I look outside the window, and everything is burning down. The night sky casts a gloomy glow over the wasteland that used to be my comfy little neighborhood. The streets outside are full of masked government agents and dead bodies. I hear a knock on the door, and I check the peephole before opening to see if it’s safe. It’s not. Staring at me through the glass is a freakishly tall man with a forced grin who looks like he’s possessed by the devil. This nightmare is the world I was thrust into when I first played “No, I’m Not a Human,” and although the gameplay was rough, the aesthetic left a very deep impression. 

“No, I’m Not A Human” fully released on Sept. 15 and is one of the most unsettling horror games of 2025, and one that hit a little too close to home. The basic premise is that you play as an unnamed player character (PC) who has shut himself in his fortified home during the apocalypse. The sun is so hot it burns people during the day, and strange monsters known as Visitors are digging themselves out of the ground and killing people. Most frightening is that the Visitors are exceptionally good at mimicking humans to the point it can seem impossible to tell if someone is a real human or not. 

Every night, people come to visit the player’s home, and I had to figure out if they were human or not. If you’re wondering where the strange title of the game comes from, it’s from the core gameplay mechanic; you have to figure out which people are real humans and which ones are monsters mimicking us, because there are dire consequences for getting it wrong. 

Deciding whether or not to let a guest in poses a moral dilemma: if the player chooses to let in a person, and they are a Visitor, they can kill other people in the house. However, if the player refuses to let them in, this can result in an innocent person dying because the player would not help them. So it is both a strategic and ethical decision to do something as simple as open the door.

If there is a risk of these guests being monsters in disguise, you might ask: “Why would I let anybody into my house if they might be a monster?” The answer is: the player must have at least one normal human (not a secret Visitor) in his home to survive the monster known as the Intruder. On certain nights throughout the game, a horrifically tall man with distorted features known as the Intruder will stalk PC’s house and knock on the door. The Intruder cannot be killed or reasoned with; the only means of surviving him is his strange “rule” that he will not attack the player if there is another person in the house with him. I wonder if this rule is perhaps a broader comment on isolation and the need for community. 

A major selling point of this game I want to praise is the atmospheric art style. “No, I’m Not a Human” spurns realism in favor of stylized graphics that make the game look like a scuffed 1980s VHS tape. It has a lot in common with the “analog horror” genre that has become popular on the internet in recent years. Some characters have warped faces and limbs like something out of a fever dream. Everything is dark, unclear, broken and strange. When I looked out the door, the sky behind the guests was full of swirling black clouds over a city on fire with rioting. The disturbing art style cleverly complemented the feeling of being a normal person trapped in a crisis. 

Something that stood out to me was the lack of music and noise. The game has no memorable music I can recall, nor does it have many sound cues. It doesn’t even have voice acting. All dialogue is done through text boxes like a comic book. The static from the TV and radio was usually the loudest thing in the room. It was admittedly a creepy ambience for a horror story, but it got boring quickly. 

The game has a rather claustrophobic feel. Nearly the entire game takes place inside one small house. The rooms are all rather drab and neglected, and somehow look more depressing with equally ugly guests to fill them. The player can strike up a conversation with these people during the day, but it usually leads to them rambling about their personal trauma or something equally unhelpful. It didn’t take long for me to get tired of the dour mood in the air.

A strange design choice of the game I don’t like is the Visitor testing system. The player can examine a character’s eyes, their hands, and various other qualities, which can reveal whether that person is actually a human or a monster pretending to be one. Visitors may show some of the symptoms, but not show others, making it very difficult to tell if they are a human or not. After testing a guest, the player can choose to shoot the guest with their shotgun if they think that person is a Visitor, or spare them if they are innocent.

Here is the major issue with this system: the player is also not allowed to test every person in their home in one day, and only has enough “energy points” to perform a few tests in a day. This seems absurdly unrealistic to me because in a whole day there should be enough time to test every person. “No, I’m Not a Human” is about survival through telling the humans apart from the Visitor mimics, but it also does not allow you to do the things you logically need to do to make a smart decision. 

Another primary criticism is that the main antagonist, the Intruder, follows an arbitrary set of “rules” that are never explained to the player and don’t make any sense. The Intruder never provides a reason why he will only kill the player if they are alone, nor is there any exposition or other characters explaining why. After the first few visits, I actually thought it was funny how the Intruder was trying so hard to be scary, only to run away from my door like some kind of teenage prankster. 

At first, this horror game is very exciting because of the dark and disturbing atmosphere, but it quickly starts to feel like a silly mess because it is based on rules that are complete nonsense. Most attempts to survive and win the game are doomed to failure because the intelligence of the player does not matter; the player will probably lose anyway because they are not allowed to take the actions that would make sense to solve the problem. This makes the crisis feel somewhat forced because there are solutions to the issue, but the player can’t use them because the game wants to artificially make you feel helpless and afraid. Yes, I am aware that trying to scare the player is the point of a horror game, but the way the developers tried to achieve this instead made it feel cartoonish and absurd instead of frightening. 

“No, I’m Not a Human” is called a “horror” game, but I felt more frustrated than scared. After my first few hours, it started to feel like a cheap Halloween haunted house. It’s a shame because the developers had some truly great ideas to work with. The art and atmosphere make it frightening in places, but the game ultimately is held back by a lack of polish. Altogether, I would rate “No, I’m Not a Human” a 6/10, and would not recommend it. You can get a better game for $15.

“No, I’m Not a Human” is available to play on Microsoft Windows computers through the Steam gaming service.