Sorry We’re Closed is the debut venture from á la mode games. It is a survival horror game infused with dreamy bubblegum pop vibes as you’re introduced to a colourful cast of characters amidst a world that is filled with people, angels and demons in disguise in modern London. It’s yet another fantastic queer survival horror game, among others, to come out in 2024. We keep winning.

Players control Michelle, a down-on-her-luck punkish girl who is recovering from an ugly breakup, is short of money and doing the night shift at a corner store. Despite friends in her life loving and cheering her on, something has felt missing in her life. Then one night she gets cursed by a demon known as The Duchess and she’s doomed to be stuck in the demon world of her grungy London life, now seeing angels and demons that hide among the humans. Suddenly her dead-end job and heartache are the least of her problems.

Michelle’s biggest issues lie in how the hell she is going to overcome her curse, and it seems the answer is in triumphing The Duchess, an androgynous demon ruler who has their sights set on Michelle to make her their love. With a similar and recent queer horror title Fear the Spotlight being all about queer love, Sorry We’re Closed is not just about queer love, but queer toxicity. The Duchess has spent millennia searching for love in the hopes that it will fix them. Michelle is just their latest obsession in this venture. She, having gone through this ugly breakup with her ex-girlfriend is not that naive. She knows love doesn’t fix people, but damn does she miss the familiarity of love.

As you progress throughout the game you meet a bunch of new demons and angels, including several of Michelle’s friends that unveil they had this other form, the whole time. Whether it is lowly demon rat creatures or ethereal-looking Gods carved of marble, you learn of their willing support for the Duchess, or their wanting to knock them off the throne and take it for themselves. Suddenly several options for how to take down (or obey) The Duchess appear. Helping greaseball Darrell, scum of the Earth’s right-hand man to The Duchess, make right with his boyfriend can give you key information to taking down the evil overruling demon. However, this comes with a cost. It’s going to ruin your bestie Clarissa’s club as he becomes empowered to overtake the club night he’s been feuding with her over.

The most tantalising offer to help you conquer The Duchess comes from Lucy, a fiery double-headed demon that promises they can bring Michelle’s ex back to her should they succeed in her mission of helping them become the new throne ruler. At first, this doesn’t seem like an enticing choice; breakups are often the inciting incident that helps someone grow as a person and be more independent. On the other hand, the world is a dark and scary place. Michelle is horribly lovesick. Why wouldn’t she gravitate to something familiar even if it’s inevitably going to hurt her all over again? At least then she doesn’t have to deal with the banal quiet of being a broke 20-something in a grungy London metro. In all of this, you begin to learn of the demon and angel hierarchy, an enticing set of worldbuilding  Whatever she decides to side with, she only has a mere number of nights to do it and the only way to do so is by helping and influencing the people around her.

While you are exploring the highs and lows of the soul, you’re also exploring both ethereal otherworldly structures and dark, dingy and depressing environments. Early dungeon runs include an abandoned subway and aquarium filled with demonic cockroaches, rats and bloody beasts. Blood stains linoleum floors and incessant, indecipherable ramblings are scrawled on walls. In later areas, you feel like you’ve ascended into heaven, with environments bathed in light, gold-plated gates and doors and statues carved from marble. These environments are depicted in a low poly style, emblematic of PS2 horror games. An art direction choice that both indie horror creators and fans like me alike can’t get enough of.

Sorry We’re Closed also employs another feature of beloved horror games: fixed cameras. It’s long debated whether some games of the past used this technique due to budget and technical constraints, but undeniably the result if done right is some stellar mood. There’s no exception here. Each level is laid out intricately and thoughtfully. Church depths in a mid-game portion of the game get more gothic and eerie the more you explore. Models of knights line halls, spike traps await under floors and the foundations around you are crumbling. Some sections become immensely cinematic as the camera pulls out to a 2D perspective and Michelle climbs a long set of what feels like endless stairs in a giant underground structure. Save a late area where you have to do some tedious running through maze-like environments, you’re never stuck all that long and puzzles aren’t all that deep or intrusive. Things just keep trucking.

Following being afflicted with her curse, Michelle now has a third eye that can be opened at the snap of her fingers (or, y’know, Space Bar on the player’s keyboard). An aura around her pulses and she can see the same environment from the perspective of the past, before everything was set to decay. Not only is this handy for finding hidden crates full of items that are in one scene but not the other, but more worldbuilding into how the deep and dark secret Underworld of modern London came to be. It’s compelling bonus nuggets of storytelling and does become crucial in more in-depth puzzles in the late game.

This constant flicking between the two perspectives is thoroughly enjoyable and fluid. It’s essentially merging the brilliance of both classic and modern Resident Evil. It only really lets up in the sense that the melee swings you’re pulling off with your axe feel a little too sluggish and like they don’t connect quite as correctly as they should. Similarly, I would’ve liked the first-person perspective to be utilised for more puzzle-solving in the same way the third-eye was. It never really reaches that puzzle-solving potential, but if all else at least it looks cool when you’re blasting demons to smithereens.

These kinds of setpieces are awesome and incredibly memorable, bolstered even more by the unique choice of using original music for a majority of these boss fights. What genre is that music, might you ask? Oh, just some incredible ear-wormy rap music. It works so well for the out-of-this-world vibes the game is setting and it created gameplay moments that I’ll be thinking of for a while yet. It’s the kind of needle drop that leaves a lasting impression on you the way Strange Scaffold games have also lately done. Remember how cool it was to experience the gameplay visual and audio feast that was the Ashtray Maze in Control? Sorry We’re Closed has several moments of that calibre.

Everything touched by the art department of Sorry We’re Closed feels dripped in gold. I’d be remiss if I didn’t also mention how stylish, striking and frankly unbelievably hot its cast is. Michelle sports a choker and star earrings with long fairy floss blue hair, a giant oversized pink parka that sits over a band tee with shorts and combat boots. The Duchess is straight up in BDSM-looking gear with a gothic black crown and bodysuit to match. Lucy, the demon you’re always chatting with to save your game has two heads, each with horns and a long tongue. She sports a pink necklace that reads ‘Baby.’ She called me a good girl a few times in the game and I’m still struggling to dust myself off the floor after the puddle of goo I became. There’s Chamuel, a Greek God-looking hottie who is a centaur with angel wings and a heart of gold… I could go on for days. Even the characters that are reprehensible are hot! Darrell is the worst and still, he’s a himbo supreme who’s constantly shirtless with spiky blonde hair and a fiery tattoo on his chest.

Overflowing with grungey but also dreamy colourful vibes, Sorry We’re Closed is magical. I’m glad we’re at a place where characters can be different kinds of hot. Finally a game with a lot of hot punks. Finally, a survival horror game that isn’t exclusively dark and dingy. At long last, we have girly pop survival horror. If I weren’t a serious critic, I’d be grading the game a 10/10 in style alone. The substance almost makes all tiny issues with the game, be it the occasional combat clunk or the umpteenth time I’ve engaged in a chase encounter in a horror game in a maze, melt away. It’s just that good. Rolling credits on Sorry We’re Closed, I’m still left wondering what on Earth I just played. What I do know is that it was something incredibly badass and infinitely cooler than I can ever strive to be.