Don’t Chat with Strangers

Don’t Chat with Strangers is a horror-themed graphic adventure game where players must navigate a series of puzzles while interacting with a mysterious and malevolent entity through a computer chat interface. Set in a fixed side-view environment, the game employs point-and-click mechanics and insta-fail scenarios to create a tense atmosphere as players attempt to survive the vengeful ghost’s torment, with each failure revealing new ways the protagonist can meet a grim fate.

Don’t Chat with Strangers: Review

Introduction

In the vast, often unforgiving landscape of indie horror, a game emerges not as a polished gem, but as a fascinating, flawed artifact. Don’t Chat with Strangers, a 2017 point-and-click horror puzzle game from solo developer Bartosz Bojarowski, is one such artifact. It is a title that embodies the very essence of the “janky” indie experience—a game with a compelling, modern-premise mired in technical shortcomings and punishing design. This review will argue that while Don’t Chat with Strangers ultimately fails as a satisfying game, it serves as a crucial case study in the perils and peculiarities of solo development, a title whose ambition is strangled by its execution, yet whose very existence speaks to the raw, unvarnished creativity that defines the genre’s periphery.

Development History & Context

Don’t Chat with Strangers is the product of Hugeowl, effectively a pseudonym for Polish developer Bartosz Bojarowski. Developed with a minuscule team—credits list only Bojarowski as developer and publisher, Joanna Efenberger as concept artist for loading screen illustrations, and Małgorzata Bojarowska as a test engineer—the game was a quintessential one-person project, released into the wilds of Steam on January 6, 2017.

This period was the height of the “Walking Simulator” and narrative-focused indie boom, but also a time when Steam’s gates had been flung open, leading to a deluge of low-budget, often experimental titles. Don’t Chat with Strangers was born into this ecosystem. It was developed with the RPG Maker engine, a tool known for its accessibility but also its limitations, which explains the game’s fixed, side-view perspective and pixel-art aesthetic. The technological constraints are palpable; the game’s interface is often described as clumsy, with no in-game exit option, requiring players to force-close the application.

Bojarowski’s vision was to tap into a very specific, modern anxiety: the fear of the unknown entity on the other side of a digital conversation. This was a novel twist on the classic ghost story, transplanting it from a haunted house to a haunted chat client. However, the landscape was also crowded. The game had to compete with polished, narrative-driven experiences and a slew of other indie horror titles. Its development context is one of big ideas and brutally limited resources, a combination that would ultimately define its reception.

Narrative & Thematic Deep Dive

The plot of Don’t Chat with Strangers is deceptively simple. You control an unnamed male protagonist who, in the middle of the night, is contacted by a girl named “Lucy” on a chat client. The initial premise is a clever subversion of online dating tropes; what begins as a seemingly benign conversation quickly spirals into a life-or-death situation where a wrong reply means a grisly, pixelated demise.

The narrative is not a traditional, linear story but a branching web of failure states. The core mystery—who Lucy is and why she is terrorizing the protagonist—is the driving force. Dialogue choices are limited to selecting from predetermined phrases, and the game’s cruelty is in its obscurity. As critic Gary Hartley noted, “There are sensible ways to keep the girl happy… Some are more obvious than others; should she request to play an online game, don’t destroy her at it and then act smug.” Other choices are utterly inscrutable. Choosing the color black as a favorite triggers her wrath, while a question about “lasagna” (heavily implied to be a sexual euphemism) must be answered with the non-committal “One day, I will” to avoid a “bizarre death scene.”

The true narrative progression is locked behind a gauntlet of illogical puzzles. A critical moment involves a forced system update that crashes the computer. To proceed, the player must not re-open the chat program (which causes an instant game over) but instead find Lucy’s phone number hidden in an error log. This number is randomly generated with each playthrough (starting with 555), forcing memorization. Calling her reveals ambient audio clues (a river, railroad tracks) that hint at the location of her body, which the player must later find on a world map and bury in a quick-time event.

Thematically, the game attempts to explore digital alienation, the performative nature of online identity, and the horror of the mundane becoming lethal. However, these themes are undermined by a narrative that feels less like a crafted story and more like a compendium of gotcha moments. The payoff, as noted by multiple critics, is profoundly lacking. The “true ending” involves simply burying the body with no further explanation, catharsis, or narrative resolution. The promised mystery dissolves into an unsatisfying, abrupt conclusion that feels like an admission that the journey itself was the point—a journey primarily consisting of frustration.

Gameplay Mechanics & Systems

The core gameplay loop of Don’t Chat with Strangers is a brutal cycle of trial, error, and permadeath. The game is played from a fixed side-view perspective of a single room, with interactable objects including a bed, a radio, a lamp, a computer, a phone, a door, a window, and a Latin cross on the wall.

The Core Loop: The player must navigate a conversation with Lucy via the computer, making correct dialogue choices to avoid death. This is interrupted by:
* Environmental Puzzles: Certain actions must be performed in a specific order. Turning on the radio after the lamp causes the radio to explode. The lamp must be on to prevent a bed monster from appearing. A gas leak must be fixed by clicking the door, but clicking the door while feeling unwell leads to an overdose suicide.
* Mini-Games: Lucy often challenges the player to “Buttons,” a monotonous button-mashing game. Winning by too large a margin angers her. The other mini-game, “Mech vs. Fruits,” is an arcade shooter that becomes a critical path objective later, requiring the player to reach level 6.
* Illogical Triggers: The game is filled with instant-death traps that defy player intuition. Rotating the cross on the wall upside down summons a giant cross that crucifies the player. Calling emergency services (911, 999, 112) causes a vehicle to crash through the wall. A robot toy in the room can apparently come to life and electrocute the player under vague conditions.

The UI is frequently cited as a major flaw. The game lacks a proper menu system; exiting requires Alt+F4. Upon death, the game often freezes on the corpse, with no indication that the ESC key must be pressed to restart.

This design philosophy creates what Darkstation’s review perfectly described as “a ten minute experience stretched into three hours via insta-fail and permadeath mechanics.” The gameplay is not about clever problem-solving but about rote memorization of a very specific sequence of actions, making subsequent playthroughs feel less like mastery and more like data entry. The “innovation” is its relentless punishment, a system that feels less like a challenging horror game and more, as Darkstation put it, “like a practical joke being played on the gamer.”

World-Building, Art & Sound

The world of Don’t Chat with Strangers is claustrophobic by design. The entire experience is confined to a single, sparsely decorated bedroom, which effectively sells the feeling of isolation and vulnerability. The pixel art is functional but rudimentary, evoking the style of older RPG Maker horror games like Mad Father or The Witch’s House, but without their polish.

The atmosphere is the game’s strongest asset, at least initially. The side-view perspective creates a voyeuristic, diorama-like feel. The sound design is crucial: the ping of a new chat message is a potent source of anxiety, and the use of silence, broken by creaks and the hum of the computer, builds a palpable sense of dread. The piano melody that plays during a key sequence is a noted highlight, a moment of eerie beauty in an otherwise abrasive experience.

However, this atmosphere is brittle. It shatters quickly under the weight of repetition. The same jump scares—a ghostly apparition appearing to slit your throat, the bed monster—lose all impact after the fifth reload. The sound of the gas leak, once a creepy indicator, becomes a tedious signal to click the door yet again. The art, while effective in screenshots, reveals its lack of animation and detail during extended play. The attempt to expand the world via a static map screen for the ending feels tacked on and underwhelming, a stark contrast to the intimate horror of the bedroom.

Reception & Legacy

Upon release, Don’t Chat with Strangers was met with largely negative critical reception. It holds a 48% aggregate score on MobyGames based on four reviews. The consensus was clear: a great premise hamstrung by fatal flaws. Steam Shovelers (60%) called it “promising” but “plagued by many of the same problems found in recent Steam releases: overworked one-person team rushed release, game-hindering bugs and a general feeling of being unfinished.” OPNoobs (50%) concluded that while accumulating death-based achievements was “undeniably fun,” it wasn’t “enough to make the title shine.” HonestGamers (40%) and Darkstation (40%) were far harsher, critiquing its clumsy execution and lack of payoff.

Its legacy is twofold. First, it exists as a cult object within Let’s Play culture. Its high concentration of ridiculous death animations made it perfect for content creators like Markiplier, who featured it in a two-part series in 2017. For these audiences, the game’s flaws became its features; the frustration was the entertainment.

Second, and more significantly, it serves as a textbook example of specific design pitfalls. It is a case study in how excessive reliance on trial-and-error can alienate players, how a lack of user interface polish can break immersion, and how a compelling premise requires a satisfying conclusion to land. It stands as a monument to a certain type of ambitious but unrefined indie game that flooded the market in the late 2010s—games remembered not for their quality, but for their intriguing ideas and memorable failures. It did not influence a wave of similar games but rather serves as a cautionary tale of what happens when a great concept lacks the necessary design scaffolding to support it.

Conclusion

Don’t Chat with Strangers is not a good game by conventional metrics. Its gameplay is frustratingly opaque, its narrative is unsatisfying, and its technical presentation is amateurish. Yet, to dismiss it entirely would be to ignore what makes it a fascinating subject for critique. It is a raw, unfiltered expression of a solo developer’s vision, a game that captures a specific modern anxiety with a startlingly original premise.

Its failure is ultimately one of execution, not of imagination. The promising terror of a haunted chat log is squandered on a repetitive loop of instant deaths and illogical puzzles. It is a game that is far more interesting to read about, or to watch someone else suffer through, than it is to actually play. In the annals of video game history, Don’t Chat with Strangers secures its place not as a classic, but as a poignant relic—a stark reminder that a great hook is only the beginning of the journey, and that without the meticulous craft to support it, even the most terrifying digital stranger can become a tedious nuisance.