Horror has become a more crowded and popular genre in recent years, with big budget franchises like Resident Evil and The Evil Within along with many others proving that people love to be spooked. Re:Turn – One Way Trip comes from an indie studio who intend to frighten you with their 2D side-scrolling puzzle horror adventure, when five teens go camping in the woods and, yes, get separated, only to encounter monsters of the past… and the present.

The setup is certainly traditional; five teens camping in the woods and exchanging corny dialogue is a major horror trope. Even still, it works to start pulling the narrative threads together. After a fight within the group and tensions running high, Saki finds herself alone and trying to find her friends, before stumbling upon an old abandoned train. As a point-and-click puzzler, exploring the train begins to load you up with items that may be useful, creepy children’s drawings and an ominous feeling of dread. It isn’t long before you’re whisked away to the past, when the train was still operating, full of interesting passengers with mysteries of their own to unravel.

The point-and-click nature of the adventure did leave me sometimes longing for a different environment, however. Once you first come across the train, that’s essentially where you’ll find yourself for the majority of the experience. You’ll find yourself becoming very familiar with each of the carriages, in the past and present, and the 2D style of Re:Turn means that can lead to a lot of backtracking one from carriage to another. If I ever found myself stuck on a puzzle or unclear of what to do next, it just meant scouring every room and every possible clickable thing as I moved from one carriage to the next, which at times took away from the creep-factor almost entirely. While some puzzles did leave me a little confused, bringing up the classic point-and-click genre conundrum where video game logic isn’t always the same as real-world logic, for the most part I found them to be enjoyable head-scratchers.

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Re:Turn – One Way Trip has a hand-drawn pixel-art style which allows for the characters to pop off the screen, and additional mini cut-scenes, like where Saki is looking into a mirror for example, elevate the visuals further, adding more personality and detail. I also really enjoyed the soundtrack, which did an excellent job of building tension during the spooks and adding emotional layers to the more character driven scenarios, particularly towards the satisfying ending.