❤️❤️❤️❤️🤍

Praying for you 🕯️🧢 O Great Cappie💙

MiSide might seem like a typical "Streamer-Bait" game, but it’s one of the better horror games on Steam. It’s a bit light on the scary side, but the main draw is its Yandere/Obsessive Love theme.

The story setup is very simple, you get isekai'd into a video game.

The gameplay involves traveling to earlier versions of the game and meeting different iterations of the character named Mita. The game explores different video game genres both as a way to deliver the story and through various mini-games – some you play with Mita and some on your own. The mini-games aren’t very substantial, but they don't outstay their welcome. The developers did a good job of mixing things up.

Among the myriad of “dark spoopy place with monsters”-titles on Steam, MiSide stands out, much thanks to its suffocatingly cute art style.

However, if you've played or watched streamers play indie horror games, you'll notice familiar elements and tropes. Things like not turning your back to this game’s equivalent of the Weeping Angels from Dr. Who, or the game's use of Escheresque impossible architecture, and level looping inspired by Kojima's P.T.

The game ran well for me, and I didn’t experience any bugs or crashes. However, the checkpoint system can be a bit unforgiving, especially if you need to turn the game off. There's no manual saving.

I also disliked how you can’t change Mita’s outfit in the game; instead, you must do so from the main menu. And since you can’t save whenever you want, you may lose a lot of progress when you want to change her clothes, which is quite silly indeed. The developers should make this more immersive, for example, by adding the ability to ask her to change clothes by interacting with her dresser or something.

One unexpected twist is how people have started to obsess over the different “Mita” versions they’ve met in the game. It begs the question: Are you stuck in here with her, or is she stuck in here with you?
Maybe you were the yandere all along? 😍🔪

I’m not sure if this has affected the game’s development or if the developers planned it all along, but I love the fact that they’re currently working on a Peaceful Mode so we can hang out with our Mita. One thing I'm certain of is that this will undoubtedly spark forum wars about who is Best Girl. I'll be sure to return to the game once that's released.

Another pleasant surprise is the social commentary on the work-sleep-work cycle and tackling heavy themes like loneliness. I didn’t expect the game to have any depth or the competence to deliver it, but there you go.

There are a lot of mediocre horror games on Steam, but this isn’t one of them. MiSide is great, and I absolutely recommend it, especially if the yandere theme appeals to you.