by theygamesBeyond the crushing difficulty, Cuphead served as a tacit reminder of just how creepy early animation could be. All those exaggerated features and lanky limbs, it’s truly the stuff of nightmares. Bad Cheese returns to that well, this time using a pastiche of Disney’s early years for a tale of terror, and there’s a demo you can try out for yourself.
Bad Cheese involves a precarious situation: you’re a child surviving the weekend with an unpredictable dad. The first-person horror game involves moving around the family home, trying to be as quiet as possible while you uncover the bizarre, often unsettling secrets held within.
Every room seems to have something that’ll give you goosebumps, from rotting carcasses to artwork and decorations that just don’t seem right. Broadly, it’s a puzzle game, where you do chores such as dusting and tidying in order to keep your father calm and gain access to particular nooks and crannies. You’ve a brother alongside your parents, and the family seems to have some other skeletons in the closet too.
Developer Simon Lukasik captures the unassuming nature of cartoons from the first half of the last century, then pushes the aesthetic to an unsettling degree. Cleverly, there’s a 16mm-esque filter on the camera, so it has that crackle and distortion of a decades-old broadcast.
Courage the Cowardly Dog seems like a potential touchstone, sharing the similarities of an anthropomorphic animal protagonist and a truly unhinged and unpredictable backdrop. At least Courage didn’t have to worry about his family, just the creepy things that kept cropping up.
Going first-person makes the upcoming PC game stand out compared to Cuphead as well. Studio MDHR’s roguelike is now a standard-bearer for anyone who tries to use animation from the early 1900s as an art-style, and that goes double if you’re going for something in any way twisted or subversive. Bad Cheese has a lot going for it on its own merit as a fun, compact, chilling game that might give you nightmares if you’re a big fan of Pluto the Dog or really don’t like spiders.
Bad Cheese doesn’t have a full release date, but there’s a demo available on Steam now. Our lists of the best zombie games and best vampire games for more of what goes bump in the night.
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