Playable Archive is free on Steam, but it wants one uninterrupted hour

"Free" is usually where I start looking for the catch. With Playable Archive, the horror freebie from the developer of The Mortuary Assistant, I found one, and it's refreshingly small. The game doesn't want your money. It wants an hour of your evening, all in one go.

It arrived on Steam on 26 October, and although everyone calls it a Halloween treat, the store listing shows no end date on the free price. So you haven't missed anything just because Halloween is over. That's not a promise it stays free forever, but there's no countdown and no key to hunt down either. You need a Steam account, you press Play Game on the store page, you install it and launch it from your library. No DLC or in-app purchases are listed.

The fine print

There are no saves. Steam lists it at 30 to 60 minutes and says plainly that it has to be played in one sitting. Treat it like a film: don't start it at a quarter to midnight, and don't start it ten minutes before someone needs you in the kitchen.

It's English only. Interface, audio and subtitles, nothing else. The tags say investigation, detective and puzzle, so I'd expect understanding what you hear and read to matter more than in a horror game where you mostly run. It isn't one for the kids anyway: the developers warn of strong language, violence, murder and references to the occult.

It's a PC game, and an undemanding one. The minimum is Windows 10, a 2.4 GHz dual-core CPU, 6 GB of RAM, a GeForce GTX 960 and 2 GB of storage. That GPU dates from 2015, which is the best news here for anyone in our region who has been putting off an upgrade because a new card is a real hit to the household budget. The listing says nothing about Steam Deck or controller support, so I wouldn't promise either. With no saves, a handheld on a train isn't where I'd test that.

What you actually get

The setup is an anonymous whistleblower's archive about a New England couple who find a strange object while renovating their home, with demonic rituals, contact with the dead and multiple timelines tangled up around it. What makes it interesting is where it came from. It's a small slice of Brian Clarke's much larger cancelled Paranormal Activity game, and PC Gamer compares it to P.T., the Playable Teaser for Hideo Kojima's cancelled Silent Hill. The full game isn't coming back, and not everything from it made the cut, so go in expecting a fragment rather than a complete horror campaign.

At the time of writing, 97% of its 308 Steam reviews are positive. That's a small sample, and nobody paid anything, which tends to make people kinder. Still, the risk here is 2 GB of disk space and an hour.

There's also a small decision attached. When I checked, The Mortuary Assistant itself was €10.49 on Steam, down from €20.99, as part of Steam Scream Fest, which Valve's schedule has ending on Monday 2 November. The store page marks the discount as part of a sale event but didn't show me the date, so verify that yourself. Playable Archive isn't a demo of that game, but it's the same developer's idea of dread, and it costs nothing to find out whether that works on you before you spend a tenner.

Mostly, though, I like the principle. Cancelled games usually die on a drive nobody ever opens again. This one got to leave an hour of itself behind, and that's more than most of them get.

Image: Zalasem1 / CC BY 4.0, source: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Camcorder_VHS-C,_Panasonic_NV-RX17.jpg