Breaking: Luto Is An Underappreciated 2025 Horror Gem With The Perfect...

The horrors of being held hostage by your own home.

It's happening again. You've ignored your body's alarms and pushed yourself well beyond the threshold of exhaustion. It's Monday, or maybe Thursday, but who's keeping track anymore? Your body moves independently from thought—either unconcerned or incapable of addressing the growing detachment—and you repeat the same, torturous daily routine with a mechanical ease.

You're not physically held hostage, but the belief that you're trapped becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. That's the crux of Luto, a first-person psychological horror game aesthetically similar to P.T. and narrated by The Stanley Parable's distant cousin. It's confusing, terrifying, cheeky, and touching all at once. I beat it in just two short sessions over the holidays, but that was enough to turn me into a snotty, blubbering mess by the end of it all.

"It's a game about grief," I say, like it's some profound declaration you've never heard. That may be a particularly draining statement about a game released in the same year as another anguished darling, Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, but we've been trying to figure out how to best express loss since humans first carved their portraits of grief into cave walls. And while it's only five or six hours of first-person horror, Luto is quite good at simulating what happens in the face of unbearable absence.

When I think of P.T. inspired horror games, Visage is the first that comes to mind, though Luto isn't nearly as big on the in-your-face terror. They share the same tense dread (along with the occasional jumpscare), sure, but their biggest commonality is the environmental tricks deployed by a house holding you hostage. It's all normal at a glance, but there are secrets in the walls.

As Sam, you'll repeatedly try (and fail) to reach the front door while the house and its omnipresent narrator grow more antagonistic with every attempted escape. No matter how hard you try, there's always something barring Sam from the exit. You'll find his keys, turn the knob to leave, and suddenly the screen goes black. The day is gone. You tried to exit on a Monday, but now it's Thursday, and you're in the bathroom with no way to account for the lost time. We've all been there.

He's like a tormented version of Bill Murray in Groundhog Day, but swap out all the fun romantic comedy bits with ghostly mannequins, dark hallways, and strange noises coming from the basement. Sam's inexplicable, disorienting reset often

Source: PC Gamer