Project Night knows exactly what it wants the dark to feel like

Heavy fog, a sodium streetlight, and a green pharmacy cross bleeding into wet tarmac. That’s most of what Project Night has shown so far, and it’s enough. Miquta Studios hasn’t revealed much of its debut horror game yet. It has revealed that it knows what it wants the dark to feel like.

Miquta is two brothers. They announced it for Steam with a teaser and no release date, and what they’re building is a first-person survival horror game in Unreal Engine 5 with the usual genre contract. Scarce resources, environmental puzzles, and the constant question of whether a fight is worth the ammunition.

The teaser is short and leans hard on atmosphere over gameplay, which is normal at this stage and also means there’s very little here you can judge on movement or feel. What it does establish is the look, and the look is the reason to pay attention.

The lighting is doing the heavy work

Horror lives or dies on what you can’t quite see, and Project Night understands that better than most announcements do. The fog is thick enough to eat the far end of a street. The streetlights don’t illuminate so much as mark positions, little islands of orange with nothing joining them up.

The green pharmacy cross is the detail that sells it. It’s a small, mundane, specific piece of a real town, and it’s the only cold colour in a scene otherwise lit like a fire. That contrast is a choice, and it’s the sort of thing you only get when someone is art directing rather than dressing a level.

Wet ground is doing work here too. Every light source gets a second life as a reflection, which doubles the number of things glowing in the dark and makes an empty street feel busier than it is. None of this is new. All of it is executed with more restraint than I expected from a first announcement.

An abandoned police station that knows what it is

The interiors put you in an abandoned police department with a mezzanine balcony, wooden desks, a wall map, a CRT monitor and a water cooler. If that reads as familiar, it should. This is Resident Evil 2’s RPD lineage, and the game isn’t pretending otherwise.

I’d rather a small team lean into a proven horror setting than fumble an original one, and the environmental work here is genuinely strong. The rooms are dressed like real spaces rather than corridors with props scattered in them. The clutter has a logic to it, like people left in a hurry and nobody came back to tidy up.

What makes it frightening rather than merely dark is the sightlines. A mezzanine means things can be above you. A room full of desks means things can be behind them. The screenshots keep putting a pistol at the bottom of the frame and giving you nothing obvious to point it at, which advertises the game’s tension better than any monster close up would.

What we don’t know yet

A lot, and it’s worth being blunt about it. There’s no release date beyond “coming soon,” no price, no confirmed platforms past Windows, and no demo. The Steam page lists TBA for every hardware requirement, which tells you the build is not close to locked.

Worth a Wishlist

If you like horror games that rely on atmosphere rather than constant noise and jump scares, this is definitely one to keep an eye on. The game already has a strong visual identity, which is often one of the hardest things for a new horror project to get right.

One of the creatures shown so far is a pale, crouched, human-like figure lurking against the tiled wall of an otherwise ordinary room. And that’s exactly what makes it unsettling: nothing around it looks particularly unusual, so the creature feels completely out of place.

Enemies are also expected to visibly change as they take damage, which could make combat feel appropriately brutal and disturbing, perfectly matching the game’s dark atmosphere.

Temper all of it with the usual caveats, which bite harder for a debut. A teaser proves a game photographs well, not that it plays well, and atmosphere is the cheapest thing to nail in a single still and the hardest to sustain across a whole game. Wishlist it, wait for a demo, and don’t get attached to a date that doesn’t exist yet.

If you want horror you can actually play tonight, our 10 best horror games of 2025 roundup has plenty that already shipped. And if the Unreal Engine 5 angle is what caught your eye, our guide to Unreal Engine for indie developers covers what small teams actually get out of it. For everything else worth playing this year, there’s our best indie games of 2026 so far.