Eschaton is one of the creepiest games I’ve ever played—and it barely does anything.

You show up after a cult ritual goes sideways and sort of… finish what they started. Multiple corpses are lying around. No explanation. The game just assumes you’re the kind of person who would usher in the apocalypse without asking too many questions.

It takes place in a rainy Scottish manor, the kind of place that feels haunted even when it’s not. Everything is grey, wet, and vaguely cursed. You wander through the aftermath like the world’s least enthusiastic medium. Nothing jumps out at you, but everything feels like it wants to. It’s horror without the courtesy of a punchline.

What makes it stick isn’t scares—it’s the weirdness. The developer, who built it alone under the name Jabuga (now Sojourn Interactive), admitted the static-covered god-figures started as a Twitter meme. Which somehow tracks. The whole game feels like something that was supposed to be a joke until it wasn’t. Like someone dared themselves to take it seriously and then just never stopped.

And despite all that, it works. The visuals are pure PS1 rot—fog, jittery polygons, cursed lighting. It doesn’t feel nostalgic. It feels like you found a lost build of something that got pulled for being too strange. A game that makes your hard drive taste weird.

But the audio is where it really loses its mind. This thing doesn’t have a soundtrack—it has a séance. Droning tones, distorted radio signals, heavy rain that sounds like it’s judging you. The developer openly cited the CIA’s Gateway Process as an influence, which is always a great sign when you’re about to shove headphones into your skull. It’s like if Silent Hill got into conspiracy TikTok.

At one point, a ghostly deer-god mumbles something cryptic through a wall of static and you nod like you understand. Another time, a locked door bugs out and stacks the rattle sound until it feels like you’re being attacked by a thousand doorknobs. You meet gods named Morrigan, Cernunnos, Ophelia, and Boreas—basically the occult Justice League. All of them speak like they’re trying to win a poetry slam. One might be the developer doing a bad Christopher Lee.

When the game ends, it doesn’t tell you. It just closes. You’re back on your desktop like nothing happened, left to sit there wondering if you did, in fact, just help reboot the universe. There are no credits. Just the faint hum of your GPU spinning in shame. And maybe some rain, still, somehow.

There are secrets—some buried in drawers, others in half-heard audio. A golden apple labeled “KALLISTI,” for example, if you’re into Discordian in-jokes. Notes that hint at cosmic metaphysics, cult backstories, and other things you probably won’t understand unless you’ve read too much Grant Morrison. It never explains anything. It just whispers and hopes you’ll connect the dots.

Technically, it’s modest. Runs fine on anything short of a toaster. The Steam Deck patch added controller support and achievements, so now you can end the world from your couch. Performance is smooth because there’s nothing to stress the system except your own sense of unease. It’s all very polite about your impending existential dread.

The whole thing lasts maybe 30 minutes, unless you linger. And you probably will. Not because there’s much to do, but because it keeps baiting you with the feeling that something’s about to happen. It never does. That’s the trick.

Some people hated it. Too short, too vague, too pretentious. They’re not wrong. But that’s what makes it interesting. Eschaton doesn’t try to be a game for everyone—it barely tries to be a game at all.

It’s just a small, strange thing made by someone who wanted to mess with your head a little. No budget, no polish, just raw atmosphere and cryptic nonsense. Which honestly describes half the best horror experiences I’ve ever had. It knows exactly what it is. And it gets out before you can question it.

Would I recommend it? Absolutely. But only if you’ve ever looked at an abandoned hallway and thought, “Yeah, I’d walk into that. Let’s see what happens.”