Madness inside

The incremental index has a fence around it, and Madness inside wanders over it on purpose. ZV GAMES' 2024 Steam release bills itself as an adventure, and what it actually is, per the store page and its own reviews, is a short first-person psychological horror piece: Police Lieutenant Vic Voight chases a criminal into an abandoned psychiatric hospital where horrifying experiments were once conducted, and the door locks behind him.

What the loop feels like

You walk. The corridors are dark, the notes and logs you find piece together what happened here, and the environmental puzzles between you and the next wing are deliberate obstacles in an atmosphere that keeps shifting under you. There is no combat and no fail state to fight; the tension is entirely in the sound design and the slow reveal. That's Madness Inside.

As Vic descends deeper, reality starts bleeding into nightmare: flickering distortions and abrupt atmospheric shifts triggered by the narrative, culminating in a choice that decides between two endings. The game wants one sitting, lights off, headphones on, and its community says exactly that. That's the whole arc: about an hour of dread with a coin-flip conscience at the end.

The systems doing the work

Six named systems from the research record: first-person environmental exploration, clue gathering and investigation, contextual puzzle solving, reality-bending sequences, linear narrative chapters, and clue-linked milestone unlocks, with dual ending branching on top. There are no skill trees and no grinding; advancing is a matter of finding narrative triggers and opening the next wing. The honest label is atmospheric walking simulator, and the game does not pretend otherwise.

Where it stumbles

The community's Mostly Positive verdict comes with a self-aware asterisk: actual gameplay boils down to walking, reading notes, and a couple of basic mini-puzzles, with no running mechanic and no evasion to speak of. The whole game takes just over an hour, which some feel is thin at its price, and the asylum setting treads well-worn psychological horror tropes without escaping them. Against heavyweight narrative horror it is stripped to the studs: no stealth, no room-shifting puzzles, just Unreal Engine 5 visuals, headphone-first audio, and mood.

Playing it today

Live on Steam, priced at A$ 10.25 at our check, desktop-only with no verified mobile release under this name. The game explicitly warns of intense flashing sequences, so keep sensory sensitivities in mind. If short-form horror is the itch, this sits closer to itch.io horror shorts than to the genre's epics.

The verdict

A focused, mostly positive micro-horror that does its one job in ninety minutes and leaves. Worth your afternoon if you read its label literally, which, to be clear, is walking simulator.