‘Tis the spooky season, so I guess I have to review a horror game then. Developer Fossil Games and publisher Hound Picked Games offer up a slice of retro gore with Camp Sunshine.

“Camp Sunshine is a 16-bit blood-soaked Horror RPG that pits you as Jez, who is dropped off at Summer Camp. He awakes in the middle of the night to discover blood everywhere, a rampaging killer on the loose dressed in a mascot costume and himself involved in a deadly game of cat and mouse!”

Very clearly inspired by classic horror flicks such as Friday the 13th, Camp Sunshine is retro in more ways than one. As the blurb up there says, you play as Jez who attends summer camp, and wakes to find a lot of blood and dead bodies. It turns out that there is a killer bear on the loose, not a real bear but the mascot of the camp. It is up to you to unravel the story behind this mass murdering mascot and put an end to the killing before there is any more bloodshed.

There is a chance that you have already seen this game, as Camp Sunshine was originally released way back in 2016 on the PC, but it has now been unleashed on console this Halloween season. The first thing I need to address is this being labelled as n RPG, it not. There are zero RPG mechanics in Camp Sunshine at all. There’s no experience points to gain, no levelling up, no character creation/building, nothing. I have seen several places call this an RPG, even the official blurb states this is an RPG – it’s not. If anything, Camp Sunshine is more of an action-adventure title.

Playing as Jez, (as covered) you wake up at a summer camp to find a lot of blood and dead people. The gameplay has you traversing the summer camp, talking to NPCs and taking part in one huge fetch quest. That really is the game at its core. The main goal is to find 10 special items that can stop the killer mascot bear from continuing their bloody rampage. You get these items by finding 10 pages of a dairy, each one mentions one of the items that you need. In order to get those diary pages, you (usually) need to help folk around the camp. As an example, one fella has one of the diary pages, but will not give it to you until you find his glasses – so off you go, to another part of the camp, get the glasses and return them in exchange for the page. Fetch quest.

With exception to a couple of the items/diary pages, fetch questing is all you really do. There are a few mild puzzle elements, but “talk to NPC, go here, get item, return to NPC” takes up pretty much 90% of Camp Sunshine. While the game is somewhat linear, you are free to explore the camp as you please. Of course, this would be pretty perilless if not for the killer mascot bear that makes this perilous. It is that killer bear that really lifts this game up and genuinely has you on edge. Whenever he is near, there is a Friday the 13th style “Ki-Ki-Ki… Ma-Ma-Ma” that sounds off to give you a brief warning… and it is creepy. The bear can just appear out of nowhere and really give you a scare. This is a two-hit death game too, and there is no combat of any kind. When that bear does appear, you really only have two choices, run or take a hit.

Camp Sunshine has a bit of a survival genre slant to it (but still zero RPG elements). While you can only take two hits before you see the game over screen (no lives, no continues, but there is a save option), you can find and eat food to restore yourself back to your two-hit health. You also have a flashlight that needs batteries and again, like the food, you can find them around the map. Keeping your heath topped up, and your flashlight working, is key to seeing the end credits. Especially with the map and environments being so poorly lit, and tied with a John Carpenter-style synth soundtrack, it really helps sell the horror vibe.

The gameplay here is quite light, but it does capture the style of 16-bit gaming pretty damn well. The story is told really well and when you do get one of the diary pages, the backstory is filled in. It is cliché ridden, but it feels authentically ’80s horror. There’s a ton of references to famous horror films and iconic characters, and you can really tell that this game was created by people who love ’80s horror flicks. There’s a great sense of macabre humour running all through the game, and you can have a smirk on your face one second due to spotting a reference or getting a particularly funny line of dialogue – to suddenly having a killer bear trying to slit your throat. The balance between humour and horror is done very well and, at the risk of repeating myself, it is very ’80s horror.

Camp Sunshine comes with the low price tag of around £7. For that cash, you get around a 5-6 hour playtime and nothing to really do outside the story. There are no side quests, no hidden secrets (save a bizarre meeting with a Bigfoot) and the game is petty linear run from start to end. But then again, this is what games were like back in the 16-bit age. Unless you were playing an epic like The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past, then games often were short affairs… they cost a lot more than £7 though. I don’t think I’ll be revising Camp Sunshine after my finishing it, but I really enjoyed my time at summer camp and as a bit of an ’80 horror film fan myself, I really appreciated the nods, references, jokes and retro gameplay.

If you have £7 in your pocket not doing much and want a fun game to play over Halloween, give Camp Sunshine a chance. It’s bloody good fun.