Review | The Fridge Is Red - Wishing For A Mini-Fridge

Something that might often go unsaid in any discussion about a game’s graphics or art style is how much our appreciation of a given style is rooted in our histories and experiences beyond our taste. Someone born in 1983 will have a totally different experience with a modern 8-bit-inspired game, than someone born in 2005. On the face of it, it should go without saying really, and yet saying it invites us to ask questions that can deepen our understanding of a title. What more or less does the 1983 player get from the game than the 2005 player? Does it change how a player will feel about certain moments in the game? Can these differences change the meaning of a game?

I’m not sure I need a fridge in my creepy basement.

I bring this up because I know that my reactions to PSX style games are far from universal. Being born in 2000, PS1 games were something too old for me, something only older kids or adults were supposed to see. I still associate the style of PSX games with other things that were too old for me as a very young child, movies at the video store with scary covers and memories that I’m not sure are real or dreamed. Staying up later than ever before, seeing my house in the dark for the first time, being frightened of what my parents were watching on TV in the evening purely because I knew I wasn’t supposed to be seeing it. Hostile places and moments, times I felt dangerously unwelcome. 

Great coffee. Poor service. General feeling of being watched and unease at all times.
3.5/5

It’s in these places and moments that 5WORD Team’s The Fridge is Red really shines, helped along by my own personal experience of the PSX style. The game is made up of six short horror episodes, ranging from about five minutes to thirty minutes in length, all in all taking only  around two hours to play through. Each episode takes place in a new location, some come with a unique threat, while others provide scares purely from the location itself. All episodes are visually consistent and mostly involve first-person exploration and some simple puzzles with only a few variations. The result is that, to a certain extent, the quality of each episode hinges on the location of the episode, or in some cases the puzzle or gameplay gimmick. While this means that if you don’t like one episode you have a fair shot of enjoying the next but it also means there’s a real difference in quality between the episodes.

I won’t go through every episode but there are a few of note. The first episode, “Fidgeted Sherri”, is easily the shortest of the lot. It’s essentially just an unnerving minigame, made so more by what you can’t do, than what you can. Relying much less on the location than any of the others, “Fidgeted Sherri”, is set in a dark basement and has you searching for fridge magnet letters while rooted to the spot. In the centre of the basement is a red fridge which shuffles towards you Weeping-Angel-Style every time you look away while making demonic grunts and gargles. This all has the potential to be quite silly, yet it is played completely straight, aided by some excellent sound design. You might occasionally hear scuttling in the corner of the room, or the flickering of the one dim light above the fridge, all contributing to a fantastically frantic little experience. Like all the other episodes, “Fidgeted Sherri” operates purely on nightmare logic: you are never invited to question why you can’t move, or why the fridge is like that, all you know is that you can’t and that it is. And the PSX art style completely sells it, everything lies just outside the uncanny valley so nightmare logic was easy for my brain to accept, resulting in a very effective snippet of horror.

Five out of every seven workplace incidents involve a mallet swinging down from the side of a ladder.

The second episode “For Daddy to Work” functions as an extended nightmare. This is a much longer episode than the first and reaches much higher peaks of tension. The episode is set in an office building, it’s dark outside and it’s time to leave for the day. Your floor seems empty so you’re presumably the last one to leave, so you head for the elevator, turning off the lights as you go. Even though this is pretty mundane, my brain was still in PSX-induced nightmare logic mode and the setup of “For Daddy to Work” felt like the terrifying dash to bed after you turn off all the lights downstairs, just on a larger scale. So when the elevator got stuck, halting my escape, I was terrified. The rest of the episode pays off the tension from the opening, taking you on an impossible journey through the intestines of the office, through several impossible rooms. This is also just about the only episode that feels like it has much to say beyond scares, by highlighting how little office workers are valued. Posters hint at frequent accidents that really shouldn’t be possible in an office, and a later puzzle requires you to find the dismembered hands of workers in order to get around - hinting that this devaluation is baked into the structure of the building. The episode is pretty much a shining example of the kinds of experience a short horror game can provide, it doesn’t outstay its welcome and you never feel like anything requires explanation because of how successfully it devotes itself, and you in turn, to its own form of logic. If The Fridge is Red was just these two episodes, and the price represented that, this could have been a fantastic addition to the growing market of very short indie horror games along the lines of Iron Lung or Mundaun. Unfortunately, the rest of the game takes a sharp plunge in quality. 

While I could write much more about the game’s best moments, its flaws constitute most of the playtime and are much harder to write lots of words about. This is because during the game’s best moments several things are working in harmony, whereas the issues during the rest of the game are pretty glaring. The game just stops being scary, and pretty much forgoes any kind of puzzle aside from figuring out where to go. After “For Daddy to Work”, the remaining episodes all play quite simply with some short exceptions that I won’t spoil. You are put into an infinite or impossible space, and you have to find your way around. In these sections, there is practically nothing that distinguishes the wrong way from the right, so I found myself getting lost often. One particular level I spent probably around an hour playing in total, and I reckon two-thirds of that was spent going in circles. It wouldn’t matter how terrifying the locations might be, after minutes of wandering aimlessly, I found myself bored and frustrated more than anything else. It ruined the vibe these sections of the game were going for and made it impossible for me to buy into the game’s own logic. The only thing that distinguished the right ways from the wrong were the Scary™ moments, but I honestly found myself relieved when I hit one of these moments because I knew I finally wasn’t going in circles.

Which floors are the scares on again?

Episodes three to six tended to focus more on contributing to the larger inter-episode narrative, than on being engaging horror experiences in themselves. This narrative follows the character you play in all the episodes: Mr Gilt, a husband and a father. Every episode serves as a twisted representation of an event in Mr Gilt’s life, yet the first two episodes are much less direct adaptations than the rest leaving space for some interpretation. The last four episodes pretty much tell you exactly what happened but make it slightly spookier. By spelling out these places and events they leave nothing like the impression of Mr Gilt’s workplace we get in episode two. Nothing is left to the imagination, at the end of each episode a cutscene plays of the exact events the episode adapts, removing all possibility of mystery or interpretation. It doesn’t help that the overarching narrative isn’t hugely interesting. Without trying to spoil too much, each episode tells a story of how Mr Gilt’s life gets worse, culminating in just about the worst thing that could happen to him. The most the story says is “Wouldn’t it suck if this were to happen?”, the player will answer “Yes” and that’s about it.

In the end, I just wish The Fridge is Red had committed to six truly one-off horror experiences that operate on their own nightmare logic. The visuals of the game are perfect for exactly that, and continue to teeter on the edge of creepiness even during the worst parts of the game. Instead, the disappointing larger narrative overshadows most of the game. To me, it feels like 5WORD Team felt that The Fridge is Red had to have theories crafted around it like FNAF or Hello Neighbour in order for it to be successful. Yet instead, this overarching narrative seems to have limited what they were able to pull off in each episode, with these limitations being felt with increasing strength as it reaches its mostly unsurprising conclusion. If a friend has the game and you have 40 minutes to spare, it’s definitely worth giving the first two episodes a go, other than that I really struggle to recommend this.

 The Fridge is Red  

Pros:

●       Art style perfect for dream-like horror experiences

●       Playable in one sitting

●       Strong opening

 Cons:

●       Lacklustre overarching narrative

●       Lack of spooks later on

●       Boring and frustrating for relatively long periods

●       Doesn’t have much to say