Happy Spooky Month! Just like with every October, I will be reviewing and discussing horror games all month long to help get everyone in the holiday spirit. If you’re familiar with this blog you know I love a good horror game so it’s always a good excuse to talk about some. And this Spooky Month I wanted to start off by talking about the Indonesian horror game DreadOut! A series I wouldn’t be surprised most people forgot existed.

DreadOut comes to us from Digital Happiness, a small Indonesian developer that is really only known for the DreadOut series. The original game was released back in 2014 for PC only originally, and was coming out right around when indie horror, and survival horror in general, were starting to make a comeback. I’ve talked in the past about how the PS3/360 era was truly the darkest time for horror games, and not in a spooky sense. Big series like Resident Evil and Silent Hill both almost ended that generation, and new comers like Dead Space and FEAR died out before the generation was finished. Indie horror games like Amnesia and Outlast managed to bring the genre back thankfully and that is around when DreadOut was crowdfunded and released!

Being made on the relatively small budget of around $25,000, DreadOut was funded on the promise of being a survival horror game with some Indonesian flare! Which is admittedly a great selling point. One of the coolest things about horror in general is how it can vary between cultures and the times. And there hadn’t been much done with Indonesia horror at this point or since from what I can tell.

I certainly remember there being some buzz about the game when it first launched but not much beyond that. It didn’t help I wasn’t much of a PC gamer at the time and it was originally only released there but even then it didn’t seem to get too much coverage online from Lets Players on YouTube and the like. As such, I kind of assumed that was it for DreadOut. An interesting little Indonesian horror game. So I’m sure you can imagine my surprise when I found out that this game actually managed to spawn an entire series that is still going to this day!

When looking into it while wanting to play the game for Spooky Month, I was shocked to find that DreadOut not only had a sequel but it also has multiple spin offs, a movie, and a third game currently in development! Generally when a horror series has this much going on I at least catch wind of it but not this time. A whole franchise came from this game and I didn’t realize it at all. This made me all the more curious about checking the game out and thankfully a remastered collection of the first game and its DLC expansion came out just last year in 2025. Making it all the easier to experience where this series started from.

So! Having played through the entirety of the first game now, I can safely say that it is surprisingly… Okay, at best.

Not to spoil my feelings completely on DreadOut but I was truly surprised by the amount of problems with the game despite it going on to be a seemingly successful series. While I wasn’t expecting the game to be some sort of masterpiece by any means, I am still struggling to see how the series managed to get a cult following to begin with. But I am getting ahead of myself! Let’s talk more about my experience with the game.

When starting DreadOut in the remastered collection, you are given the option of starting from Act 0, 1, or 2. From what I can tell, Act 0 is the demo that was released to promote the game while it was getting funded way back when and is framed as a dream and tutorial for the full game here. Though I say tutorial very loosely here as the game doesn’t really try to teach you the mechanics organically or anything. The closest thing you’ll get to one is the ‘How to Play’ in the pause menu that literally walks you through everything. This already wasn’t the best first impression won’t lie, but I’ll give it a pass since it at least reminded me of reading the game manuals that use to come with physical copies back in the day. I’ll also give a brief overview of how the game is played.

DreadOut is a primarily third person game where you play as Linda. Like every survival horror your goal is to escape whatever crazy situation you are in, fight off the things chasing you, and solve puzzles. In this game you do this mainly by using Linda’s camera on her smart phone. And before you ask, yes, this does mean there are more than a few parallels between Fatal Frame and DreadOut. But not as many as you might think! DreadOut has you fighting ghosts by taking pictures of them, as well as solving puzzles by taking pictures, but the combat is nowhere as in depth as Fatal Frame. For both better and worse. This is the main game play loop of the game though! Fight ghosts by taking pictures of them and solve puzzles with your camera as well. Though admittedly, I am stretching when I say puzzles here as there aren’t too many.

Getting back to Act 0 though, like the demo that it is, this section really does serve to basically give you a sample of what to expect from DreadOut. In this case that means creepy environments, some spooky ghosts, and barely a puzzle. This Act starts with Linda waking up in a rocking chair in what seems to be a run down shack of some kind. After walking around, she eventually runs into one of her friends after getting a call from them asking for help. This entire Act is understandably very short with it lasting probably only like 15 or 20 minutes. The highlight of this part is easily the final bit where you come across three candles under this massive hanging figure past a graveyard! Sadly, this is also where the first big issue with the game comes into play.

So this is the game’s first real puzzle. You need to do something with the three candles under the figure. One is lit and the other two aren’t. When you take a picture of the one that is lit, the flame vanishes for a second. So I thought maybe taking a picture of the other candles might light them. But nope! Maybe from a different angle with all of them in frame. Also no. Turns out, you’re suppose to run out here, realize you can’t do anything, and then run back to the graveyard to fight some ghosts that have now appeared! After killing the two ghosts, you run back to the candles again, and now you can take a picture of all three of them. This really isn’t much of a puzzle and is going to be something of a theme in this game sadly… After doing this though, Linda wakes up in a car with her friends driving towards a spooky looking town in the distance! And that is when the game starts properly.

From what I understand, this is where the original 2014 release starts from. Linda, her friends, and their teacher were all seemingly on a school trip and took a wrong turn leading to an abandoned town not found on any map. Rather than getting back in the car and leaving, they decide to explore the town after one of the students finds a way over to the town past the broken bridge. This leads to a pretty short exploration bit where you walk through the ghost town until finding your way to a school. Linda and her best friend Ira stay outside while their teacher and the rest of the students explore around inside. And this is obviously where things really get started!

While making their way out as it’s getting dark, they realize one of the students is nowhere to be seen! So everyone, including Linda and Ira this time, head into the school to search for him. The second this happens, Ira is seemingly possessed by something, locking everyone in the school and separating Linda from them. Now the goal is pretty simple, get out of the school while finding your friends!

The school itself is where the entirety of Act 1 takes place, which makes sense. It wouldn’t be a survival horror game if you weren’t trap somewhere and needing to get out. However, unlike most survival horror games you aren’t given a map. Thankfully the school itself is pretty small all things considered but given how similar some of the areas can look I could see it being a problem for some. As you start to explore the first thing you are likely to run into is a big pig roaming the first floor of one side of the school. Despite it not exactly looking like a ghost, this pig still acts as one and can be affected by your camera! Oddly though, it can’t be killed by it and can only be chased away. This encounter is important though as Linda will remake in her journal, which is where your objectives will be written, that the pig has keys tied around its neck and she might be able to cut them off. Key word being ‘cut’ here as you don’t have anything that could do that yet. Which means you need to find something that can! Despite it being so simple and up front, this is the main goal you will be trying to achieve throughout Act 1. Those keys are the keys to the front door. Which is a bit of a let down to have your solution to leaving discovered so quickly but it thankfully isn’t as simple as you’d think.

With a goal in mind, this is when you’re suppose to really start exploring the school. Sadly there really isn’t too much to find. Most rooms will either be empty, have a note of some kind with lore, or an item that gives you some passive buffs. And when I say passive, I mean it! I had to look up what these items did in order to know they were doing anything at all. The lore also isn’t really anything to write home about. I was expecting them to help explain what was going on with the town and school but it really doesn’t. They talk about how the town itself is very weird and has some very specific rules that must be followed but nothing that really explains what happened here. Maybe not knowing much about Indonesian folklore hurt me here and it would be more obvious if I had context but for me everything just sort of flew over my head leaving me with way too many questions about this place. Which also extends to the story itself honestly!

As you keep exploring around you’ll eventually come upstairs and run into another hostile ghost! This ghost is a Sundel Bolong and roams the upper halls and this is where we run into another problem. In Act 0, you were able to beat the ghosts/monsters that attacked you by taking pictures of them. So far in Act 1, this hasn’t worked. The pig will run off and can never actually be killed and the ghost lady upstairs can be killed but only in a specific way. I’m not really one for hand holding in games but some direction here would have been so nice! Mainly because taking pictures of her does appear to damage her. Not only does she scream and recoil at each picture but she eventually vanishes. At first I figured that she just had a lot of health and I need to keep attacking her. And after that didn’t work I figured she had to be invincible like the pig. However, to my surprise, I ended up managing to killer her! As it turned out, she had a weak point on her back that had to be attacked in order to beat her. This isn’t exactly clear… Like, sure, there was a big opening on her back but there wasn’t a point where she seemed to show her back, I just got a lucky shot. And beyond that, she appeared to be taking damage whenever I took a picture of her regularly! There was no note or telegraphed movement that made me think that she needed to be attacked from behind. Even weirder, I’m not actually sure I needed to defeat her. Unlike the pig, she didn’t drop an item or anything, she was just an obstacle to get around. So I really don’t know if you actually need to defeat her to progress or if it’s just something you can do to make roaming around easier.

Getting past her will lead you over to an office area. An area that instantly stands out due to the creepy music that plays inside. Beyond a note and a locked closet, there isn’t much to find here. But don’t go too far as one of the game’s few puzzles needs to be solved here! There is a destroyed part of the second floor that lets you look out into the main area of the school. While your camera is up, you can see some weird markings on the pillars and ceiling. Lining them up just right and snapping a picture will give you a disturbing sight! An old photo of something tragic happening at the school. And while that is spooky, the important bit of information that comes from this is that there is a key in the class room this tragedy took place. And using the context clues from the photo, you can figure out which one. Overall not a bad puzzle but it can be very easy to miss. While you have been taught to use the camera for puzzles, it can still be hard to catch on to what you are seeing on these pillars is a puzzle due to some glitches where certain things look brighter when viewed by the camera than others. For awhile, I thought the pillars and ceiling looking different was yet another glitch! One benefit to having the school be so small though is that I did quickly run out of places to check and found my way back to this. But not before getting frustrated by how annoying this was to find…

Okay! So, now that the key has been found in that classroom it’s time to use it on that locked closet. There isn’t much to tell you that this is where the key goes, beyond it being one of the only locked things in the school, but the key is shaped like a cat and a cat is hanging out outside the office with the closet, so…

Regardless, the closet actually leads to a secret room! One with plenty of scissors and a baby doll in a crib. Heading over to said crib will cause the baby to cry and summon a scissor ghost for a boss fight! Surprisingly, despite the last two ghosts we’ve run into either being unkillable or having a gimmick, this scissor ghost is not either of those. You can only see them with the camera but beyond that all you have to do is snap pictures of them and not get hit. Do this enough and the ghost will be beaten and drop the scissors! I’m honestly not sure if I should even call this thing a boss fight but the game does lock you in a room with it until you beat it and it’s given a whole cut scene so I don’t think it’s right to call it a basic ghost. Either way, with the scissors in hand you can now get those keys from the pig!

For me, the pig was actually sleeping at this point so rather than needing to trap it or something I just wandered over and got the keys. Simple enough! But getting back to the front doors of the school would be anything but simple.

On the way back we encounter an all new ghost! A massive ghost in fact that traps us in a seemingly endless hallway of unusable doors. I’m not sure if I’d call this a boss fight either since it’s more of a puzzle but it was at least a neat sequence! Basically, you have to use your phone to find an invisible door and use that to escape. And surprisingly you only have to do this once and you’re free. I was honestly expecting a bit more from this but nope! You’re finally back at the front doors, but of course you can’t leave yet.

Blocking the exit is a ghost we’ve seen before in Linda’s dreams. A woman in a red dress. Using your camera isn’t going to cut it here though and what you’re suppose to do is just try and reach the exit. Each time you get close those the woman will teleport you away and make it a challenge to get back. The first time she does this locus, or some kind of bug, will be flying around Linda’s head and covering parts of the view. And of course the woman in red is still making her way toward you. It’s not too tough though. However the next part certainly cranks up the difficulty…

After reaching the door with the bugs on you, you are teleported again but this time there is a rat running around on Linda. This reverses your controls. So pressing forward runs you backwards, and left moves you right and so on. This is way more jarring to deal with! Especially since the woman is still chasing you too. Also, again, no map. So I hope you know your way around while also struggling with the controls, and the woman chasing you! I sadly found this more frustrating than scary in the end. This felt more like something from a party game or something rather than a horror game. But I won’t deny that it is unique!

Finally, after reaching the door this time, you are able to escape! Exiting the school as a spooky face is shown above the doorway, letting you know that Linda may not have truly escaped… Which makes sense given we have zero idea what actually was going on and we still haven’t even seen our friends yet.

I was pretty shocked to find out that when the game originally released this was the end. Act 1 was the entire game. Insane given it was barely like 2 or 3 hours long. However, a year after release, Act 2 was added in a free update. And this really shook things up.

Act 2 starts with Linda making it out of the school seemingly but still being in town, trapped to deal with ghosts. Specifically, she has to deal with these little creatures running around jumping at her. You can attempt to fight them off but the fight only ends when they grab Linda’s bag and phone before running off, leaving you defenseless. This quickly becomes a problem when one of Linda’s classmates, Doni, shows up and is clearly possessed, attacking Linda and causing a chase sequence.

I already am not a big fan of chase scenes in horror games. They are rarely done right and lose their scare factor the moment you get caught for the first time. Something that is a major problem since most chase sequences are trial and error based and this one is no different. The moment you take one wrong turn Doni will corner you and there is no way to get around him leading to you starting the chase over. Thankfully the sequence isn’t all that long, but something I haven’t mentioned yet is how DreadOut treats getting a game over like this.

When you die, Linda is sent to Limbo. A big blank void with some candles and a glowing light you must walk to in order to get back to the game. This isn’t bad on paper until you realize that glowing light gets further and further away each time you die. And if you die enough it can take around a minute or so to reach it! Maybe longer too but thankfully I didn’t get a chance to test that. It truly baffles me why they included this. I suppose it acts as a penalty to dying but I feel the loss of progress is penalty enough so I really don’t know…

Back to the game, once you escape Doni the first time you aren’t out of the woods yet. He quickly catches up to you and knocks you into a house falling apart. So much so that Linda falls through the floor and starts this sequence by crawling away. This shows a big difference between Act 1 and 2. Act 2 seems to be going for a more ‘cinematic’ angle. Something Act 1 was very much lacking the moment you got to the school. Act 2 has so many more cut scenes and not only that, you have to actually interact in them. Not through quick time events or anything but through more scripted means. Case in point, after falling through the floor you control Linda crawling under the floor by pressing forward. There doesn’t seem to be any kind of timing involved in this to make sure Doni doesn’t catch you, the scene seems to be entirely scripted. This however is very much not the only time this will happen though! This is actually the least annoying this mechanic is.

After getting chased by Doni some more, he is eventually killed but not by us! Not long after that, we finally get a camera too. And like an actual camera! So far, Linda has been using the camera feature on her phone, but for this section we get an actual flash camera. This does work differently from our phone camera! Rather than having a flashlight the best this camera can do is use its flash feature to light up the area briefly. This is actually a cool idea! It’s very tense in fact. To light up your area now you have to flash it which might reveal something spooky you couldn’t see before! Sadly, this never actually happens since you get your phone back literally right after learning how to use the camera…

Not long after this we get to one of only two puzzles sections of Act 2. This one taking place in a peaceful garden area complete with beautiful women relaxing, giggling, and playing music. Not to mention the giant floating woman overlooking all of this. Not sure if this also ties into Indonesian folklore in someway but it was a nice change of pace! For this section you need to light three candles, similar to Act 0. So similar in fact that once you do complete these simple puzzles, the area turns into that part from Act 0! Complete with the hanging figure. This time though, you have to fight it!

Overall, this boss fight is pretty straight forward. Take pictures of the big once hanging figure who is now on the ground trying to grab you, and defeat the enemies it summons after you land enough hits. I’d say this is the best boss fight in the game if it wasn’t for the last bit! At the end of the fight, the figure will grab Linda and pull her in close, right up to its glowing eye that has been its weak point. Now, keeping in mind that there are now cut scenes where we need to press buttons, what would you do? If your answer was to try and take a picture of it, you are wrong!

Despite everything that we were taught before, if you press anything, and I truly mean anything, on your controller the figure crushes Linda in its hand and you have to do this brief cut scene bit over again. What you are actually meant to do here is nothing. If you don’t press a button, the figure dies and you win. This is just cheap… Not only does it go against what the game taught us before, it even tricks you by having Linda hold her camera up to her face, pointing at the glowing eye, like she’s ready to take a picture! Why would they think players would assume they needed to press nothing? Maybe I missed something but to me this feels like just a ‘gotcha’ moment to get a kill on the player for some reason. Truly bad design.

Anyway… After this section we actually run into another classmate, Shelly, and our teacher. Said teacher is hurt and needs to rest, telling Linda that Ira did this to her. Thinking Ira would never attack Linda, even if she is possessed, Linda goes off to find her. And she does just that! Pretty quickly too. After following her to a secluded room, Linda takes a seat with the possessed girl for a chat. And for the only time in the whole game, we have dialog options here. These don’t end up mattering all that much though, you get some info out of Ira, or rather the being possessing her, which does finally give some context to what is happening which is nice, but regardless of what you do Ira remains possessed. You do however get a key to a mansion which will be the last section of the game.

If you decide to check up on Shelly and your teacher though, you’ll find Shelly is dead and your teacher is nowhere to be seen. After mourning for her in a brief cut scene, you are off to said mansion to finally put an end to all this.

Like I said, the mansion is the last bit of DreadOut. And sadly it comes with its own annoyances. The main gimmick of the mansion is mirrors, something you are introduced to very quickly. The ghost that haunts you in this section is invisible and not even your cameras can see her. Instead, you need to use mirrors to see her. This is explained by having you get attacked out of nowhere in the first hallway of the mansion. For a teaching section though, this is pretty punishing. You are likely to die when this happens the first time as the ghost will constantly attack you and you need to run over to one of the mirrors in the hallway. Even after taking a picture of the ghost, she’ll be right back on you as you try to get to another mirror, as the mirrors break whenever you use them. Perhaps this was just a glitch for me, but I lost my ability to run briefly while doing this bit making it almost impossible to reach the last mirror without dying…

After running out of mirrors and shaking off the ghost, you find yourself in a big ballroom. There are only two doors you can interact with here. One on the first floor that’s locked and other on the second that starts a boss fight when you try to touch it. The fight is with the same invisible ghost as before but this time you have no mirrors. Instead, you need to figure out how it is moving based on all the things it is shoving around in the ballroom. And honestly, a cool concept for fighting an invisible boss! I don’t think it’s a particularly fun fight but at least it was more creative and the mechanics all made sense, so no notes!

After that, you return to the door upstairs you tried to open before. This leads to the game’s last puzzle, a mirror puzzle. It just boils down to spotting the different between what you can see in the mirrors, moving on.

Finishing this gives you the key you need to access that locked door downstairs which starts one final fight with the invisible ghost. How this fight works is that there is a wall length mirror and you need to see where the ghost is coming from so you can attack them! However, very important to note, you cannot attack them via taking pictures of them in the mirror, you know, like you did the first time you ran into them. Instead, you need to use the mirror to see where she is, turn to face her, and hope to snap a picture before she gets you. This fight is fine, I guess. It goes on way too long for my liking but it’s hard to be upset with it. I just find it annoying that they change the mechanics, again.

Finally, after all, that we are at the final section of the game!

After getting into what I can only assume is the red ghost lady’s room, she appears in a mirror before Linda is pulled into said mirror by her own reflection. This drops Linda right outside the school. You are given a choice here, leave and run away or go back into the school for one final fight and the true ending. I of course went back into the school to get the true ending.

There really isn’t much to say about this final boss fight. It has multiple phases, all of which can be annoying but nothing you haven’t seen before. The one unique thing is the final phase though where you need to navigate an invisible maze by looking through your camera. A section I probably would have really enjoyed if it didn’t take ages to raise and lower your camera.

After reaching the end of the maze, you are truly done. You get a brief cut scene showing Linda’s teacher leaving with a snake baby, seemingly possessed by something, and Linda getting a call from Ira sometime later explaining how it is their job now to be Keepers of the Dark, teasing a future game.

I am going to be completely blunt here, I do not understand the appeal of DreadOut. While I don’t feel the game is truly awful or anything close to that, it is very okay and nothing too special, it is still so surprising to me that this became a franchise and one that is still going to this day! Which means that there must at least be a few die hard DreadOut fans out there, right? And honestly, I would love to hear what they like about the series. Not even trying to be mean! I am genuinely curious what got people to keep coming back. Maybe it is something in the sequels.

While I am not going to be checking it out any time soon, I do plan on playing DreadOut 2 at some point now. I recently did a review of the game Mortal Shell 2 and in that review I talked about how much I love to see developers actually learn from and take feedback into consideration. My hope is that is what happened with DreadOut 2 as well. But that will be a story for another day!

For now, let me end off with some thoughts on DreadOut. It is a mess, one that is trying hard, but a mess. I sadly can’t really recommend it either. Maybe if you are honestly curious about the game and you can find it on sale, but not beyond that. A little of an odd way to start this Spooky Month but I promise there will still be some great games to recommend playing this month! So stay tuned for those.

But those are just my thoughts! What are some of yours? Are you at all interested in DreadOut? Are you looking forward to Spooky Month this year? I’d love to hear your thoughts so don’t be shy!

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