I first played I’m On Observation Duty at a friend’s birthday a little over a year ago, and while I was zooted out of my mind for most of the trip, the experience of playing it has stuck with me with resounding clarity. While we were all huddled together around a couch in our Airbnb, one of the members of our group took the reins of the game, which grants players access to security cameras around a certain setting. Sometimes it’s an office, or a house, but there’s always something wrong with it, or at least there eventually will be. You scan the perimeter at first to see what it all looks like when things are normal, and then eventually, “anomalies” occur that either subtly displace things or visibly worsen the situation.
At first, I was struck by how mundane it all was. I’m On Observation Duty’s action felt a bit slow to start, and I think the room was feeling it too, since we were mostly divining what object had moved two inches to the right. But just as it felt like we might turn in, things escalated. Things began to appear, and elements of the environment became visibly distorted. The barks from our crew grew from murmurs to full-on shouts, as the anomalies of the game became more aggressive and haunted. At least one person nearly lept off the couch out of fear, and before long, I’d noticed that my grip on the couch’s arm had tightened over the session. Whether I cared to admit it or not, I was scared and having a wonderful time.
I’m rarely a passive participant to horror in games. I’m typically on the sticks myself, and usually alone in a room when I do play a horror game, but I’m On Observation Duty was one of my favorite experiences because it was time spent getting spooked with some incredible people. Horror is such a social genre, it only makes sense that one of the few times I open myself up to enjoying it with other people in the room, it blows most other titles out of the water despite its simplicity. If you do pick it up, corral your funniest friends into a call or the same room, because it’s a blast this way.
I’m On Observation Duty is a series of short horror games, and most of them are discounted for the ongoing Halloween sale for anywhere between two to three dollars. Alternatively, if you’ve decided that this premise sounds like your kind of shit, you can pick up a collection with all seven titles in the I’m On Observation Duty series for about $33.