ABOVE Turns Sunlight into a Threat
ABOVE is a compact, daylight psychological horror experience that leans on atmosphere and tension rather than combat. You play Joyce, a lone park ranger stranded beside her disabled car on a remote Idaho desert road. The engine is dead, there is nowhere to hide for long, and the constant impression is that something above is watching, listening, and waiting.
The game unfolds entirely in broad daylight, which is part of its unsettling trick. Open ground and temporary shelter replace shadowy corridors and locked doors, and the lack of a safe, permanent refuge makes every decision feel consequential. As you move through scrub and sand, scattered diary fragments and short radio exchanges reveal a small, tragic story about family, guilt, and sacrifice.
Survival Without Combat
ABOVE is minimalist in its survival approach. There is no fighting; survival depends on movement, awareness, timing, and careful choices. The game uses sound based tension as a core mechanic. Some noises will attract unwanted attention, so how and when you act matters. Tools in the world help you observe the environment and sometimes hint at what moves within it, but they are neither cures nor guarantees.
Objectives are environmental and often require planning and nerve. The design encourages risk and reward: being noticed might speed things along, or it might be fatal. Subtle systemic pressure ramps up with each mistake, and light procedural variation ensures runs are never exactly the same. The result is a tight, tense loop that asks not how you fight, but how you endure.
A Quiet, Personal Story
The narrative is delivered through exploration. Diary fragments and brief radio snippets piece together Joyce’s situation and the emotional core of the game. ABOVE aims for emotional impact over jump scares, using a personal, human thread to give weight to the looming, ambiguous threat overhead. Themes of loss and sacrifice are central, and the game makes those themes part of the survival loop rather than a separate layer.
Because the story unfolds in small fragments, the atmosphere grows as you learn more. The desert keeps its secrets, and the act of piecing them together is as important as escaping them.
Playtime, Replay, and a Small Warning
ABOVE is designed to be completed in a single sitting, with an estimated playtime of about one hour. Procedural objectives and the sound based mechanics give it replayability beyond a first run, and the compact structure keeps the tension focused.
Content warning: the game contains themes of psychological distress, loss, and sacrifice. There is no graphic violence.
If you like tightly written, atmospheric experiences that reframe familiar spaces as sources of dread, ABOVE looks built to take bright daylight and make it quietly terrifying.
