Backlog Bingo 2025: Sorry We're Closed

I've had horror games on the brain lately, clearly: the only game I started and finished between the previous bingo entry (Who's Lila) was Proximate (which I recommend! but this isn't about that game! I won't talk about it more here!), so, going for three games with very different vibes seemed fun.

One can easily describe Sorry We're Closed as "incredibly queer Silent Hill" without being very reductive, so, of course I'll start there: it's a PS1-aesthetic horror game with all of the trappings that entails, combat being intentionally janky, "run from enemies because combat is janky but also because resources are limited" being a major expectation, fixed camera angles that are at times used for intentional jump-scares and at times accidentally annoying, and even optional tank controls. If you're into that you will probably like this, and if you played Signalis you will definitely like this, so hey, if you're in either of those groups, great, you have your recommendation.

Sorry We're Closed opens with the protagonist, Michelle, having just broken up with her girlfriend (who she very much still has strong feelings for) going to work at a convenience store job that she hates. (Clean setup for a queer came with Things To Say about queerness and capitalism, to be honest.) You're introduced to the supporting cast, most of who share an apartment with Michelle: the distractingly attractive enby named Robyn (uwu), Clarissa, a dancer who got fired from a bar run by Darrel (the worst character in the game by a wide margin), Darrel's partner Oakley, who is really struggling with the ways in which Darrel's personality has changed, etc etc. The game frontloads "here's a cast of queer characters, all of which kinda have problems in their life" in a way that sets things up really well, I think.

The first night that you sleep, you're visited by a sleep paralysis demon named The Duchess, who is also looking for love after a relationship ended, and who curses you: the curse gives you a literal third eye that allows you to see into the demon world, but also, you quickly learn that they kill everyone who doesn't fall in love with them, which...probably isn't desirable, really. This also lets you see the various things that have been true for a while: Robyn is also a demon, and they know a lot more than they're letting on due to being immortal, Darrel isn't, but is working for The Duchess in hopes for power, which explains the weird personality changes, Clarissa's an angel who needed the bar job because the bar was where she could find demons easily, and now she's slipping in her demon-killing quota. It's...A Lot, in the way that a lot of media steeped deeply in extremely explicit queer metaphor is, but it all generally works.

Mechanically, this is pretty straightforward with some twists: in the first area, Robyn gives you a typical horror game infinite-use axe that you basically never want to have to use, and you quickly find a pistol as well. This is half of the game's arsenal in the first fifteen minutes or so, which I think is kinda nice, because we didn't really need twenty different guns here. You can shoot things with your pistol, obviously, at basically any range you can see them, but it's fairly ineffective; opening your third eye lets you see an enemy's heart, which you can shoot for several times more damage, but which also has a couple of downsides: one, the heart is now the only place you can shoot them, instead of anywhere on the much larger body, and two, you can't shoot through the edge of your third eye's sight range because of the barrier between worlds, so you're forced into fairly close range. This is still almost always preferable: there's a small stun if an enemy gets caught in the third eye's circle as it opens, so most enemies that you want to kill (other than bosses) will die to "walk up, draw gun, aim generally at it, open eye, take the half-second or so that it's stunned to find and shoot the heart to kill it", but it's high-risk in a way that feels really good.

Towards the end of area one, Robyn says in a throwaway line that definitely isn't foreshadowing that some demons have multiple hearts, but that "there's nothing that powerful around here, fortunately" and gives you the game's other main mechanic: a giant fancy gun called the Heartbreaker which is charged by shooting things in the heart. It's an instant kill on any normal enemy (though this can't really be abused: you have one bullet in it ever, and getting that back requires you to kill other things), and it's required to kill bosses, the first of which was heavily lampshaded by Robyn a couple of sentences ago. Every boss goes the same way: dodge some attacks until you can get a clean shot, shoot them in various moving weak points until you get a Heartbreaker charge, shoot them with it to blow up one of their hearts, repeat. (It's nice knowing exactly how many phases a boss will have as soon as it starts, huh?) It's all straightforward, but it works well for what the game's going for.

I think that the game really shines narratively (though I am also the kind of queer mess that's into messy queer narratives): there are four endings, call them A B C and D, A is always available, B and C are mutually exclusive with D, but you can choose any one that you're eligible for right before the final boss fight, so you can theoretically get them all in two playthroughs if you want. I ended up going for C, which I'll let Journal Ammy summarize a bit:

Ended up on the ending route for Chamuel: the short version is that he's an angel and his boyfriend is a demon; being together long-term will necessarily make them more like the other, eventually making them both human; Chamuel embraces this and his partner does not. Needless to say, this hit quite close to home: I have come to expect that something will hit a little hard in extremely queer media these days, but, well, I've been thinking about the core questions in here a lot lately: how much change for a partner is too much? What's healthy? To what extent should you embrace that being close to people necessarily means that you will change, and to what extent should you try to resist that? Where does "but I'm willing to become a different person for you" become unhealthy? It's not really left me with anything new to think about, but seeing it so starkly presented meant a lot to me, I guess.

Playing this fairly closely after the end of a long-term queer relationship probably primed me to spend time reflecting on it, but, also, I'm me, so I'd have been thinking about it for a little while anyway. It's one of those games that manages to be simultaneously understated in what it says and excessively blunt in what it says? I like the writing a lot and see a lot of basically everyone I know here, even with the story being as incredibly over the top as it is. Strongly recommended if any of the above stuff sounds palatable to you, though it's obviously not going to be for everyone.

(Also, Proximate was really good, if you like- dragged off stage)