MISRECORDED

A tape surfaces from a disappearance nobody solved, and you're watching what it recorded: the same corridor, walked over and over, never quite the same twice. That's the entire pitch of MISRECORDED, a first-person analog-horror game from Lowfade Studios that shipped on Steam two days ago, and it's a tighter, more mechanical idea than most "found footage" horror games settle for. You aren't just watching degraded VHS aesthetics happen to you — you're actively comparing this loop against your memory of the last one, and the game is built to reward exactly that kind of attention.

A corridor that lies to you

The loop is the whole game. Walk the corridor, note what's there, reach the end, and start again — except something has changed. The store page's own examples are specific rather than vague: furniture nudged out of place, a shadow falling the wrong direction, an object hovering where gravity says it shouldn't. Spot the anomaly and the tape itself reacts, glitching and warping as if it knows you caught it. That's a cleaner core loop than a lot of horror games manage, because it gives you a concrete task — compare, don't just survive — instead of asking you to wander atmospherically until something jumps out.

The twist that keeps it from being a static puzzle is the flashlight. According to the developer's own description, a presence in the corridor only moves when your light goes dark; keep it lit and it waits, let the beam fade and it closes the distance. That turns your one tool for finding anomalies into the same tool that's putting you at risk the moment you switch it off to conserve battery or hide. It's a neat piece of design symmetry — the thing that helps you spot what changed is the same thing that decides whether something notices you — and it's the part of the pitch most likely to hold up over a full playthrough, though nothing outside the store page can confirm that yet.

What two reviews actually say

The evidence available two days after launch is about as thin as it gets, but it's worth reading closely rather than dismissing. Exactly two user reviews exist, one in each direction. The positive one comes from a player who logged 62 minutes and reports finishing the game outright: "I just beat the game, its a super trippy realistic horror anomaly game where you track anomalies in a haunted house," going on to compare it to another anomaly-hunting horror title and call the antagonist "an ugly alien ghost nasty dude." Two independent reviewers — this one and, separately, the negative reviewer below — reached for the same genre comparison unprompted, which at least confirms MISRECORDED reads clearly as belonging to the "spot the anomaly" horror lineage rather than doing something nobody recognises.

The negative review, in Simplified Chinese from a player logged at 14 minutes, is more useful than its brevity suggests because it's specific rather than a general pan. Translated, it reads: no Chinese localisation, no achievements; it's an anomaly horror game similar to the same comparison title the positive reviewer named. Then the complaint: no sensitivity or brightness settings, no sprinting and no crouching — you can only walk at a slow, fixed pace — and the camera sways left and right while walking with no option to turn that off, which the reviewer called genuinely uncomfortable to play through. That's a concrete, checkable accessibility gap rather than a vague complaint, and it's the kind of thing that tends to matter more the longer a first-person game runs, not less.

With a sample of two, neither review settles anything about the game as a whole — Steam itself declines to show any positive-percentage badge until a listing clears a much higher review count. But taken together they agree on what MISRECORDED is (a short, VHS-styled anomaly hunt with a darkness-triggered threat) even as they disagree on how comfortable it is to actually sit through.

A studio that's paying attention

The most encouraging signal in this launch isn't a review at all. Lowfade Studios' own news feed for the game shows one post, dated the same day as launch: a bug-fix patch correcting missing intro text tied to a character named David Mercer, and closing an exploit that let players skip the loop entirely before finding the anomalies it's built around. Fixing a sequence-skip exploit within roughly a day of release is a good sign for a small, self-published studio — it means someone was watching the launch and moving fast, and it directly protects the one mechanic the whole game depends on. It doesn't touch the camera-sway or missing comfort options the negative review raised, which remain outstanding as of this writing.

There's no achievement list on the store page at all — the global achievement percentages API returns nothing for this title, and the Chinese review confirms it directly ("无成就," no achievements). For a game built around distinct, nameable moments (finding each anomaly, reaching an ending), that's a missed opportunity for both players and reviewers: it's exactly the kind of data this section usually leans on to show where a short horror game's audience actually gets to before stopping, and here there's nothing to read.

Price, platform and what's missing

MISRECORDED is Windows-only, priced at NZ$5.05 and discounted 14% to NZ$4.34 for launch week (US$3.99 down to US$3.43) — genuinely impulse-purchase money, and the one-time price carries no in-game store, no DLC and no subscription to weigh against it. Language support is narrow: only English and Turkish, both with full audio, and nothing else. There's no free demo, which is a missed chance to let buyers test the walking pace and camera behaviour the negative review flags before spending anything, especially since that complaint is about comfort rather than difficulty and won't resolve itself with practice. A same-week Simplified Chinese review landing despite no Chinese localisation existing is itself a small data point — word of the game is already reaching past its supported languages, for better or worse depending on what that player experiences with machine-translated menus.

Final verdict

MISRECORDED earns a 6.0 for a genuinely well-shaped idea — a loop you actively interrogate rather than passively survive, and a flashlight mechanic that ties your only tool for finding anomalies to your only real risk — sold at a price that makes the whole question low-stakes. It doesn't score higher because the evidence to back any of that up is about as thin as this library ever sees: two total reviews, a fifty-fifty split, no achievement data, no demo, and one specific, credible complaint about missing comfort options and a forced, swaying walking pace that a buyer sensitive to that kind of thing should take seriously before purchasing. The developer's quick post-launch patch is a genuinely good sign for support going forward. Buy it now if a cheap, mechanically distinct anomaly-hunting horror game is exactly what you're after and a fixed camera sway won't bother you; wait if you'd rather see the review count — and ideally an achievement list — grow past two before deciding.