Games Like The Archivist

The Archivist is a first-person psychological horror experience inspired by analog horror and VHS aesthetics. You arrive at a decaying wooden house, led there by chance—or by something far more deliberate. Inside, a flickering TV and a scattered collection of VHS tapes are waiting.

Each tape you discover pulls you into a self-contained nightmare: abandoned hospitals filled with shadows, forgotten schools echoing with silence, endless forests that twist on themselves, and liminal spaces that blur reality. Some tapes challenge you with puzzles and strange symbols, others with hostile presences that hunt you. Die within a tape, and you awaken where you first found it, the house whispering with static all around you.

But the house itself is not safe. With every tape you watch, the presence of the Archivist grows stronger. You never see him, only feel his gaze and hear his whispers through the static.

Your only way forward is to watch every tape, collect what lies within, and piece together the story behind this place. Yet the deeper you go, the more uncertain your escape becomes.

You cannot leave until the final tape is played. And when it ends, so does everything you thought you knew.