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On April 7 2026, indie game developer RedSensationGames released their horror title Narin: the Orange Room to the world. This game centers on a young schoolgirl named Narin, who wanders into the mysterious Twilight Realm in search of her sister, accompanied by a talking cat. This realm takes the form of a haunted version of her school that she must navigate through while avoiding vengeful ghosts of those who were bullied in the past. Is this horror title worth playing, or should gamers consider transferring to another school? Let’s dissect the game piece by piece and make the decision for ourselves!
Simple and Stimulating Exploration
Gameplay in Narin: the Orange Room takes the form of a simplistic survival horror title, where the player must navigate their way through a nightmarish school, often needing to collect items or solve puzzles to progress to new areas. Each room in the game has a purpose, whether that be to progress the story or offer a new puzzle.
Examining objects around the school won’t often lead to progression, but it does give the player a better grasp of Narin as a character, as she talks about how she is absent from class trip photos or how lunches make her nostalgic for the times she spent with her sister. She’ll also occasionally have typical survival horror protagonist snark when examining objects like a broken vending machine.
Now, one might think the game being set entirely in a school might lead to an experience where you’re only walking through classrooms and other expected areas, like a cafeteria. However, you will quickly find that this is anything but an ordinary school, as once you get to the main hall, you’ll see a large angel statue and no less than two chandeliers.
While every area in the game is designed to look like a school, Narin will be navigating through many strangely designed areas, like a maze of walls or a basement with dolls hanging from the ceiling. These strange areas truly help the game from feeling as stale as other horror games set entirely in a school.
Mixed Horror Gameplay
Narin isn’t alone in this school, however, as there are multiple hostile ghosts that will attempt to catch her. Because Narin is a child, you have no way of fighting back against these entities and must hide, with an icon at the top of the screen warning you when a ghost is nearby.
This style of horror gameplay is one that can get old very fast if the solution to each encounter is exactly the same, but thankfully Narin: The Orange Room has unique set pieces for all of these ghosts, and many of them involve actively moving while avoiding their sight instead of being passive.
Easily my least favorite of these ghost segments was the one involving the janitor in the game’s second chapter. Being forced to passively hide in lockers for him to walk by is a type of horror game design that I find to be dull. Thankfully, these segments were all short, as ghosts do tend to move on quickly in this game.
In contrast, my favorite section of the game was the chapter where you need to avoid the Scissor Girl. This chapter had the player exploring multiple rooms in the school to collect items that would help them progress through other rooms in the same area, like a classic Survival Horror game.
Aside from avoiding ghosts and collecting items, the only other gameplay mechanic in Narin: The Orange Room is picking up bottles from trash cans in order to throw them. More often than not, this is done in order to hit light switches or objects that Narin cannot reach on her own.
While this isn’t a complex mechanic and mostly exists to add some extra stress in rooms with ghosts, as the player knows they will need to be out in the open long enough to aim their throw.
Because of its short length of around six hours, Narin: the Orange Room rarely pulls the same trick twice. This applies to both scares, story, and the gameplay, which gives the game a nice sense of pacing and prevents it from getting stale.
A Decent Narrative with Presentation Issues
Due to the short nature of the game and its being a story-driven experience, I will not speak a lot about the narrative of Narin: The Orange Room in order to keep this review a spoiler-free experience. All I will say is that while predictable, the narrative of the game and the character of Narin herself were enjoyable. However, I do have some comments on the way it is told.
Characters in Narin tend to say just a sentence too much, especially during moments where the player themselves must choose to speak with them. Narrative twists from the end of the game become incredibly obvious when a character says something along the lines of “This seems familiar, but why?”. Sometimes less is more, and I wish the game had held back on foreshadowing as much as it did.
Another slightly annoying thing is how often Narin will stop the player in their tracks in order to repeat a solution after the player has already figured it out. This breaks the pacing of what is otherwise a very brisk horror experience.
I would also heavily recommend that any gamer interested in playing Narin: the Orange Room is to switch the game’s audio track to the original Thai. The English audio for Narin is extremely stilted and has the potential to ruin emotional moments later in the game. Alternatively you can opt to play the game without voice acting to avoid a strange disconnect caused by Narin being the only voiced character in the game.
A Lack of Terror
Graphically, Narin: The Orange Room isn’t the most impressive game in the world, but I do quite enjoy how the game’s various models (especially Narin’s) look while playing. While the 2D art is also nice, Narin herself only has a few facial expressions, which can lead to a feeling of repetition during the story as she reacts the same way to most events.
While the game is decent graphically, it unfortunately fails when it comes to actually animating its world. More often than not, objects will teleport from one state to another, with the most glaring example of this being when a pair of mannequins break in front of the player by transitioning from being intact to just lying on the ground in a single frame.
This flaw, unfortunately, extends to the ghosts who are trying to attack Narin. If you get captured by one, you’ll just get a brief animation of the ghost staring at your screen before respawning at your most recent checkpoint.
Any horror these enemies could have invoked is completely drained when you see that all they will do is stare at the player before sending them back to a checkpoint half a room away. The absolute worst of these, unfortunately, came from my favorite of the ghosts, as the scissor girl does not even appear to attack Narin at all, but rather just moves her scissors slightly before you respawn.
A lack of true horror is something that plagues the game in general. While I am thankful that the game had an almost complete lack of cheap jump scares, which simply flash an image with a loud noise on the screen (there was one, but it had to be initiated by the player), the game doesn’t provide much to scare the player beyond ghosts and occasional environmental details.
Overall, I would describe Narin: The Orange Room as a decent game that unfortunately flounders many of its horror elements. While I did enjoy my time exploring this school and liked the character of Narin herself, it’s hard to compliment this title as a horror game. However, with a price tag of only $15, it’s hard to imagine those who are interested in this type of experience being disappointed with the game.
Narin: The Orange Room
Bottom Line
Narin: The Orange Room is a short and simple horror experience and a good showcase of what the small team at RedSensationGames is capable of. The game's twisted school setting and variety in both puzzle and horror sequence design keep it from getting stale. However it is held back by several animation issues and design choices which drain the game of the potential to being truly scary. Despite these issues, those who are interested in this style of Horror game should still be able to enjoy their time with Narin.
