Paper Ghost Stories: 7 PM | Xbox Review

November 5, 2022 Alyssa White

It’s spooky season, and I was craving a short yet scary game to celebrate with. Cellar Vault Games’ Paper Ghost Stories: 7 PM scratched the itch that I had while also leaving me hungry for more. This is a prologue to their upcoming title Paper Ghost Stories: Third Eye Open, and I am very much looking forward to that title now.

Chills and Thrills

Paper Ghost Stories: 7 PM takes place in Malaysia on the day of the Hungry Ghost Festival. It starts with three children (Wen, Ming, and Lun) sitting around their neighbor Aunty Fung. She regales them with a true tale of the family that just moved into the apartment next door. Aunty Fung becomes thirsty before getting to the juicy part of the story and asks the children to fetch her water bottle from her apartment. Simple and innocent enough, right? Wen offers to go get it, but creepy incidents featuring paper dolls soon start occurring. The other two children are also affected by the same horrid visions.

The scares are all of the jump variety, but they are incredibly effective. I was startled by each one that popped up and left a little shaken up afterwards. It’s not the scariest game I’ve played, but it succeeds where other horror games sometimes fail.

Paper Trail

The nightmarish apparitions aren’t the only things that are paper dolls in Paper Ghost Stories: 7 PM. Each character is also a paper doll, and the entire world is made out of paper as well. I loved this unique visual style and spent way too much time just looking at the details of mundane objects. This also adds an odd creepiness to the entities of the game as well, with their stilted movements and their sinister, drawn on facial expressions. I’ve never encountered this aesthetic in a horror game before, and it’s an effective method of providing visual scares. I also appreciated the footnotes the developers included during the segments of dialogue. Malaysian words and phrases are used, and these were an immense help in fully grasping what I was reading.

Play With Us…

The mechanics of this game are a mixture of those found in visual novels and adventure games. You’ll select dialogue options, but you’ll also engage in a few minigames and explore the environment looking for objects. It’s not a challenging game, and it doesn’t punish the player if they mess up. This will either be a turn off or an appealing aspect of this title, depending on who is playing.

Multiple playthroughs are encouraged. It’s easy to miss clues, hints, and story beats in just one go, and the story is fascinating enough to warrant returning again and again. Each of my runs only took 30 minutes to complete. I just wish the ending wasn’t so abrupt each time. As soon as the game would really sink its claws into me, the credits would roll. It makes it feel more like a demo for the upcoming full-length entry than a fleshed out prologue. I also wished that there was an option to skip past dialogue I had already read in previous playthroughs. Instead, I just had to repeatedly mash the A button to manually skip.

The Final Verdict

Paper Ghost Stories: 7 PM is a wonderful, bite-sized entry into the horror genre. The story was fascinating and returning for multiple playthroughs was rewarding. The paper doll aesthetic is also a visual treat. I just wish it had been a tad longer, but it does have me eager to check out Paper Ghost Stories: Third Eye Open. It’s an easy recommendation if you’re looking for a short but sweet, spooky experience.

This review is based on an Xbox copy of Paper Ghost Stories: 7 PM provided by Stride PR for coverage purposes. It is also available on PC via Steam.