The Fridge is Red Critic Reviews

The most dedicated of horror fans will find some things to love here but most gamers might become frustrated. I understand that the team at SWORD was working with limited resources. But they should have focused more on the delivery of more weird moments and somewhat scarier sequences. The Fridge Is Red has one good idea and never quite manages to create a good video game around it.

The Fridge is Red is an ambitious take on the surreal horror genre, with a mix of good and bad elements. It effectively conveys a sense of madness and nightmares with a simple but good story. The game looks and sounds wonderful even with the blocky retro elements. Ultimately The Fridge is Red falls short of great because of the gameplay. It has some good moments, but there is too much running in circles, especially for such a short game. All that said, if you like this kind of horror, it is still worth checking out.

You can see greatness from the heights that The Fridge is Red reaches, but most of the time, you’re mired in its lows. At times, it feels like the central obstacle in the game is just trying to figure out what it wants from you. What order, what direction, and what interpretation you need to arrive at. There’s definitely vision here that wants to be delivered, but it needs to be paired with consideration for the experience.

The Fridge is Red ultimately fails to conjure up the scares and often impedes its own momentum, even if there are flashes of compelling horror to be found.

While the opening 30 minutes might convince you otherwise, The Fridge is Red is an uninspired walking simulator with little actual game to engage with. A cool retro art style and sense of atmosphere dissipate out of this open fridge into the ether of a bland, empty and lukewarm room. This fridge is sadly more grey than red.

The Fridge is Red succeeds in creating a creepy atmosphere through the use of liminal spaces and excellent sound design. The world immediately pulls players in with its unsettling feeling and almost demands to be explored. However, The Fridge is Red misses the mark significantly due to the lack of consistent scares, often obtuseness of puzzles, and low-quality graphics. The Fridge is Red includes several great ideas, twisting the stress of everyday encounters into something surreal, but they never quite become fully fleshed out, and they become predictable when they all end in more or less the same manner.

Overall, the fridge is red seems like a title that would hit it off well for those who are heavily invested in niche horror experiences but for those who are like myself, the intro did not do enough to get me hooked enough to fully understand what the story was behind the demonic red refrigerator. There were hints of a more coherent story throughout the game but since that interest was dashed on the rocks at the start, it was hard to want to piece everything together. The red fridge may be tempting for some to open, but it might be best that it remained closed.