It Moves is a masterpiece of atmospheric horror from SnowOwl who has apparently made a LOT of those in the last few years--boy howdy! This is the first one I've actually played, at least I think anyway. It Moves is a masterpiece, and a brilliant masterpiece at that, but it is not without its flaws. Flaws or not, though, it's a nice change of pace for me to see a game massively succeed like this one that actually deserves its massive success.

It Moves is not an epic game by any means. It requires less than an hour of your time to complete. For that tiny investment of time, you get an unsettling experience of incredible quality. And--some would say INSANELY--it is free. Considering the buzz this game has gotten elsewhere, I doubt anyone who likes atmospheric horror is still on the fence about whether or not to play this. And I doubt that any such hypothetical person would be convinced by me, if they've hesitated this long. But nonetheless, I need to state the obvious: you should absolutely play this IMMEDIATELY if you have not already.

It Moves is based on a short story called "Bedtime" by Michael Whitehouse. The story, though, is really more of a piece of "creepypasta", the kind of thing you would see shared on reddit. Much of the story's text appears directly in the game, and the game owes it a lot. This also means that the quality of the writing in this game is directly tied to the quality of writing in the story, which, disagreeing with the review from Rock, Paper, Shotgun, I would have to call merely okay.

However, the game expands greatly on the story, using "Bedtime" essentially as a frame narrative through which to unfold seven interactive dream vignettes in which you explore the nightmare landscape of a troubled child. In so doing, It Moves rises far above its source material.

These dream vignettes of exploring an infinitely imaginative and unsettling nightmare landscape are where the game excels on a level I have rarely seen before. Make no mistake, It Moves engages its audience by frightening them. The simple puzzles that are included are very cursory and the interactivity and gameplay is minimal. What you're here for is to appreciate the texture of the gorgeous and disturbing visuals and soundscape that SnowOwl has created.

And what visuals they are. SnowOwl is a truly gifted artist. Extremely imaginative and deliciously upsetting custom art is used extensively and expertly to create environments and creatures that are simultaneously horrifying to look at and too fascinating not to. Ample use of darkness ensures that these abominations are never glimpsed too closely, lest they become workaday and routine.

And the audio design, in my opinion, is even better than the art. An unrelenting soundtrack of subtle, ominous, discordant, droning ambient music and noise underscores the entire game, expertly punctuated with a layered cacophony of background and foreground sound effects that unsettle most adroitly. The sounds and music you are listening to in this game are ALWAYS unpleasant and nerve wracking but NEVER annoying or irritating, and that is a marvelous accomplishment by a master sound designer. Unlike the graphics, I believe that none of the audio is custom, but I don't hold that against this game for a moment. As a non-artist and non-composer myself, I have immense respect for the talent it takes to use other people's resources to the fullest, and SnowOwl's curation and use of sounds and music from various sources is an achievement par excellence.

Having gushed, and gushed, and gushed at length about how awesome this little freeware indie horror game is, I should probably round things out with some of my complaints.

My first and foremost complaint is that I found myself wanting more of many of the environments to explore and interact with. That is actually probably a good thing, but it actually felt like a problem in the undersea environment which really seemed to be crying out for its own, fully realized game rather than being squeezed in almost as "filler". Nowhere was this more evident than in the lengthy essay on how terrifying it is to be underwater, which felt out of place both for being an in-game document and for being literally longer than the entire rest of the text of this game combined. This underwater sequence is obviously aching to be expanded into a full game of its own.

It Moves' conceit is that it largely alternates between interactive sequences of the player exploring the exquisitely surreal landscape of the child's nightmares and noninteractive cutscenes that relate the core narrative. Another night, another nightmare. Unfortunately, the nightmares are not spaced out correctly and the last three vignettes are all unfolded during the course of one night...



...this is logically problematic within the narrative because these are circumstances under which it would be impossible for anyone to fall asleep even once, let alone thrice.

But my biggest fault with this game I save for last, which is that this game is not actually scary. I don't mean that it didn't scare me personally. That would not be a fair rubric, because as those who know me know, I am a grizzled horror veteran. I mean that it lacks the necessary ingredients to be scary.

Now, 4.5 out of 5 Stars might seem like a very high score to give to a horror game that isn't scary, so hear me out. It Moves is certainly disturbing and creepy. On one or two memorable occasions it also startled me quite, quite badly in spite of its forswearing of "jump scares" (which I actually have no problem with) in its description. But it never scared me, and here's why. For something to be scary, there needs to be suspense and tension. And It Moves never built suspense or tension. The reason for this is that at no point was your character threatened with something bad about to happen to him that you the player could meaningfully avoid or temporarily delay. In every nightmare scenario you guide your nameless child protagonist to his doom...and because you know it is a dream, you do so quite knowingly. You die, you move on to the next stage of the game, and there is no lose state and nothing to avoid. And during the narrative sequences there is no interactivity at all, and being a helpless audience member, there is no tension nor suspense either. You are just along for the ride. At no point are you the player made responsible for preventing terrible things from happening to this child.

With this defined, I can clarify that while Alien: Isolation is an extremely scary game (you are trying to keep from getting murdered by that alien and it is fucking HARD and you are afraid of being murdered by that alien not because it's annoying and you have to restart from the last savepoint but because getting murdered by it is so bowel-looseningly SCARY that is UNPLEASANT), it was not at all disturbing (the same is not to be said for being exposed to the life cycle of the xenomorph in the original Alien film, but that's neither here nor there). It Moves as described here IS disturbing, but not actually scary. And the first several Silent Hill games are so special because they manage to be both.

It feels weird to end such a glowing review on what must seem like such a negative note so let me just say that not all horror needs to be scary in the way I have just described. Disturbing and unsettling the player is just as rare of an achievement, and making someone jump is no small achievement either. It Moves does both while providing a lush visual and aural experience with unparalleled quality and style of presentation. It should certainly win some awards come the Misaos.