The Hollow Shift sees players uncovering unsettling secrets after they try to work a night job for some extra cash.
It’s the 1980s in the Philippines and you’re staying with your grandfather for a little while. While you’re here, you decide to pick up a few shifts at a store in this rural town, serving the handful of people who live nearby. May as well make some money while you’re here, right? And the work isn’t terrible. Once you’re at the shop, you just need to grab the items that people ask for and hand them over. Since there’s so few people in town, you’ll figure out what folks typically want quickly as they make repeat visits.
Things turn strange once you finish your first shift. Your head starts to swim as disturbing notes hint appear around the shop, hinting at something terrible. You run into a strange customer that no one else can see. And when you start to walk home from your shift, shaken by what you’ve seen, you start receiving more cryptic notes. You have to find some things amongst the rickety houses nearby. Something is crying out in the night, but hey, why let that interrupt a perfectly good quest for some creepy dolls? What follows comes together fast and in unsettling fashion, revealing a gruesome series of past events that are still causing horrors now.
The Hollow Shift is brief and punchy, but is still willing to let you stew in its atmosphere as you try to figure out its puzzles and run from its disturbing, surprising monstrosities. Its varied in its gameplay enough to keep switching up how you engage with it, but excels at keeping you on edge as you creep towards the same awful discoveries that many other people have made before you. But at least you won’t have to work another night shift ever again, I guess.
The Hollow Shift is available now on itch.io.
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