Spooky season is the perfect excuse to pick up some games or demos that will leave you screaming. It’s almost a prerequisite of October to track down some worthy horror games that leave you on edge, and there are plenty out there. One I’ve written about before is Shift at Midnight, which has now come to Steam with a multiplayer demo. 

The last time I played Shift at Midnight by Ben Muen, it was a single-player experience downloaded through Itch.io, and it was absolutely terrifying. Now, with the multiplayer version of the demo available through Steam, you can drag some friends along to sniff out the doppelgangers and hide in the vents alongside you. 

Somehow more creepy with friends

I have to admit, heading into the multiplayer demo of Shift at Midnight, I wasn’t expecting to find myself quite as freaked out as I was the first time around, but I was quickly proven wrong. Everything I loved about the original demo is still present, and despite having been through it before, I began to feel incredibly on edge as the background screams and corner-of-your-eye shadows started to creep in. 

The whole experience is somehow both more creepy and less with friends. I know, that’s a contradiction, but having friends around provides some measure of reassurance because you’re not alone, but also provides more sources of noise that you didn’t make. 

I jumped out of my skin at times when my Fiancé shot someone or slammed a door. Playing solo means you know exactly what noises you’re making; having someone else make noise too means you have to question whether they did that or if it’s something you should be worried about. 

On the plus side, having someone else around does mean that things get a little bit funnier, even at the scariest moments.

Updated gameplay

The version that I played through Itch.io was undeniably fantastic, but the Steam version still manages to be a huge improvement on what I previously experienced. The changes aren’t massive, and they definitely don’t stand out as entirely obvious, but they are meaningful and welcome. 

For instance, there’s a shop tab on the computer where you can purchase additional stock for the store or items to defend yourself from the horrifying entity whenever it happens to approach. There’s also a new ‘emotion detector’ item that gets added on around day three, which lets you test the emotions of the customers to see if they’re human or not. 

At one point, a customer was experiencing the emotion of “craving human flesh”. It’s safe to say that I reached for the gun at that point. 

Slenderman has entered the building

Okay, so it’s not actually a cameo appearance from Slenderman, but at one point in the demo there was a very creepy and very surprising appearance from an impossibly tall and bizarrely placid (to a point) entity. I won’t go into too much detail surrounding how he appears to avoid spoilers for anyone hoping to play, but I will admit that I was so surprised by his appearance that I let out a very real scream that left my throat sore. 

The entities in Shift at Midnight are incredibly creepy, despite the old-school, low poly art style of the game. There’s something deeply unsettling about their sudden appearances, coupled with the warning that they’re approaching, that has me panicking and running to the nearest vent every single time. 

The main entity in the demo is the same as the one I encountered before, and it’s still so spider-like that it makes my skin crawl just thinking about it, but now there’s an added level of horror: it can hear you. The game picks up your microphone, alerting the creature to your presence and sending it scuttling towards you. If you’re like me and laugh in inappropriate situations out of anxiety, that’s a disaster. 

Thankfully, with my fiancé there as moral support, I did eventually manage to drag myself out of the vent in which I was hiding to face the entity. We even managed to send it fleeing the store after shooting it a few dozen times, screaming all the way. When it left, we fled to the bus without cleaning up the entrails and finished the demo. 

The multiplayer demo of Shift at Midnight is available through Steam right now, and if you’ve got some friends that you can trust not to scream during that final encounter with the entity boss, I highly recommend dragging them along for the ride.