Sorry We're Closed Review (Switch eShop)

To call à La Mode's Sorry We’re Closed a survival horror is certainly accurate in many ways, but it also does a disservice to just how unique and fresh this debut title really is. While it absolutely borrows a few elements from genre classics like Resident Evil and Silent Hill (including the obvious PS1-inspired visuals), Sorry We’re Closed is quite unlike anything we’ve ever played before, and it’s bloomin’ marvelous.

The basic premise sees you take on the role of Michelle as she grapples with her emotions over a bad break-up while fending off a demonic entity known as The Duchess. Yeah, this game is filled with angels and demons – Dan Brown would have a field day. The Duchess places a curse upon Michelle, one which will force her into a loving, all-worshipping relationship with the demon within a few short days.

You gain the power of The Third Eye, enabling you to peek behind the curtain of reality and glimpse an alternate world in which demons are made manifest. We’re not just talking gross, zombified demons, though; Sorry We’re Closed features a wonderfully diverse cast, most of whom harbour a demonic side revealed via The Third Eye.

Take Robyn, for example: serving as Michelle’s guide throughout the game, they look quite cool enough with their trapper hat and fur-lined leather jacket, but activate the Third Eye and suddenly they spawn an awesome pair of horns and a swishy tail. This is perhaps the most subtle transformation, however, since other characters morph into completely different versions of themselves, including a trio of businessmen who quite literally transform into Cerberus.

The game is split between spending time in a small, bustling London borough where you can chat with your friends and acquaintances and traversing demonic environments littered with enemies, locked doors, and puzzles – AKA survival horror 101. Focusing on the social elements first, though, Michelle can accept optional tasks from her friends, thus influencing the final outcome.

Discovering which ending you wind up with is a solid incentive to spend as much time as possible talking with each character, but even if the game lacked this element, the writing and presentation are remarkable enough to keep you invested in its world. Each location, including a music store and a nightclub, is brimming with colour and personality, with funky, catchy music playing in the background, all bolstered by instant visual changes initiated via The Third Eye.

The good news is that you can spend as much time as you like with the game’s social elements before progressing the story. You can either hightail it to your main goal straight away, if you wish, or lose yourself in quirky drama for hours on end. We’d recommend not powering through the game as fast as possible, however, since a lot of the horror presented is directly tied into Michelle’s life and her relationship with her peers.

The sequences in which you’re alone and fighting off against ferocious demons feel incredibly reminiscent of vintage survival horror. You’ve got fixed camera angles, puzzles in which you combine items and activate them with in-game objects, and, of course, lots of creepy enemies. The main difference here, however, is how you take on your foes.

Starting with an axe, Michelle soon finds herself in possession of a pistol and a shotgun. Aiming your weapons shifts the perspective into first-person mode. Here, you can either shoot your enemies from a distance and slowly chip away at their health, or you can wait for them to come into close range, activate The Third Eye, and aim directly at the demons' hearts. Some smaller enemies can be wiped out immediately this way, while others have hearts that shift within their bodies, requiring three or four shots to vanquish them.

Aiming carefully and blasting the hearts without missing a shot is highly encouraged since doing so will activate a special ability known as ‘Heartbreaker’. This is essentially a super-powerful blast from your shotgun that can eradicate any normal enemy in one go while drastically cutting down the health of boss characters. Activating Heartbreaker results in a slick animation in which Michelle carefully aims the shotgun towards the silhouetted enemy against a bright, bold pink background. So cool.

When we encountered our first couple of enemies and started aiming in first-person mode, something felt a bit off. Aiming was too twitchy with the right analogue stick and it just didn’t work all that well. We needed more fluidity, more precision… we needed gyro controls. Our hearts sank briefly as we opened the options menu, dreading that the dev had overlooked this crucial control option, but thankfully gyro is present and correct, and it makes combat encounters infinitely more enjoyable. We’d highly recommend activating this from the start and cranking the sensitivity up a bit for the optimum experience.

There’s another optional change that you can implement within the menu: tank controls. By default, you have a modern control scheme, but tank controls make the game feel more authentically ‘survival horror’. They work well enough, but turning left or right can actually make Michelle walk backwards a lot of the time; perhaps an issue with sensitivity, but since it can't be altered, it can prove frustrating. As such, this is actually one of few examples of the fixed-camera genre in which modern controls feel better, though this will come down to personal preference, and we’re thankful that à la Mode at least included it as an option.

If there’s one thing that we think is missing from Sorry We’re Closed, it’s voice acting. To be clear, the game works perfectly fine without it, with dialogue boxes accompanied by a satisfying sound effect, but if the developer ever feels the need to revisit this project and give it the Disco Elysium treatment, that would be very welcome. It would give the characters that extra boost of personality and really make the beautiful, ethereal world sing even more.

Finally, it's worth noting that the Switch version is capped at 30fps compared to the 60fps seen on the original PC release. It's not the kind of game that necessarily feels worse because of it, but if you're sensitive to that kind of thing, it's worth keeping in mind. Similarily, the initial load into the game can be quite lengthy, but once you're in, transitioning between most environments is reasonably swift, with slightly lengthier loads between the social settings.