Games Like Fears to Fathom: Everyday Horror on a Night Shift

The closest relatives are the games of Chilla's Art, a two-person Japanese studio that shares Fears to Fathom's taste for short, everyday nights and grainy VHS filters. The Convenience Store sends a college student to a well-paid night shift at a Japanese convenience store, where the job slowly turns supernatural. The Closing Shift does the same at a coffee shop, as a young woman serving and cleaning after dark grows sure that someone is watching her, and Parasocial follows a streamer in her small apartment who realises one of her viewers knows where she lives. Night Delivery takes you door to door through one apartment block at night with boxes to drop off and the feeling that someone is behind you.

If what you like is the job itself, Kiosk puts you alone in a rain-soaked fast food kiosk, cooking for late-night customers after the last worker vanished, Night Bus has you drive a country bus route through 1999 New Zealand while watching the passengers on CCTV, and ORDER 13 sends you into a dark warehouse to fetch orders with a flashlight while something lurks between the shelves.

[HERROR] Gas Station Case is built in Fears to Fathom's own mould: a 1999 night shift at a remote Ohio gas station, serving customers and answering calls as people vanish in the woods. Photomaly gives you your late father's photo studio and customers who may not be what they seem, and Retail Hell pushes the night-shift idea into the afterlife, at a convenience store between life and death.

For the home-alone fear of Fears to Fathom's first episode, One Halloween Night is a free, 25-minute evening of answering the door to trick-or-treaters until someone comes for more than candy, and Alone. Again. shows a man standing still in the street outside through a grainy camcorder, closer every time you look. Crimson Snow turns the stalker into the story: on Christmas night you are locked in a house with a woman obsessed with you, guiding your girlfriend by phone.

Two more begin with a chore. The Shopping List sends you, new in town, to finish a shopping list before heading home, while the locals are rude, people have gone missing and something seems to be watching, in about an hour. make sure it's closed is a few free minutes of a childhood fear: your parents have left a note, and you have to check the garage door is really shut on a dark night before you go inside.

For something quieter, Akai Onna follows a student who passes a woman in red on his walk home and feels watched ever after, and Tales of Fear: Episode Zero gives you three short, free evenings of horror from ordinary lives, asking after each whether it really happened.

Two free itch.io shorts make the night job the whole story. Cleaning Redville puts you on a small woodland town's garbage truck at night, loading bags while the town's rumours suggest the job is not what it seems, and Egg Fried Rice turns a midnight drive to the takeaway into a tense errand with several endings; each takes about twenty minutes.

Two short jam games keep the idea of an ordinary trip gone wrong. In Out of Time Hotel your car breaks down and you check into a strange hotel obsessed with time, for ten to fifteen minutes. Closing Doors is a free, four-minute browser game in an elevator that keeps stopping on floors that are not yours, where all you can do is close the doors on whatever waits outside.

If you only try one, play The Convenience Store for the closest mix of an ordinary job and a night going wrong, or One Halloween Night if you want something free and short.

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