Horsefly Games’ point-and-click adventure, The Polar Darkness, brings folk horror and investigation to PC in 2027.
The side-scrolling adventure will blend Finnish folk and cosmic horror into the grimly gritty cold of northern Finland during the polar night. A chilly, haunting backdrop for a mystery to unravel.
The 2.5D game’s gloomy winter village setting makes me cold just looking at it, which is actually quite nice given the weather is heating up again.
The Polar Darkness Gets Cold and Cosmic
The story of The Polar Darkness is set during the Winter Solstice in northern Finland. You play a journalist who is sent to a remote village to cover a controversial revival movement led by a charismatic cult leader and her child preacher.
When the boy mysteriously disappears during a sermon and a blizzard traps everyone in the village, she is forced to investigate a secret the community has protected for generations.
Being a point-and-click adventure, there’s a slightly relaxed attitude to the investigation in the sense that you face no combat situations or time constraints. Just the dread-filled allure of slowly sinking into a situation much bigger than you.
Much of the game is spent investigating the case you’ve stumbled upon. So you’ll traverse environmental and dialogue puzzles in search of the truth, and certain choices you make will push the story in a particular direction.
While you’re free to approach things as methodically as you like, those decisions and meeting objectives do pass the time, and with a three-day window to the story, there’s only so much standing about in the snow you can do.
The visual style is what’s most striking about The Polar Darkness. Using photographic characters based on scans of real actors, there’s a strange use of realism to it, where you move through areas as if they were living paper dioramas of a Finnish village.
No set release date yet, but The Polar Darkness is currently pencilled in for a Q1 2027 release. You can wishlist it on Steam in the meantime.
For the latest gaming news, follow GameWatcher on BlueSky, check out our videos on YouTube. We sometimes include affiliate links in our posts, which grants us a small commission, thank you. Please support independent Games Media. ❤️
