Is this Game Trying to Kill Me?

About Is this Game Trying to Kill Me?

Is this Game Trying to Kill Me? is a horror puzzle game by Stately Snail, released for Windows on Steam on 12 November 2024. It came to PlayStation 5 and Xbox on 4 April 2025, published there by Sometimes You, and is also sold on the Nintendo eShop for Switch.

It is late at night and raining when you end up in a cabin deep in the forest. You wake next to a skeleton in a bed. The owner, a grinning figure with fangs, glowing goggles and a wide-brimmed hat, has an idea to pass the time: a special computer game. Win it and there is a reward. Lose and you will be staying a lot longer than you planned.

The game on the old CRT computer is Castle Serpentshtain, a top-down pixel dungeon in the style of 16-bit games, where a small man must get through rooms of locked doors and traps. You play it in first person at the desk, then get up and search the cabin. The two worlds are linked. Symbols that appear on the cabin wall solve a puzzle in the castle, a chest opened on the screen opens in the room, and solving puzzles in the castle opens new rooms in the cabin, and the other way round. If your little man steps on spikes in the game, spikes come out of the monitor and kill you.

Most of the game is logic puzzles: switches, tiles, symbols, cards and hidden objects. The computer has a hint system with up to three picture hints for every puzzle, the last one usually close to the answer, and reviewers note there is no penalty for using it. A few parts ask for quick hands instead: a timed hide-and-seek in the cabin with a goblin from the screen game, and boss fights in both the 2D game and the 3D cabin, where you dodge attacks across a grid of tiles. When you die you go back to just before the fight or trap, and you never have to solve a puzzle twice.

Reviewers took about three hours to reach the end. There are three endings, a bad, a neutral and a good one, all chosen in the final stretch by how many more puzzles you solve. The game auto-saves to a single slot, so to see all three without starting over, take the bad ending first.

Its look is stylised and colourful, with a cartoonish host and a synth soundtrack, but there is blood, spiders and plenty of sudden deaths by spikes, arrows and worse. ESRB rates it Teen for blood and violence. It suits players who liked the captor, game and escape room mix of Inscryption, and anyone who likes horror they can think their way through.

How to play Is this Game Trying to Kill Me?

1. Buy the game on Steam, PlayStation, Xbox or Switch and start a new game.
2. Sit at the old computer and play Castle Serpentshtain, the pixel dungeon game its owner has set up for you.
3. When the screen game stalls, get up and search the cabin for clues, objects and mechanisms.
4. Use what you find in the room to change the game, and what you solve in the game to open new rooms in the cabin.
5. If you are stuck, open the picture hints on the computer; each puzzle has up to three.
6. When you die, learn from the trap that got you; you restart just before it.

Tips

• Check the cabin whenever something changes on the computer screen; the two worlds affect each other.
• Write down symbols, numbers and patterns you see on the screen and on the walls.
• The hint system has no penalty, so use the first picture hint before the last one if you only need a nudge.
• The boss fights and the hide-and-seek are timed; watch the attack patterns and expect a few tries.
• The game saves to one slot, so go for the bad ending first, then solve the last puzzles for the neutral and the good one.
• If you switch between mouse and gamepad, adjust the camera sensitivity again.

Questions