So imagine it’s 1955, you’re working the front desk of an apartment building, and your whole job is to check IDs and make sure the right people get in. Sounds boring, right? Except the city is quietly overrun by doppelgangers that can copy your neighbors down to the last detail, and the only thing standing between them and the building is you and a clipboard.
That’s Not My Neighbor is a point-and-click horror game where you play as a doorman for the Department of Doppelganger Detection, and every visitor you let through is a small gamble. Each person who shows up at your window needs to pass a checklist: does their appearance match the photo, does the ID check out, are they on today’s list, and is their entry request valid. You’ve also got a phone on your desk to call upstairs and confirm whether a resident is actually home, which becomes important when someone shows up claiming they forgot their documents. Real neighbors can forget things. So can a doppelganger trying to sell you on a story.
The ID checks are where it gets genuinely stressful because the details matter more than you’d expect. You’re looking at photos, ID numbers, expiration dates, names, and the D.D.D. approval stamp, and the doppelgangers are usually close enough to fool you at first glance. An expiration date that’s a month off, an ID number that’s slightly too long, a photo that looks almost right but not quite. The game doesn’t highlight what’s wrong. You just have to catch it yourself, and sometimes you won’t until the end of your shift when the results screen shows up lined with blood telling you exactly which one slipped through.
At first glance the art looks charming enough, all muted tones and clean cartoon lines, until you clock that some of the faces have too many eyes or don’t quite line up the way a face should. It never jumps at you with loud scares, the whole thing is quieter and more unsettling than that, and the dread just builds up over the course of your shift without ever announcing itself.
There are multiple game modes too, including a Campaign Mode with different endings based on your performance, an Arcade Mode if you want to chase high scores, and a Nightmare Mode for when you feel like the regular version wasn’t doing enough damage to your nerves. What makes it genuinely clever is that you’re never fully sure when you’ve made a mistake during a run. The game just keeps going, and somewhere in the back of your head you start wondering which one got past you and whether it matters by now. It’s the kind of game you finish and immediately want to tell someone about, so if any of this sounds like your thing, That’s Not My Neighbor is available on Steam and it’s absolutely worth your shift.
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