Don’t Fret is a horror game that strikes all the right chords for spooky season

Spooky season approaches. I know it’s only August, but the UK just saw its first proper rain in months, and my sofa has the Halloween cushions on it, so I’m calling it spooky season. Anyway, with darker nights and falling leaves on the horizon, there’s no better time to get into some horror games, and Don’t Fret might have taken an early lead for my top spot in 2026.

I have to be honest, going into Don’t Fret, I was expecting more goofy-style horror than “oh god, where is the pumpkin-colored cushion?” type horror. I mean, having a sentient guitar as the central protagonist does lend itself to more comedic scares than serious ones at first glance. But Don’t Fret completely destroyed my preconceived expectations in all the best ways.

Thrown in at the deep end

The darker nature of Don’t Fret is immediately obvious in the demo, when you’re confronted with a presumably abusive father(?), a mother who changed the locks to keep him out, and a damn gun entering the mix. Fret, in human form, grabs his guitar and hat before hiding in the closet, only to wake up trapped inside the guitar and lost in a school that would definitely benefit from an emergency OFSTED inspection. 

As soon as he gets there, Fret starts getting instructions from an unknown girl on the other end of a walkie-talkie. Rather than asking any questions about the situation or who the hell this girl is, Fret just gets on with things and does as he’s told. Honestly, you have to respect the bravery that takes. I think I’d be hiding in the first locker that happened to open. 

And the thing is, it doesn’t get any better or less bizarre from that point onward. Suddenly, Fret is just a guitar in a music school, solving puzzles and trying to figure out what’s going on with no real help from anybody. The whole place is dark and oddly moist, as many horror settings tend to be, and every corner could be hiding something that wants to kill him. 

Questions that don’t need answering

Despite there being a long list of perfectly valid and understandable questions, it’s easy to get lost in the setting of Harmonic Heights, the school where Don’t Fret takes place. Everywhere you look, there’s something that will add more questions to your list, but they quickly become unimportant compared to the ones that come after.

Why have they blocked the corridors with flipped-over lockers? What is that strange bundle of unidentified things on the wall? Why are there boxes full of violins in random places? Of course, mechanically, all of these questions have very clear answers. Thematically, though? You’re given no clue as to what happened to create this carnage throughout the school, and you’re left to fend for yourself against enemies who are far more terrifying than they have any right to be.

At least I scream in key

As I said, I went into Don’t Fret with expectations of weirdness, but not necessarily true horror. However, that thought quickly evaporated when I met the first enemy of the game. After solving some puzzles and finding a key to unlock a door, the weird bundle of unidentified stuff on the wall suddenly… burst open. What came out made my skin crawl, and I’m still not sure whether I mean that in a good or bad sense.

This thing had two too many arms, a bandaged head, and the type of movement that’s straight out of a classic zombie game. And I’m talking fast zombies that react to you, rather than the brain dead zombies who amble along like they’re going for a stroll through the countryside without a care in the world. When I tell you I screamed a true, guttural scream when this thing ran at me, I am not exaggerating.

That was the point at which things stopped being just plain weird and started to feel truly scary. Running for my life because I had no weapon aside from throwable violins that may or may not even do damage had my heart in my throat, all while this zombie thing snarled and panted behind me. Suddenly, I found myself checking around every corner just in case, spinning around at the slightest sound behind me, and hesitating where I would have previously run towards danger headfirst. 

Help arrives at last… Sort of

Thankfully, surviving this encounter did unlock the Guitar Tuner, which is an all-in-one tool to help you survive whatever twisted hellscape this school is turning out to be. It has a torch, a danger meter, and can even explode on demand if you figure out the timing properly. Sadly, as you might expect, things are never simple in horror games like this… Of course, you now need to stock up on batteries. 

I should have seen that coming, but I did not.

I have to admit, the danger meter came in pretty handy soon after I found the Guitar Tuner. In what can only be described as an age-old trope done perfectly, there are some bathrooms to explore. I don’t think I have to tell anyone how terrifying it is to open toilet stall doors while knowing that one or more of them probably hides a jump scare just waiting to happen.

Spoiler alert: it happened, and I yelled at the game to “stop it” before running away, belatedly realizing that the danger meter had been notching up the entire time and the whole thing could have been avoided if I’d been paying attention.

Still, I learned a valuable lesson, and henceforth one eye will be on the meter at all times. 

According to the Steam page, the game is filled with musical puzzles to solve and memories to unlock that will help uncover the true story of what happened in Harmonic Heights. I obviously haven’t got that far yet, but the puzzles I have solved and everything I’ve seen so far are enough for me to know this is one to watch. 

Don’t Fret is filled with terror around every corner, with a surprisingly dark story beneath all of its musical weirdness. There are still far more questions than answers, but there’s already a whole lot to love. It’s the perfect horror game as we roll into the Fall. The full game doesn’t have a release date just yet, but you can play the demo right now on Steam.