Every day, Michelle wakes up to go to her dead-end job with a boss she is either ambivalent towards, or hates. You don’t actively participate in her job because it’s just a means to an end – to pay rent, to buy food, but most importantly, to engage in her community. Her day begins the moment the sun goes down, when she pulls down the shutters on the shop and prowls the streets of her London borough. It’s when a demon called The Duchess curses Michelle to be their beloved that her liminal life begins, making her question what love really means to her.
Love is at the centre of everything in Sorry We’re Closed. Whether you’re straddling the line of the Underworld breaking the hearts of demons, or running from shop to shop to help the desperately human romances of her friends, love is the beating heart of the experience. It’s that exploration of love, how it’s fostered within our communities, how it crosses class and race, and how it defies definition, that pulls you into the next day even when the mundanity of life, and parts of the game itself, should otherwise be off-putting.
So You Want To Be A Heartbreaker?
Helping others is one form of love, but self-love is just as important – something Michelle has been lacking in the last three years since her ex-girlfriend left her. With The Duchess’ curse quickly counting down, Michelle has no choice but to search for a cure, and that’s where her expeditions into the Underworld begin.
Like the survival-horror games it pulls from (Silent Hill 3 chief among them), Sorry We’re Closed has fixed camera angles at all times when exploring, forcing you to view the world exactly the way it wants. This is what makes the ability to swap into first-person at any time while standing still all the more unsettling. It can feel a bit jarring at first, but is a great tool to witness just how detailed the areas you’re moving through are, and how many terrors are hiding just out of the camera’s line of sight.
The game has you switching between the holy trinity of survival-horror weaponry – a handaxe, a pistol, and a shotgun. What makes combat such a unique experience is that you can only attack in first-person, so you can’t always rely on what the locked camera perspective is showing you. You can’t move while aiming either, always keeping you on edge in the heat of combat. But I did say love is at the centre of everything…
The Duchess’ curse has granted Michelle a literal Third Eye that lets her peer into the otherworld, seeing a glimpse of reality amidst all the Underworld, and vice versa. When activated, the Third Eye has a small area-of-effect around Michelle that lets her see into the heart of any demon that comes close to her, attacking them right where they’re weakest. You have to aim for the heart, or nowhere at all. It’s a fun balancing act that rewards letting the enemy get close to you so you can take them down faster, and keeps a degree of the horror alive in the Underworld sections.
Outside of your main weapons, the most powerful tool in your arsenal is introduced to you just before the first boss – the Heartbreaker. Charged by defeating demons – and filled exponentially more by targeting their hearts without missing a shot – the Heartbreaker lets you peer directly into an enemy and take them out in one fell blow. The visual effect, which turns the whole screen pink and leaves nothing but an enemy’s silhouette and their heart laid bare, never grows old, even if the combat never expands past its introduction. Thankfully, some unique enemies in the later levels help to rejuvenate the limited combat system.
The one oddity is that the demons you kill and every other demon you meet are treated differently. Any demon you can speak to is worthy of civility, and there is a degree of sorrow in having to literally break their hearts and deny them the love they so covet based on the choices you make. That same appreciation is never extended to the regular demons you fight though, with Michelle at one point waving it away as ‘self-defence’, and continuing her heartbreaking without another thought.
Heaven, Hell, And Everyone In-Between
The cast of Sorry We’re Closed is small, but everyone has a role to play. There’s Marty, local record store owner who just can’t get over his love of demons, diner-owner Oakley who is deeply in love with his rough-around-the-edges boyfriend, Darrell. He owns a business too, the Taste of Heaven nightclub that employs another one of Michelle’s friends and celestial master-of-espionage, Clarissa.
While the theme of love is at the forefront of Sorry We’re Closed, the quieter themes about building a community are just as important. Is one thorn in your side what should undo a coalition, or is a chance at redemption just what it needs to survive? It doesn’t shy away from the effects governmental negligence has on a city either, and it’s resolute in the fact that people make a community, not the number of ways you can spend money. The story is framed around Michelle’s curse, but love is a two-way street, and fostering the small community she lives in is an integral part of that.
That sense of community extends to the game’s music, too. Any time you visit Marty’s record store, the focus is put on local artists, and Michelle literally spends the entire game wearing the shirt of her favourite band. Every boss in the game, who is usually someone Michelle knows, has its own unique track too complete with lyrics espousing their inner turmoil. The music feels underground, experimental, organic. Every word is a bleeding expression of art, of love for the medium. And it’s all home-grown.
These sections of the game are where the bulk of your decision-making occurs, too. Your choices are rarely world-altering, but about helping people come to their own conclusions. There is no good or evil, just what you think is best. Is it enough to put up with your boyfriend’s immaturity in hopes they’ll grow up? Should you risk your own life to save the one you love? What are the limits of love, and the beginning of obsession? The game asks you to employ your own interpretation of love here.
Horror Is The Queerest Genre There Is
Horror has always been a hotbed for societal issues. The abuse of women, the demonisation of sex, the gratuity of gore, the preying upon mass hysteria. What makes the game stand out is not the tokenisation of sexuality, but the mundanity of it. No one says they are queer explicitly, yet the themes exemplify it.
Heaven is held as good and correct, something to aspire to. Yet certain forms of love, even the very concept of love, is seen as trivial. Pointless, even. Angels are cast out for daring to yearn for this, transformed into demons. They are forced to live on the fringes of society for how they were born, while Angels are praised for simply existing, despite them all sharing the same origin.
So is it any surprise that demons lash out? They don’t even know what they’re missing, yet are forced to be seen as lesser, impure things. The Angel of Love, Chamuel, is losing his angelic form just for loving a demon. Robyn spends every waking minute trying to free their angelic boyfriend from his post. The Duchess desires to fill the indescribable emptiness in their chest by any means possible. Is it really so greedy to want to be loved? Is it worth damning us to hell?
When you unlock your Third Eye, you see demons the way they really look, in that same striking colour scheme of every other character Michelle meets. They can be unsettling, fitting more religious definitions of sexually perverse, a form of punishment enacted on them by heaven. But you can’t shy away from how human they look either. No matter how sinful they might have acted, they deserve a chance at love, too.
Sorry We’re Closed struck me deep. Every confession of love, every bullet through the heart, every day that Michelle woke up just to prove love is worth living for. Any kind of love, as long as you try. That’s the kind of game this is. Past the combat and puzzles, after the decisions and conversations. No matter what, it wants you to wake up each day and choose love.
Sorry We’re Closed is a nostalgic, single-player survival horror game. Enjoy atmospheric environments driven by classic fixed camera angles and the thrill of arcade-style first person combat. Enter the perilous demon world, collecting items and managing your resources to stay alive.
A WORLD OF ANGELS AND DEMONS
Follow the final days of Michelle as she battles to break the curse placed on her by a powerful demon looking for love. Help (or hinder!) the lives of curious residents in Michelle’s bustling London borough as you pursue freedom from your own untimely demise.
A BLESSING OR A CURSE?
With multiple endings to discover, influence your fate as the choices you make will open new opportunities to avoid or embrace the antagonist’s allure.
SURVIVAL HORROR WITH A TWIST
Taunted with a few days of freedom left, Michelle is offered tantalising opportunities to escape her curse. If she can muster her courage, brave the demon world, and keep her Hellhound pistol loaded, she might find a way to rebalance the scales of destiny.
Explore with nostalgic fixed camera angles as you delve deeper into the liminal cracks that separate consciousness and sleep. Defend with arcade-style combat in first person using demonic weapons.
Action
Adventure
Survival Horror
- Released
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November 14, 2024
- Developer
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à la mode games
- Striking art direction.
- Strong cast of endearing characters.
- Inventive use of locked-camera angles with unique first-person combat.
- Repetitive combat.
- Puzzles are often too easy.