Kinophobia
Explore a haunted movie studio. Learn the fates of the tormented souls bound to it. End a 50-year curse inscribed in blood and celluloid.
KINOPHOBIA is a parser game about exorcising ghosts, becoming a rabid cinephile, and the terrible price of success.
- A 'database thriller' inspired by games like Return of the Obra Dinn, The Roottrees are Dead and Immortality, covered head to toe in blood.
- An intricate investigation into the lives and deaths of dozens of characters. Read documents, do in-depth research, get help from online movie sickos, and maybe employ a little magic.
- An entire parallel history of cinema to uncover, from 1970s New Hollywood to 1990s schlock and sleaze.
- Manhandle cursed objects and murder weapons. Dissociate into hallucinatory vistas of grotesque horror. Throw up so hard you expire.
Includes a web-based interpreter, a short introductory manual for those new to the parser genre, a diegetic map, and in-game hints. Approximately six hours of play.
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Development log
- KINOPHOBIA - V378 days ago
- KINOPHOBIA - V2Nov 03, 2025
Comments
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Hello! I really liked this game.
A couple of small things:
- When you have the shredded carpet in inventory, it replaces the "x floor" command.
- In the final confrontation, when asked if you know who he is, "say yes" is wrong. (Maybe I too literal here).
- He then also makes a typo: 'guessting'.
- Another typo: "q letterboxd" has 'fillm'.
Don't let these small things discourage you. I want to improve a great game.
Just wanted to echo so many of the other comments - I really enjoyed this game, it hits all the core detective / database notes of its inspirations while bringing a unique style to the nascent genre. Great work!
Loved this! Had a couple moments at the end where I needed to look at the walkthrough (turns out "search desk" will not automatically "open drawer" 🙃) but otherwise thought it was really well balanced. At the end it said I got "8 out of 9 additional mysteries" -- what were they??
Excellent game! I didn't know I wanted a parser-based database thriller until I played this, and now I want more.
Absolutely adored this game! Perfect mix of logic, investigation, research, and a need for copious notetaking/timeline construction. Writing was spot-on. I would echo the other comments about making loading/saving instructions clearer though - I can see this catching on with puzzle fans who aren't familiar with this style of IF and don't know the conventions.
(also, I ran into a bug with the later sequence with the car etc. - I got through, then immediately bumped back to the car a second time, and couldn't progress that time, had to reload an earlier save)
Do you remember any more detail on what you did in that sequence so I can try to repro the bug?
I realized afterwards that I should’ve kept my save to send to you, but I overwrote it. What I can remember:
Spoilers
I was leaving Jen’s office, got put into the car scene. Not sure what I did at this point - I know I didn’t examine the car or wait, I might’ve looked around at other things or tried to move in a direction. Something (in retrospect an error message) came up about… the game not knowing where I was? And being placed into the next scene. Can’t remember the wording, I thought it was part of the game initially so I didn’t note it. I got through the next scenes fine, made it back to the studio, and then either looked around or tried to move again, was immediately put back into the car scene, and couldn’t do anything to escape - I saw the description of the car, but nothing came out of it. Once I exited and restarted from where I saved, I was able to get through those scenes normally without error.
Question: Did you run into the Crimson Highway at a point where you were exactly halfway through the game (ie, you had 12 out of 24 ghosts locked?)
Edit: Okay, assuming that what happened there is what I think happened, 1. what an obscure bug to encounter, you need to do things in a very exact way 2. This should be fixed for the post-comp release.
Really enjoyed this, I love this style of deduction game. I'm not a fan of parsers, and there were definitely a few points where that aspect frustrated me, but the mystery elements were enough to get me past that.
Excellent tone, pacing, and execution. Loved the letterboxd reviews. Great addition to the canon of dinnlikes!
Great game! I enjoyed it a lot!
One small comment, it's not quite clear how to load a saved game, I only saw restore command in the very end, maybe I missed it previously. Perhaps it would be helpful to add info about save and restore in the ABOUT section.
Thank you for much for tremendous work on this! Very impressive!
hey man very cool i love this game. however the game does not tell you you lose all your progress if you lose the tab. please include a note about needing to type SAVE in the "about" command instead of just in the readme so you don't lose an extraordinary amount of progress. thanks!
Wish I had seen this comment before. I didn’t see any obvious way to save so figured it’d be cached on the browser, but you lose all progress if you come back to the game after closing the tab. To be fair it is on the how to play card, but figuring it was typical command I missed it. It’d be nice to have a note come up at the start of the game or in the page description. (This is on me for not reading the how to play card as it is there, but it would be good if it was highlighted that the game doesn’t save progress as you go.)
:sickos: im still early poking around but this one's got its teeth in me hell yeah