Flick is a psychological horror game that proves true horror doesn't always hide in the dark

I need to let you in on a little secret. While I love all things horror-related, I am also a complete wuss when it comes to the aftermath. I can watch the movie or play the game just fine, but then I spend days afterwards feeling jumpy, checking over my shoulder, and being freaked out by the thought of something being at the bottom of the stairs when such a thing is logically impossible. So when I first saw Flick, I knew playing it was the best and worst thing I could do. 

Flick is a psychological horror game by Inqdrop Studios that makes the light your only protection while simultaneously training you to fear what happens when you press the switch. The horror doesn’t just lurk in the shadows where you expect it to be. It comes out into the light in a way that makes you question whether what you think just happened actually happened at all. The darkness ends up becoming more of a security blanket than the light, because it's easier to ignore things you cannot see. 

Note: Everything included in this article is true to the playtest build of Flick. 

The light should not be scary

The main mechanic in Flick plays on our fear of the dark and flips it on its head by making the environment shift in impossible ways whenever you flip the light switch. Entire rooms become something new and far scarier, items appear that weren't there before, and the story woven through the game plays out in glimpses of things that shouldn't be possible. 

Writing appears on walls that were blank moments earlier. Hideously creepy paintings suddenly turn to face you, while shadows appear where the available light sources shouldn't allow them to exist. Flick does psychological horror in a spectacular way because you begin to question your own memory. You can turn back to seemingly the same scene, only for something to have miraculously appeared, making you wonder whether it was there all along. 

I've never been very good at being in dark spaces, but Flick made me grateful for the things I couldn't see. The darkness became a sign of safety, at least compared to what I might see when I turned on the lights. Now, three hours after I finished the playtest, I still find my head turning at the slightest shadow. It doesn't help that I have a black cat wandering silently around the house. I'm beginning to think he may be enjoying making me jump. 

Puzzles under duress 

I'm not going to lie, I'm usually pretty calm and composed under pressure, but something about the darkness vs. light mechanic combined with puzzle solving in Flick had me completely floundering in a way I didn't expect. Instead of thinking logically, I ended up standing in front of the light switch and frantically flipping it up and down, apparently in the hope that something would happen without my input.

The puzzle required me to find a triangle and a circle to place on two toy cars. Then, I had to position a light bulb so their shadows fell in a specific way on the wall. I knew what I had to do, I knew what I was looking for, and I knew how the puzzle worked. My powers of observation are what failed here, along with the persistent suspicion that something was probably creeping through the shadows towards me every time the lights were off. 

Fear is a strange and powerful emotion that makes us act in ways that we usually wouldn't. For me, it apparently makes me terrible at observing my surroundings, which is bad news if I ever find myself in the middle of a real-life horror story. Fingers crossed that never happens, but if it does, you’ll all know what went wrong. 

A fractured story

As you flip the switch, you gradually uncover fragments of a horrifying story that are scrambled and hard to connect, but that doesn’t make the building plot any less terrifying.  With satanic drawings on a child's bedroom wall and graffiti saying “mummy loves you”, it's easy to get a sense of the kind of tale Flick is trying to tell, though less easy to piece things together in a way that makes sense.  

You have to sift through every shifting room to unravel a tangled web of history and fear while solving puzzles using objects you find in the environment. It doesn’t help that the art in Flick is perhaps too realistic, not in a way that makes it bad, but in a way that sucks you in entirely. 

I played during the day, and I'm glad I did, because I can only imagine how much more anxious I'd feel if my only light source came from within the game itself. I don't think I'll ever have the guts to play Flick in the dark, but I'm looking forward to spending more time in this beautiful and horrifying world when the full game is released. 

Flick is set to release on November 19, 2025, and I know what I plan on playing that day. There isn't a demo yet, but with Next Fest around the corner, one may possibly arrive before release day! You can head over to Steam and wishlist the game right now, and you definitely should if you're a fan of horror.