This is a review crossposted from review blog Dragon Quill. The original article can be found here. Be forewarned that this review contains vague spoilers for the plot and ending.

It Moves has skin-crawlingly eerie sounds and beautifully unsettling graphics. It is not much of a game, however, nor is it much of a semi-interactive story, which is what I think it was aiming for.

In It Moves, you’re a little kid whose brother has moved into his own room, leaving you with a bunk bed to yourself. You go to sleep…

And weirdness begins.



As you descend into the tunnel area, the darkness presses in. Only a tiny area is visible.



Also, there’s at least one freaky monster down there with you.



…and it runs the other way.

Human-head-spider-octopus will eventually return to chase you and end the dream, but it spends most of the level retreating from view. This is where I realized this was not really going to be a scary game.

It Moves is told by a clearly much older and perfectly safe narrator, so we know he makes it through, plus this is just a dream anyway. Moreover, in this and every subsequent dream, it’s clear that all the spookiness is totally irrelevant to the actual threat of the storyline. This first dream opens with someone talking about stalking, a later bit will have the main character thinking pointed thoughts about how inherently disturbing it is to be stalked, but the real-world scary threat has nothing to with that.

The second dream has this whole rusty tunnel thing going on. Then you encounter mysterious possibly bloody person!



And when they disappear, the screen gains a faint scary face overlay.



Creepy! Great effect! The way it slowly intensifies (and other weird effects begin to pop up more and more) as you run into the weird figure again and again is really unnerving.

But it doesn’t actually matter.

Another dream level involves discussion of why the deep water is scary, and lists each component of the fear…none of which has any relevance as far as I can tell beyond that it mentions fear of the unknown and the unknown is technically a small component of what he’s afraid of when awake.

The last few dream-levels also make it clear they mean nothing whatsoever by all taking place during the final monster-kid confrontation where he’s awake the whole time. They’re just used to space out the text.

And the bit when the kid’s awake? Is the polar opposite of the lovely design you see for the dream bits. It’s just the kid narrating how scared they are. I’m not sure if the prose is actually bad writing or just seems bad due to the fact it’s always going to be awkward to have extended paragraphs about how horrible something is when what’s on the screen is mundane and static, but either way, the kid talking about how omg something in the bed below starts off creepy but quickly smothers that to death by going on and on and on and on about it while nothing actually happens.

It also relies on perhaps my least favorite cop-out, the kid not talking because ~childhood is so different~. Kids don’t think exactly like adults, but they don’t spend months being terrorized like this either without making any effort at all to deal with it. He doesn’t even try sleeping somewhere other than the top bunk, or trying to trade rooms with his brother, and he only thinks of putting stuff on the lower bunk so it can’t sleep there after his mom has to leave the house for a while.

The monster itself is a cipher.

First, it tosses and turns on the bottom bunk but gets angry when the kid moves above it and starts thrashing around violently enough to scrape paint off the walls – which is objective evidence something is up but will never actually matter. It disappears as soon as his mom comes to investigate his screams, and if she spends the night it doesn’t come back.

Next, it stops tossing but starts prodding the bed above – and the narration really annoys me by how the kid can narrate each step – he can tell it sat up, it can tell it’s touching the slats, etc – and somehow he feels the poke right in his ribs while still informing us that somehow he can tell it’s only poking the mattress below. He screams, it starts thrashing, his mom makes it vanish.

This goes on for months until finally he gets rid of the mattress and puts other stuff there so it can’t sleep in the bunk, and then he wakes up to find it on top of him but completely still and seemingly unaware he’s woken up for once. We’re given a description where he ends each bit with “and this horrified me yet more!” when honestly the thing just sounds pathetic – there’s something wrong with you if you’re describing something’s ragged clothing as another thing to be horrified by. Also, it’s clutching him and half in and half out of the wall and it’s really only pretending not to know he’s woken up and also it tries to pull him into the wall but waits so long that the sun comes up.

So…why didn’t it do this before? Why did it only get into his bed when he removed its bed if its goal was to be a scary devouring wall monster? How did it do the whole sitting up thing if it’s actually a wallmonster with no legs? Why didn’t it just eat his mom? Why didn’t it eat him back when he shared a room with his brother and was on the bottom bunk?

The character them solves his problem by moving his bed to a different wall and leaving the stuff piled up there. which works even though it just proved it could move where it appeared. Then for no reason his parents decide to swap rooms with him, and in a shocking twist ending, last just over a week before moving out even though we’ve established it flees his mom’s presence and/or can only appear if there’s a single person in the room. It all sounds good until you think about it for a split second.

So in sum, the main narrative is crap and has no connection to the dream sequences that make up the actual game. The storyline is so bungled this would actually be a better game if it dumped the framing entirely and just had the kid fall asleep and go to various scary worlds. I could speculate about what they might mean and if they were real on any level. I could marvel at the odd dream logic of how the nightmare sections seem to all involve the character doing things that are obviously a bad idea (descending into the creepy tunnels, finding mystery hooded figure, or my favorite, flipping the switches to open gates when there’s a monster behind the last gate) but that you do anyway.