Night Security is the latest offering from renowned Japanese indie devs, Chilla’s Art.

Chilla’s Art has settled nicely into a niche of tightly knit urban horror, and Night Security fits cleanly into that scope. Most of their games are narrow in scale, forgoing complex narratives or rich gameplay for deep dreaminess and eerie exploration. While some are longer, more complex affairs like the fantastic Closing Shift, Night Security feels little more bite-sized and fleeting.

Night Security’s simple premise is just eerie enough to leave an impression.

As is common for Chilla’s Art games, the setup is brief. You’re off to work the new night shift as a security guard in an a office building. You read a note left by your supervisor that the residing guard has mysteriously quit and you’re assuming their role.

The gameplay involves patrolling each floor in the building, checking that all emergency lights are functioning, turning off the bathroom lights, and locking up the offices as you go.  Occasionally, you’ll find some poor, overworked employees lingering that you’ll have a brief conversation with before seeing them out.  That’s really the extent of the gameplay in Night Security.

There is nothing wrong with tasks like these being the bulk of gameplay, I just wished they took it further. Drilling down the nightly closing checklist and settling into the malaise of a graveyard shift could be immersive and lull you into the atmosphere, but ultimately what’s here is pretty fleeting and surface level.

It’s too bad that the gameplay is lighter in Night Security when Chilla’s Art have put out games like The Closing Shift and Karaoke which were a little more fleshed out in that department. There is a brief sequence in Night Security where you monitor security cameras, swapping from floor to floor. It was tense, and expanding moments like those or adding responsibilities to your closing check-list could have gone a long way into reinforcing the atmosphere of the game. Maybe give some reason to head back down to previous floors to investigate disturbances caught on camera? Lots to explore there.

Chilla’s art has always done a great job of creating oppressive environments. They’re always able to do a lot with a little, and taking on the setting of an office building is right within their wheelhouse.

As such, the highlight here is the atmosphere The building you patrol is quiet and deathly still in the late hours. Overhead, fluorescent bulbs buzz and flicker, vending machines rattle as you walk by, and the elevator churns to life when you flick a switch. As with all Chilla’s Art’s games, the setting feels lived in and realistic but morphed into something ominous and foreboding through low lighting and sparse connection to the outside world.

Of course, what starts as a common office building quickly turns into something sinister. As you patrol floor-to-floor, the sense of isolation and unease increases as the building becomes abandoned and unfinished.  The horror of this game is conveyed in the environment–it turns hostile, dirty and downright otherworldly. Eventually, as you reach the upper floors, the building begins to resemble something of the Otherworld from Silent Hill. It really leans into that aesthetic as the game goes on.

The beauty of urban horror is the distortion of normally safe places.

You’re not trapped in some hellish otherworld, an ominous forest, or any other location that is inherently scary. No, it’s a space you find yourself in every day, your home, your neighborhood, your office, and it’s transformed into something dangerous. Night Security takes a stab at achieving this, and I think it mostly succeeds, but the stay is too brief to really be effective.

With each floor of the building matching the one before it, almost puzzles to speak of, and the game’s runtime being about an hour, maybe less, it unfortunately doesn’t give itself time to truly settle into the dread it’s striving for.  The plot is either deeply hidden or lost in translation, which usually adds to the charm of Chilla’s Art’s catalog, but in Night Security the offerings are so sparse that it takes away from the experience.

Night Security is a brief jaunt through a spooky office building. There is some tension to be had on the upper floors before an admittedly terrifying but brief ending sequence, but these are flashes of what could have been something greater. While the office building is a simple and great setting for Chilla’s Art to explore, it wasn’t given enough time to leave a lasting impression.

Ultimately I left Night Security hoping for a longer shift.

Night Security is available on Steam