Developer: Night Shift Team
Publisher: Red Limb Studio
Platform: PC
Tested on: PC
Creepy Shift: Roadside Diner – Review
The roster of horror games where you have to do a mundane minimum-wage job while avoiding scary creatures is ever-growing. We’d say it’s become a staple of the horror genre, but that doesn’t mean we can’t enjoy it still. Creepy Shift: Roadside Diner is exactly the sort of game you expect when you hear that title, and it’s also the debut game from developer Night Shift Team who are presumably making this into a series. Our main conclusion is that you need some serious skills if you want to keep a haunted diner up and running.
Story
Creepy Shift: Roadside Diner says it’s based on a creepypasta on the store page, though it fails to mention which one specifically. Regardless, the story is pretty simple. You play as a desperate man who must seek any way to make money, even taking on the night shift in a local diner. The diner seems mundane enough, but it comes with a peculiar set of rules that need to be followed during the blood moon. And obviously, the night you are covering the night shift is one of those. If the rules are not followed precisely, several unnatural creatures will set their sights on the diner and the unfortunate night shift worker within. Slowly, while you play, you uncover exactly why the diner became haunted.
Graphics
The game looks pretty good, and we especially enjoyed the design of the enemies that can deliver a good scare. Each of the various creatures that haunt the diner has a distinct and unique look and animation to it, tying this into their specific lore. The diner itself looks classically ’50s inspired and has some great atmosphere to it in terms of lighting. We were also surprised by the large outside area around the diner that we also got to traverse sometimes. Overall, the glitchy visual effects worked effectively during the more tense moments too.
Sound
We enjoyed the music in this game a decent amount, aside from the loud jumpscares here or there. There’s nothing like bopping to some retro jukebox tunes, even if turning the jukebox off whenever it starts to play is one of the main rules you have to abide by. Aside from that, you spend a lot of time without a real soundtrack playing. The voice acting in this game was also really good. We enjoyed the main character’s performance and it allowed for them to have more personality than your average bland horror game protagonist.
Gameplay
Creepy Shift: Roadside Diner is a first-person horror game experience that doesn’t outwear its welcome. It’s on the short side of things, with some replay value added by a graded score that tells you at the very end how well you did. This score is based on how you held up doing your night shift tasks around the diner while balancing it with surviving the haunting. The game starts out very easy anyway, with your objectives being simple things that need to be done around the diner. Cleaning tables and putting away supplies, you simply walk around and click on stuff. The only scary thing about the game in this part is the creepy atmosphere.
After a while, things start to pick up. Supernatural stuff start happening and you need to follow the three basic rules. Make sure all outside doors are closed, even if they’re opening on their own. Turn the jukebox off whenever it starts playing, even if it teleports to other places in the building. Lastly, check that there is a candle beneath the pastor’s painting at all times, otherwise, he’ll come out and kill you. That last one is indicative of what you can expect as the game drags on. A stealth mechanic is introduced, where you need to hide at the right moment to avoid being killed. And all of this is happening while you still need to do your job.
The only real downside of Creepy Shift: Roadside Diner is probably the pacing. The entire playthrough will last you an hour at most, which is quite short. The supernatural occurrences ramp up from zero to one hundred very quickly, not leaving enough time for the atmosphere to truly sink in. There are also entire sections where you’re not even in the diner and are instead forced to wander through other places for the plot to unfold. Near the end of the game, the amount of supernatural activity leaves no room for your diner tasks and you’re basically just biding your time until your shift ends. While trying to beat your score offers some replayability, the scares and such are always the same since they’re not randomly generated. This is exactly the sort of game that might profit from having some sort of endless mode.
Conclusion
Creepy Shift: Roadside Diner works well as a standalone title if you’re looking for a short experience with effective scares and not too much gameplay. While we’d like to see the concept expanded on a little more, we still liked the game a decent amount and found the scary visuals very good for the runtime. Hopefully Night Shift Team will work on some longer, more elaborate games for future entries into this series.
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