Enola is a Horror Game About Living With the Pain of a Loved One

I needed a minute after I played the Enola demo at PAX East.

demo at PAX East. Some horror games can have that effect on me, but this one was different. While searching for the female main character’s girlfriend, I had witnessed a lot of imagery that disturbed me. Broken mannequins lay all over the place, carefully displayed in ways that made little secret of what had happened to the missing woman I was looking for. Enola isn’t speaking to our fear of supernatural creatures, but of the very real vulnerabilities a woman would feel while walking home alone at night. This is a game about living in the aftermath of the sexual assault of a loved one.

Developer The Domaginarium’s new trailer will show you that this is a horror game about dodging monsters in the dark, but those monsters are all human beings bent on hurting you. These men move quickly and with little warning, slipping out of the darkness to attack while all you can do is mash the keyboard in hopes of getting away. It shows the character making a lot more contact with these men than I’d seen in the PAX East demo, where I only saw one man and he was on top of me so quickly that I almost died instantly. It’s a more conventional horror game trailer that may draw more eyes to it, although I don’t know if it’s conveying the game’s tone and subject matter very well. Still, it’s another peek at the game for those interested in seeing how Enola ‘s coming along.

We’ll soon be seeing how well Enola deals with its difficult subject matter soon, as the game will be releasing in full on Steam this September. The demo, filled with tender moments between the main characters, showed touching as well as dark sides of their story together, so I do feel confident that this game will do a good job conveying what it’s like to live with a loved one hurt by sexual violence. It’s very touchy subject matter that the trailer doesn’t do the best job of conveying, but the demo I played did. The story seemed to be the most important part when speaking to the developers, and hopefully that will come through in the game when it launches.