Psychological horror Chilla's Art Short horror PS1 horror

[Chilla's Art] The Caregiver | 終焉介護

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Care for an old man in a dark old house, one shift at a time.

Platforms: PC
Stores: Steam, itch.io
Price: Paid
Rated: Very Positive on Steam (81% of 464 reviews); Rice Digital found it a good starting point for the studio's games
Length: about an hour
Players: 1
Made by: Chilla's Art
Released: 2021

What frightens As a home caregiver, you visit an old man's dark traditional house shift after shift, and something there, drawn from Japanese folk belief, makes each visit more frightening.

The Caregiver (終焉介護) is a short first-person Japanese horror game by Chilla's Art. You play a caregiver who walks across town to look after an elderly man in his old wooden house, where something from Japanese folk belief waits in the dark.

About [Chilla's Art] The Caregiver | 終焉介護

The Caregiver (終焉介護) is a horror game by Chilla's Art, the Japanese studio behind The Convenience Store and The Closing Shift, released on Steam in April 2021. The makers call it a psychological Japanese horror adventure about a caregiver.

You play a home-care worker. Each shift starts with a walk through the town to the client's house, an old wooden home with shoji screens, narrow corridors and rooms full of clutter, where an elderly man, Souichi, sits in his wheelchair by the window. The work is ordinary; the house is not. Rice Digital's review describes a frightening presence upstairs and a story that draws on traditional Japanese folklore and religion.

Its look is a little different from most of the studio's games: the VHS filter is lighter, so it reads more like an old standard-definition game on a CRT television. It autosaves as you go.

Rice Digital called it a good balance between the studio's story games and its more survival-minded ones, and a good first Chilla's Art game. Players praise the house and the sound and find the walks between shifts the weakest part. The studio's itch.io page gives an average session of about an hour.

How to play [Chilla's Art] The Caregiver | 終焉介護

Buy it on Steam or the studio's itch.io page and start it on Windows.
Walk through the town to the client's house at the start of each shift.
Do the caregiving tasks you are given and explore the house in first person.
Keep going through the shifts until the story ends; the game autosaves.

Screenshots

An old man in a wheelchair faces a window in a dim room as the caregiver calls his name, Souichi

A narrow wooden corridor of the old house lined with paper screens and glass doors

A Japanese street at dusk with apartment blocks, a streetlight and a cafe sign on the pavement

A dark corridor in the house cluttered with a sofa and boxes, a lit window at the far end

Tips

If you take a wrong turn on the walk, the game tells you; follow the streets back.
Play with headphones; reviewers single out the house's sound.
Short sessions suit it: the studio puts a session at about an hour.