simple puzzles to advance the plot. The developers deliberately avoided jump scares in favor of a constant, visceral tension. The graphics, powered by Unreal Engine 5, look realistic, while the retro atmosphere is created by cassette tapes and memorabilia from that era. Even the tagline is based on the image of a videotape: you want to rewind your memories and skip the boring parts, but someone always presses "stop."
Half an hour to complete
It's a compact, linear story for single-player, and it takes about thirty minutes to complete, so it's easy to return to for more details. Valley of Kings is also listed on the site, but aside from the name, they have nothing in common: one is a strategy game with a dragon, and this is a small-scale horror game about a missing family. Download torrent Valley of Shadows on PC you can see it below.
Features of the game
A psychological horror film set in the suburbs of the nineties.