I purchased this game in a bundle with Necrophosis. I have a couple of games of the BrokenLore series on my wishlist and I saw this as the perfect opportunity to try one. I enjoyed the psychological horror aspect of the game. We portray a young Hikkokomori that is stuck in his life: he does not have a job, his relationship with his family is difficult, his parents are tired of financially sustaining him and constantly remind that his brother has a good life, as he did a wonderful career and he has happy and solid family. My interpretation is that this game is a metaphorical journey inside his head, trapped both in a physical space (his apartment) and psychologically, as he is not able to face his responsibilities and this is taking a heavy toll on his overall wellbeing. But with persistence he is able to eventually find the way to redeem himself.


Don’t Watch unique focus is on the narrative, and for me it was more of an interactive TV show episode, rather than a proper videogame. The player has to follow a series of predetermined and scripted actions. You cannot take any decision to change the course of the events and the overall environments are small and extremely linear. I liked the fact that the developers used different art styles. At first, they immersed the player in realistic graphics that then switched into a pixelated-retro style, contributing greatly in building an eerie vibe that made everything more scary. The art direction is overall nice and certain sections contain quite some gore. However, nothing particularly mind-blowing, as most of the assets used, I saw them in many other similar titles. They could have been more creative.

From a technical perspective, I think that the developers could have done a better job in optimizing this title. Every time that I opened the game, I needed to set the language and the graphical options to medium again, as clearly a Steam Deck is not able to handle epic as a standard texture definition. This title just does not cache your preferred settings, which is something I believe the devs should fix. I also feel that the optimization could be better. With the incremental popularity of hand-held consoles, devs should dedicate a bit of time to flesh out the titles for lower-end systems as well. Especially if we are talking about games that last for not even one hour.


The plot of this chapter of the BrokenLore series provides some interesting insights about the life struggles of an Hikikomori, and his tumultuous path to improve his overall wellbeing, that can take quite a heavy toll in someone’s mind. There are a lot of elements of the spiritual culture, such as Hyakume that made me curious. This pushed me to do some research, and I discovered quite a few interesting elements of Japanese folklore. If you are into psychological horror, I definitely recommend this short title.