True Nightmare - Diner Loop turned me into the world’s worst detective

I am historically terrible at anomaly games. You know the ones; you walk through an enclosed space repeatedly, and little things change around you. If something changes, you turn back, and if everything is fine, you keep going. The problem is, I have the memory capacity of a goldfish and, presumably, the same level of attention to detail. 

So when I first saw True Nightmare - Diner Loop, I knew that I was probably not the intended target audience for the game. However, I am apparently a glutton for punishment because while I am terrible at anomaly games and usually find myself stuck in an endless loop of failure, I kind of love them all the same. Therefore, despite knowing it would end terribly for me, of course I was going to give this one a try, and I’m glad I did.

From developer Frost Fox Studios, Diner Loop is not the first in the True Nightmare series. The developer’s first anomaly game, Roadside Cafe, is also available on Steam.

Was that pizza always there?

As we’ve already established, I am bad at these games, but I continue to torture myself with them anyway because I am apparently an anomaly masochist. It’s weird, because I am really good at spot the difference, but as soon as you take that baseline image away from me, it’s like I forget what I only just saw in favor of what’s now directly in front of me. The new image becomes the baseline, even if things are out of place. 

So my first few runs of Diner Loop were spent trying desperately to establish what the hell the baseline actually was, rather than what my brain decided it was in the moment. I tried really hard to spot things that were out of place, while simultaneously apparently glossing over changes so obvious that my mind simply accepted them as normal, despite the fact that they clearly were not. 

Still, through lots of trial and error (and more than a little frustration), I did eventually get the counter up to three. I was mid-celebration when the entire screen went black, and I was thrown into an entirely new anomaly that I didn’t even register as an anomaly, so when I could eventually walk through the door, my counter reset. 

Teamwork and… sharks?

With my attention span rivaling that of a cocker spaniel in a field full of balls, I decided to enlist my fiancé to help me get through the loop. Together, we started making detailed lists of everything from the positioning of the blinds to the number of bottles of wine on the shelves, hoping that they were, in fact, things that could become anomalies rather than just decorative features. 

Still, we did manage to get back up to three successful laps of the diner before we encountered something entirely new: a shark. Yes, you read that right. For some reason that I cannot even begin to fathom, Diner Loop occasionally descends into absolute madness with special levels that you need to run through regardless of whether there are anomalies or not. That’s handy, because the anomaly in this situation is so obvious that even I can’t fail to notice it. 

Because it’s a shark. 

And boy, let me tell you that there is nothing more terrifying than running through a diner where a shark is apparently trapped and eating the people inside. There are safe-ish routes you can take to avoid being in the water with the shark, but they’re only useful until they collapse beneath your feet and throw you into the water below like a soggy appetizer, leaving you to run for your life.

Horror in the loop

At its core, Diner Loop is a horror game, and there are some jump scares that made me scream. However, the majority of the horror you’ll face in the game is more subtle and based on the “what if” rather than what’s actually happening. It’s fear of the unknown, of what’s coming next, that keeps you on the edge of your seat. 

Although having said that, those jump scares really do hit at the perfect moments. The game manages, despite being a horror, to lure you into complacency and then slaps you with a moment that will have your heart rate temporarily sky-high. The shark is one of those moments, but another occurs later when you’re walking through an apparently normal diner only to turn around and find the waitress far too close for comfort. 

The fact that her head spins around in frankly unnatural ways certainly helps sell the horror. 

True Nightmare - Diner Loop is set to release at some point before the end of 2026, though there is no set release date just yet. The demo is available and will keep you stuck in the loop for a long time, though, so I’d recommend giving it a try if you’re into anomaly-seeking games.