Gray Dawn

About Gray Dawn

Gray Dawn opens on Christmas Eve in 1920, in a remote English village. An exorcism has gone wrong, the altar boy jumped from a window, and no body was ever found. You play Father Abraham, the priest the village suspects, and your goal is to find the boy before the guillotine finds you.

You play in first person. You walk the priest's home and church, pick up and look at objects, read what you find and solve puzzles to move the story on. Every time the boy or the murder charge comes back to Abraham, he falls into a trance fuelled by fear, and the game moves into another place: candlelit chapels, overgrown ruins and a version of Romania drawn from Eastern European folk mysticism.

The fear is mostly dread rather than chases. The trances show blood and gore, a growing revulsion towards God, and a voice that may be the devil trying to convince you of things that may or may not be true. The game keeps asking whether Abraham is guilty, and lets you doubt him.

Interactive Stone released Gray Dawn on PC in June 2018 and later brought it to Xbox, PlayStation and Switch. It suits players who like slow, story-led horror with puzzles and strong religious imagery, in the line of Layers of Fear or The Town of Light, more than players looking for monsters to run from.

How to play Gray Dawn

1. Buy it on Steam, itch.io or your console's store and start a new game.
2. Explore the priest's house and church in first person and pick up objects to look at them closely.
3. Read the letters, notes and books you find; they carry the story and often the answer to a puzzle.
4. Solve the puzzle in each area to open the way on, and follow the visions when they take you elsewhere.

Tips

• Turn objects over when you inspect them; clues are sometimes on the back or underside.
• Keep a note of symbols and numbers you see in the visions, as they can matter later.
• Play with headphones: the voices and sound carry much of the dread.
• If you are stuck, go back over rooms you have already seen; new things appear after the story moves on.

Questions