By ![Encrypted Nightmares [Game Showcase]](https://www.indiegamesdeveloper.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/03/enc-nightmares2.jpg)
Encrypted Nightmares, developed by Artur Latkovsky, is not a game that asks you to survive the horror, it asks you to broadcast it. Set against the backdrop of the dark web, it casts players as the unseen operator of a live-streamed nightmare. Your role isn’t to help or intervene, but to direct, to choose which camera angle best captures the terror, to keep your audience fixated on every twisted frame, and to rake in crypto coins for every chilling moment you expose.
The experience is as unsettling as it is uncomfortable. You’re handed control over nine camera feeds, each showing different slices of a bunker where something has gone terribly wrong. A man, your reluctant star, wakes up alone, with no memory of who he is or how he got there. The air is thick with dread, the shadows are never quite still, and yet the most terrifying part might be the realisation that he’s being watched, not just by the thing that’s hunting him, but by thousands of faceless viewers hungry for fear, chaos, and spectacle.
As the story unfolds in real time, your choices shape what’s seen and what remains hidden. One playthrough lasts about 40 minutes and is meant to be taken in one sitting, intense, uninterrupted, and dripping with dread. But don’t expect to unravel everything the first time through. The freedom to switch between feeds, to cut away just before the scare or linger on a quiet moment too long, means each run tells a different version of the same waking nightmare.
The influence of found footage and screen-life cinema runs deep through every flicker and flick of static. This isn’t about clean narratives or tidy conclusions, it’s about the feeling that something could go wrong at any second, that you’re seeing something you shouldn’t, and that maybe you’re the real monster for turning it into a show.
Encrypted Nightmares doesn’t scream for your attention, it whispers, coaxes, and pulls you in slowly until you’re complicit. There’s no safety in detachment here, just you, the cameras, and the cold logic of the crowd. Keep the feed alive, keep the fear coming, and never forget, the horrors you show are only as dark as the ones you choose to ignore.
Encrypted Nightmares is available to Wishlist on Steam
