The Backrooms and Sons of the Forest come together via a new indie horror game that challenges you to use building and survival mechanics to stay alive while trapped in a massive, living, and ever-changing version of IKEA – literally the worst nightmare that I can imagine.
The endless shelves and aisles. The nauseous, swirling colours. The aimless walking, and sheer pointlessness of it all – shopping for furniture, or “bits” for the house, is a psychological torture to which we all, seemingly as penance for some dreadful and intractable original sin that we cannot comprehend, must all eventually be subjected. It’s a living death. The mind dulls. The senses fade. How can there be so many different types of bath mat? Time loses meaning in IKEA. Like a doomed astronaut falling through an event horizon, a minute of normal time becomes an hour, a day, a year.
So imagine being stuck in IKEA for the rest of your life. Imagine that the corridors, and vast, pallid warehouses filled with mattress toppers literally, genuinely went on forever. Imagine the floor manager was a gigantic flesh monster with a rhino horn instead of a face. Well, that’s The Store is Closed, an upcoming indie horror game that sees you trapped inside an IKEA-style furniture store as the architecture grows and shifts around you, and the staff hunt you for your blood.
As well as avoiding the mutated store assistants – which still wear their bright-yellow “here to help” t-shirts, despite transforming into mounds of tendony meat – you must construct a shelter and supplies for yourself by breaking down furniture, and pilfer food from the in-store canteen. The goal, naturally, is to find a way out, but the only way to do so is to go “deeper into the store”. Hopefully they’re still serving those cheap hotdogs.
Like Sons of the Forest, The Store is Closed will also feature online co-op as you work together with pals to try and survive. It’s currently available for your Steam wishlist and you can learn more about the game on its official Kickstarter page. No release date has been announced yet.
You might want to try some of the other best indie games on PC, or maybe some of the best survival games. Alternatively, take a look at some of the best co-op games including Portal 2 and The Division.