drim

drim feels exactly like a creepypasta, both in good and bad ways. You play as this miserable girl named Scoria wandering through a grimy blood splattered building, fighting ghosts with scissors and tryna figure out what the hell happened to her sister. The whole thing takes like an hour so it's not a huge time commitment, but it packs a lot of awkwardness and unsettlement into that short runtime.

Let's talk about the vibe first, because that's where drim either shines or completely falls apart depending on your taste. The artstyle has a handdrawn look that feels raw in a charming way and you've got some malformed ghosts that aren't jumpscare material but they're a bit unsettling to look at. The game throws you into long dark hallways with a constant pressure of dread, but then you'll find an item called Soiled Panties and it completely kills that atmosphere, like, one minute you're dealing with heavy stuff and the next you find these vibe killers.

Getting into the gameplay, you walk around, pick up items and get into turn based battles that use RPG Maker 2003's ATB system. Combat can be frustrating because your attacks are prone to miss, healing items are scarce and the status system is interesting on paper since Scoria's mood changes from sad to suicidal based on what you do, but in practice it doesn't feel like it affects anything. Plus, you'll end up spamming the Hard Swing skill over and over just to survive. The puzzles are also obtuse, like figuring out you need to smash a random brick on a window that looks like background decoration, you'll probably get stuck at least once and just start interacting with everything out of desperation.

The story either pulls you in or pushes you away since nothing is explained clearly, you've got vague references to a car accident and Scoria's sister, and there's a girl who helps you in the final battle but the game never bothers to tell you who she is, the dev admitted even she don't fully know what the plot means and that intentional vagueness is either deep or lazy depending on your mood. Some people read into it as a metaphor for sexual abuse, trauma and survivors guilt while others just found it pretentious, for example, Scoria refuses to use a box cutter as a weapon because that's ridiculous but she'll happily fight the ghost with safety scissors at the start of the game. That kind of inconsistency makes it hard to take the emotional moments seriously for some people.

The horror elements rely on lingering unease, there's no jumpscares, just creepy stuff like the bathtub ghost missing its lower half and this one room with a guro picture that comes out of nowhere. That image naturally pissed off so many players because it feels exploitative, while others argue it ties into themes of abuse. Honestly, it's jarring and not in a clever way. The SFX deserve a shoutout tho, they fit the broken uncomfortable aesthetic perfectly.

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However, there's something captivating about its rawness, it feels confusing and overly edgy, but also genuine in a way that polished games rarely are. If you go in expecting SILENT HILL, you'll hate it, but if you go in expecting a broken game made by someone who clearly had feelings she needed to express, you might find something memorable.

If the whole thing didn't completely wreck you, think about throwing some spare change into the offering bowl, snag the Donation Edition here to support Sapphomet and dig into a little bonus content: a proper soundtrack, a tiny artbook that grows over time and even a free sketch commission. The ghosts remember kindness... and so does the dev.