Don’t Let Him In Review

Don’t Let Him In is a short psychological horror game with a strong setup: three friends on their way to a concert pick up a hitchhiker on a lonely road. I had a decent time with its unsettling mood, although the experience did not leave the same impression as the horror games I rate more highly.

The trip turns increasingly strange as the stranger’s presence disturbs the group. It is a familiar horror premise, but an effective one: the characters have invited an unknown person into the one enclosed space they are relying on to get them through the night. The game keeps its focus on that journey instead of building a sprawling world around it.

The third-person view and cinematic scenes frame the story like a compact horror film. Exploration and survival-horror sections sit between the cutscenes, while psychological unease shares space with jump scares. That makes the game more directed than a large, exploratory survival horror adventure. Its strongest idea is the situation itself: an ordinary journey with friends becomes harder to trust once someone else has entered it.

Four retro visual styles let players change the look of the experience. That choice is a useful part of its identity: a low-resolution horror aesthetic can make familiar spaces feel less comfortable, and here it complements the isolated road-trip setting. The presentation is the main attraction for anyone drawn to small, cinematic horror games.

The developer describes a running time of roughly an hour to 90 minutes. That is an estimate rather than a guaranteed completion time, but it sets a useful expectation about scope. A short horror story can work well in one sitting, with little time for the central threat to become routine. It also leaves less room for mechanical variety or for weaker scenes to be balanced by a broader adventure.

The game alternates exploration and survival-horror play with cutscenes rather than offering the kind of elaborate inventory management or large map associated with longer entries in the genre. That makes it approachable for a single sitting, but anyone hoping for a deep mechanical challenge should know that the emphasis is on the situation and its presentation.

Checkpoints matter within that compact structure. Survival sections can interrupt a cinematic story if failure means too much repetition, so having places to resume helps the journey retain its shape. They do not turn the game into a deep combat system, and the limited interaction remains a drawback. The question is how well those sections sustain the atmosphere between scenes, rather than how many systems the game can fit into its short length.

The visual options give the same journey several retro treatments without changing the underlying story. That is an appealing way to frame a small horror game, though a different filter cannot make a thin interaction more involved. I had a decent time with the premise and mood, but they did not stay with me as strongly as the horror games I rate more highly. The uncertainty around the hitchhiker was more compelling than the prospect of another mechanical challenge.