I never quite watched Are You Afraid of the Dark as a kid — my time and place had given me completely different childhood traumas — but even regardless of my lack of familiarity, I can still tell just how hard this manages to capture the vibes of one of those children's horror shows. It looks a bit cheap, and it's clearly meant to feel more fun than scary, then the other shoe drops and suddenly something genuinely evocative or tense gets thrown right in your face, like, say, the chase sequences. You'll collect an item, then suddenly something will come after you and the music will ramp up as you're forced to run: not quite knowing where you need to go, not quite sure how far your pursuer is behind you, or even if you're allowed to pause the game given how the music keeps playing only until you take out whatever's chasing you. For what's specifically an adventure game, and for... something a bit more evocative of its source material (or, say, the Goosebumps TV series), it's pretty impressive, both from a technical standpoint and from how the game manages to balance its horror elements.
I was also a pretty big fan of the framing device, and how it works to function... both as a part of the story and as a game mechanic. The events of the game are you, the player, attempting to continue a scary story started by somebody else, and at any point you can jump up a textual level and talk to the people around the fire with you, either playing through your past conversations for an indication of where to go next, or to get a direct hint upon a game over through the form of the rest of the people at the campfire discussing the story. There's hints of a fun little dynamic between the people at the campfire — something that might mean a bit more had I context of its source material — though I do wish perhaps the hints themselves were wrapped a bit more within the framing device. I understand that it... might be a bit confusing for hypothetical children playing this game otherwise, but if I'm telling a story, why are the other people at the campfire talking explicitly about game mechanics, or saying that *I* was the one who pressed the 'do not press' button? It's minor, but it did stick with me as something where the game could've committed a bit harder to... what's easily one of its strongest points in the framing device.
Besides that, I liked this! It's a nice, quick adventure game that works to avoid a lot of the more esoteric puzzle design of the time (aside from, say, some areas that are a bit too large and empty and where it's easy to get lost) which does a lot to evoke its genre of kid-friendly horror, and has a fairly unique and cool framing device to wrap the whole thing together. Definitely sad that this wasn't financially successful — I would've loved to see more like this. 7/10.
I was also a pretty big fan of the framing device, and how it works to function... both as a part of the story and as a game mechanic. The events of the game are you, the player, attempting to continue a scary story started by somebody else, and at any point you can jump up a textual level and talk to the people around the fire with you, either playing through your past conversations for an indication of where to go next, or to get a direct hint upon a game over through the form of the rest of the people at the campfire discussing the story. There's hints of a fun little dynamic between the people at the campfire — something that might mean a bit more had I context of its source material — though I do wish perhaps the hints themselves were wrapped a bit more within the framing device. I understand that it... might be a bit confusing for hypothetical children playing this game otherwise, but if I'm telling a story, why are the other people at the campfire talking explicitly about game mechanics, or saying that *I* was the one who pressed the 'do not press' button? It's minor, but it did stick with me as something where the game could've committed a bit harder to... what's easily one of its strongest points in the framing device.
Besides that, I liked this! It's a nice, quick adventure game that works to avoid a lot of the more esoteric puzzle design of the time (aside from, say, some areas that are a bit too large and empty and where it's easy to get lost) which does a lot to evoke its genre of kid-friendly horror, and has a fairly unique and cool framing device to wrap the whole thing together. Definitely sad that this wasn't financially successful — I would've loved to see more like this. 7/10.