3.5/5 ★ – PhatBaby's review of MiSide.

This deserves SO much more love than it's currently getting. Just a supremely creative, engaging and imaginative little horror game that lulls you in as a spin on Doki Doki and then keeps delivering the goods as it ramps up. Starts out and you're like, oh, okay, we're going for a yandere-flavoured cabin fever game with a spooky NPC that follows you around and chats a lot of vaguely sinister shit. But that's literally just the entrance to the theme park ride. As soon as you leave the cabin, you run from creative idea to creative idea, and while all of them are clearly inspired by the tombola of widely riffed popular horror games, they're so brief that it feels like you're moving through a gallery of loving little homages rather than straight rips. There are just so many cool ideas here, and it's all brought together by a multiverse-esque world that's filled with cute easter eggs, funny winks to the camera, creepy scares and a shit-load of creativity. I love the wave of truly great short-form horror games we get these days and I don't necessarily think this matches some of the best ones around. But it still gets the formula so right. Create an interesting world with a cool spin, have an engaging core villain, and then roll them sleeves up and have a little fun with it. Genuinely, some really, really inventive horror in here too. Sucker for a sexy ol' mirror scare, and dear god, they plant a baller one in the first main scary bit. But later, you meet this scruffy gremlin chick with a long-ass neck, and they pull the ultimate horror card of just having you chill out with her for like five minutes. And my god, I've never been more uncomfortable just knowing this rickety ol' slug existed. She's just scuttling around her dingey-ass apartment while you're running errands, and you get to the point where you're just like, "Sooooo, are we fighting or... like... is this whole stretchy Mr Fantastic neck thing just, like, your vibe...?"