Kinophobia

I’m pretty disappointed in myself; I played this game for 3 days and 5-6 hours trying to beat it without hints and only got 18 out of 24 before beginning to look things up.

This is a parser game with a moderate-sized map filled with information. You play as an exorcist visiting an abandoned film studio, set on exorcising 24 ghosts that all died in different years. To do so, you must know their name, the year they died, and how they died.

Thus, you embark on your quest to gather up as many pieces of paper as you can find (and you can find a lot) and occasionally using your psychic abilities to examine objects’ pasts.

I generally try in my reviews to be encouraging to newer authors or people who seem like they could use encouragement, but to be more frank and open with people who are well-established. So I’d like to say that I am giving this game 5 stars and think it is great, and I’d like to spend the rest of this review analyzing the game’s design and play style without focusing on building it up with praise.

This game was directly influenced by numerous games I’ve never played, included Obra Dinn and Her Story. When I played it, I was strongly reminded of several other IF games, perhaps inspired by those same sources.

Superficially, I was reminded of Dr Horror’s House of Terror, a parser game that took 2nd place in 2021. It also featured a haunted film studio split into 5 buildings, each of which had its own cast of monsters and puzzles to be solved. I soon found that while the setting was similar, the gameplay was almost a polar opposite.

I next was reminded of Excalibur, a fantastic game from the same year (2021) that takes the form of a fake wiki database about a non-existent TV series. It’s self-aware, and even in-game it’s possible the series never existed and the whole wiki is a concoction of a fan. Similarly to Kinophobia, gameplay revolves around looking up cast members with connections to the occult.

The third is Type Help, a game released this year outside of competitions that then skyrocketed to 5th place of all time on IFDB. Like Kinophobia, it has a linear sequence of murders where the names and deaths of the victims must be pieced together, first by finding easily accessible info, then slowly learning the system and finding patterns.

The implementation in this game is paradoxically smooth. Most scenery mentioned in scenery descriptions is not implemented at all, usually a sign of a terrible parser game. Here, it’s just a sign to ignore it. The focus is entirely on the documents.

Similarly, some reasonable synonyms don’t work. “Q Landlord” doesn’t work. “Q The Landlord” does. But again, this isn’t a flaw; the game is about being as exact and specific as possible. You may think you have the exact right name, and a person with that name might exist, but it might not be the right person.

Unlike Dr Horror’s House of Terrors, which took a wry attitude, this game is generally sincere somber. This breaks down under the weight of the 24 suspects. Without hints, I re-read every document over 10 times, searched and researched names (curse you Annie Serpico) until the ambient messages became entirely pedestrian. “Oh? Light is reflected off an iris before me? How droll”. Combing the rooms became a tedious chore (I recommend using SCORE, as it tells you when you’re done exploring). Yet despite this, I put more hours into the game than I have into any other parser game this year (except for the French magnum opus (Le comte et la communiste). I simply enjoyed it, and I don’t think fixing its perceived flaws would ‘fix’ it; a lot of times the best experiences are the best precisely because of flaws that contrast with the rest of the game, and removing those flaws can result in anodyne experiences (I experienced that with Kingdom Hearts 3, which smoothed out the combat system so much that much of its combat feels like ‘press O to watch movie’).

Overall, this is an oddball game with a strong commitment to worldbuilding and nice (which I mean literally, not sarcastically) translation of video game mechanics into parser. I think most people will find something to like here.

Founded in the mid-1970s by Gregory Korda, Armature Studios produced a wide variety of films, many of which received high praise from critics and audiences alike. But the studio seemed… cursed. Every year, someone would die, often under suspicious circumstances.

After going out of business in 1998, the studio sat in abandonment. Prime real estate isn’t as desirable when it has the reputation of being haunted. Jump forward to 2025. You are a freelancer whose work deals with the supernatural. Recently, the studio’s lot was purchased, and the new owners have hired you to rid the studio of whatever haunts it.

In other words, Kinophobia is a ghost investigation game that takes place at an abandoned movie studio. The game is made with Inform and is also a submission to Ectocomp 2025 in the Le Grand Guignol category.

Gameplay
At first, I found the game to be quite intimidating. My initial impression was that there were tons of things I had to juggle. Notebook. Binder that gets filled quickly. Phone. A pendant with some kind of substance in it. And verbs. RESEARCH. CONSULT. WRITE. Something about CONCLUSIONS.

I was overthinking it. Soon enough, it clicked. Kinophobia quickly became a lot of fun.

The gameplay involves exploring the studio for newspaper clippings, posters, memos, letters, and other readable material that name-drop people, films, dates, and incidents tied to Armature Studios’ history. Along the way, you can also encounter haunted objects that provide further clues.

As you pick up the shotgun microphone, you feel a slight tingle of static electricity.

The main goal is to identify the 24 ghosts that haunt the site. This is done by finding the person’s name, cause of death, and year of death, which you record in your notebook. Once everyone has been identified, you go to the one room that has been off-limits during the gameplay. But I won’t spoil it.

The gameplay’s structure is a bit unusual. When it comes to games about ghost hunting or exorcisms, I imagine the player running around to find and confront/banish ghosts directly or solving scenery/object-based puzzles. Kinophobia is more of a research-oriented investigation. After collecting readable material, you sit down to analyze it. My favorite part of this is Ari, our research assistant who will look up topics and text us her findings. Sometimes she’ll text us at random to make sure we’re doing alright. She’s awesome.

Ari tells you that the top hit for this name is a "dadfluencer" based out of Cleveland. The person you're looking for is probably not that.

There is so much content to explore. It’s easy to go down a rabbit hole as you chase every bit of info that you find. I love this sort of thing. After a while, you almost forget that you’re investigating a haunted movie studio. Almost.

You think you hear a voice behind you - there's nothing there when you look, of course.

The game makes sure to remind the player of where they are. This includes (Spoiler - click to show)experiencing eerie visions. I actually wish there were more of these. It’s also possible for ghosts to appear visually, but this is more for atmosphere than anything else.

I did need the walkthrough to finish the game. 24 ghosts are a lot. I enjoyed the challenge, but some were too cryptic for me. For example, (Spoiler - click to show)I think reading the “Whatever happened to Magda Marcel?” article and concluding that she was murdered is a bit of a leap, though I appreciate how the game confirms this through a text message we receive from Ari as well as the appearance of Magda’s ghost (a gnarly murder, from the looks of it). Also, I was more inclined to classify hairstylist Melissa Wong’s death as “illness” (chemical poisoning) than “accident,” considering that it was due to routine exposure to toxic hairspray.

Story
To avoid spoiling the immediate story, I’m going to focus more on the worldbuilding component. After researching the daylight out of everything, one could almost believe that, despite being a work of fiction, the people, films, essays, organizations, and other subjects in Kinophobia are real, perhaps because much of it feels vaguely familiar. I should note, a few things do exist, like Letterboxd. But most of it is fiction.

There’s even commentary on these fictional works.

Ari shares a Letterboxd review of Ampersand (2008): "What if all your failed Hinge dates showed up to your house to kill you with hammers but you were too busy having crippling gambling debts to notice. Five stars."

These were a delight to read.

I’m not the first to make this comparison, but Kinophobia reminds me of Excalibur, a Twine game where you navigate a convincing Wikipedia-style “website” about a TV show of the same name. Both have an investigative element where you dig for info and draw conclusions. But what I especially like is the depiction of a creative endeavor that once lived in its heyday. Through your investigation, you start to imagine what it was like before the television show got cancelled, or before the film studio went out of business. As dysfunctional/cursed as they were, there was a moment when they shined. It’s neat to contemplate before returning to the present.

Also, the author describes Kinophobia as a “database thriller,” which may just be my new favorite genre.

Visuals
I like that the game uses a black screen and white text. Much spookier than the default white screen with black text. The cover art also has a nice appearance with black and white imagery + a splash of orange.

Final thoughts
Will everyone fall in love with this game? Not necessarily. But I do think it has something for everyone. There are parts you will appreciate.

As for me, I had a blast. It featured some of my favorite things: An atmospheric map that you roam freely, and a story that you piece together through research. And while it’s a long- and sometimes difficult- game, the walkthrough is well designed. It cuts to the chase so you can dive right into the essence of the gameplay.

So far, Kinophobia is one of the best ghost investigation games I’ve played!