Every so often, a title lands on my desk that resists simple categorisation. Developer npckc’s (stylised as) a pet shop after dark is one such anomaly, a short, deceptively complex game that demands a brief plunge into mild spoiler territory just to explain how its cogs actually turn.

“PETSITTER WANTED. A horror point-and-click adventure game. Water the plants, feed the pets, and DON’T turn off the lights.”

While the official blurb leans into the horror label, calling it such misses the mark. It is atmospheric, mildly unsettling, and draped in a quiet unease. It’s spooky, a bit creepy, but it steers entirely clear of visceral gore or jump scares. That restraint is a masterstroke: it broadens the game’s appeal, welcoming players who might otherwise recoil from heavier psychological or blood-soaked horror titles.

The story is deceptively mundane. You step into the shoes of an unnamed new employee at a local pet shop. Your responsibilities are amazingly straightforward: water the plants and feed the (mysteriously invisible) pets. Once your chores are done and dusted, you turn in for the night. The next day, the owner turns up, pays you (a lot), and that’s it; the game is finished… or is it?

This is where I have to part the spoiler curtain just a fraction. a pet shop after dark is an interactive graphic novel with a bit of point-and-click gameplay thrown in. Once your workday wraps and you drift off to sleep, and the next day starts, the software breaks, the game crashes, and you get error messages. But this is pure narrative staging. You find yourself thrust into the meta-textual underbelly of the game, where the boundary between player and developer dissolves, and you must actively tinker with the game’s (in-game) local files to manipulate the world.

As an example of an early puzzle, you need to turn the shop’s lights off… but there’s no conventional light switch. So how do you do it? Well, not by hunting for a hidden pixel; you need to dig into the directory folders, locating the file handling the lights, and delete it outright. No file, no light. This cheeky, boundary-shredding logic forms the backbone of the experience. What starts as a tightly bound four-screen floor plan starts to open up the deeper you dig into its digital entrails.

Puzzles are woven into every corner of this surreal ecosystem, each solved beat acting as a lever to advance the overarching mystery. Some riddles click into place with satisfying intuition, whilst others lean into a more archaic, obtuse brand of trial-and-error frustration. A built-in hint system exists, but it feels frustratingly capricious, available only when the game deems it appropriate, meaning you will occasionally have to lean on assistance just to claw your way forward.

Yet, the narrative pull is magnetic. It is clever, self-aware, and thoroughly committed to its fourth-wall-breaking conceit. Even when certain design hurdles feel a touch stiff, the sheer satisfaction of watching the story unravel makes the friction worthwhile.

Reviewing the title on Xbox, however, exposed an annoying mechanical hurdle: the console controls are undeniably sluggish and finicky. Movement relies on a sequential snap-to system rather than a free-roaming cursor. If your highlighter rests on the far left of the screen and your interactive prompt goal sits on the far right, you are forced into a tedious, repetitive sequence of directional taps: tap right, tap right, tap right, just to bridge the gap. Coupled with a difficult-to-see visual indicator, a fluid virtual cursor or directional arrow would have smoothed out navigation immensely.

Clocking in at roughly just over an hour, stretching slightly longer if a particular puzzle stalls your momentum, a pet shop after dark doesn’t overstay its welcome. That brief runtime is matched by a modest price tag under £9, making it an exceptionally refreshing way to spend an hour or two. Despite the stubbornness of the console port’s control scheme, this is a delightfully idiosyncratic trip well worth taking if you are craving something eerie, inventive, and wonderfully strange.