Befitting their steady of indie video games, Cypriot writer Essential Reflex had a small however very atmospheric sales space at Tokyo Sport Present 2026. Packed into a number of sq. meters of techno-horror equipment have been 19 (!) video games largely within the horror journey wheelhouse, save for TANUKI: Pon’s Summer time, a put up office-sim a few chubby tanuki on a motorcycle. Funnily sufficient, a fluffy Pon mascot was typically outdoors Essential Reflex’s sales space, ushering gamers into their many different scary worlds.
Of be aware to me have been developer Forest Reges’ SATED, a first-person roguelite with PSX-era graphics the place you have to cook dinner nightmarish dishes for even worse shoppers; Monumental Collab’s survival-horror fishing sport Drowned Lake was like a first-person Dave the Diver meets Silent Hill; and Militsioner, a first-person immersive sim by developer TALLBOYS, the place you’re falsely accused and operating from the regulation—specifically, an enormous policeman who can scoop you up like a doll. Suffice it to say, Essential Reflex is working with some very gifted creators and making loads of (largely creepy) stuff I need to play, even when it’s outdoors of RPGFan’s standard protection.
Essential Reflex Sales space at TGS 2026
Inside our protection, nevertheless, is the eerily stunning Flawless Abbey. I had an prolonged demo with the sport whereas chatting with a member of Essential Reflex’s workforce. Revealed in 2023, Flawless Abbey has been underneath steady growth because the debut title for its small indie workforce, Mattress Head Video games. The titular Abbey isn’t a spot, however quite an individual: a fellow dreamseeker, just like the participant, whose job is to enter folks’s goals through H.R. Gigeresque machines.
For the primary jiffy, I used to be a dreamseeker troubleshooting a dream machine, navigating a really bureaucratic sci-fi advanced not dissimilar from Essential Reflex’s sales space. Once I lastly obtained the machine operating, it was like a sport inside the sport. This body narrative added to the sense of surrealism Flawless Abbey does so effectively. In moments, I used to be whisked away onto a prepare flying by the sky in direction of a distant, Babel-like tower.
The sport is beautiful—with a pop-up ebook aesthetic and painterly dreamscapes that loosely echo actuality. The setting and its logic actually seize the half-remembered liminality of goals.
There’s a serving to of Myst within the wealthy ambiance and puzzle-solving, and most of the puzzles have a tactile high quality much like Amerzone. Like a puzzle field, gadgets on the earth have to be turned, flipped, and toyed with to progress, which additionally progresses the protagonist’s enigmatic previous: you’re a dreamseeker with little reminiscence of your previous, led up the dream-tower by a coy architect of goals I might solely assume was Abbey. Abbey appears as eager to halt your progress as she is to assist it, like a dungeon grasp of kinds.
The creepier elements of the demo jogged my memory of amusement park darkish rides (suppose the terrifying Snow White experience at Disneyland), plus some clear inspiration from Amnesia: The Darkish Descent. Mirroring a scene from that sport, there was a second in Flawless Abbey the place I needed to run from one lantern to the following, flicking on their short-term mild and staving off an unseen however definitely not unheard beast gaining on me. The sound design is very wealthy on this sport, equal elements unnerving and dazzling.
I stepped by so many seamless moments that, upon reflection, made little sense in sequence, simply as dream logic falls aside the following morning. One second, I used to be in a theatre, the following, an observatory. A grand entrance corridor, a damaged elevator, an workplace, a domed constructing resembling the Pantheon in Rome—I used to be enraptured throughout my time with the sport, and I look ahead to the total dream.
Flawless Abbey has no set launch date past a 2027 goal for PC, although the demo I performed had each mouse and gamepad controls, so I’ll maintain my fingers crossed for console releases. Within the meantime, the Halloween season is likely to be the proper time for me to dip into a few of Essential Reflex’s different titles.
