Krypta FM Review: A Delightfully Spooky Taste of Cryptid Hunting

Developer: Under the Sink Studio
Publisher: Under the Sink Studio
Release: July 19th, 2024
Platform: Windows
Available From: Steam
Price: Free

At ten past nine every evening, he sends you out into the darkening world. He's the presenter of Krypta FM - pronounced with the chopped staccato of every good radio announcer as Kryp! Ta! FM! - and you are his eager listener and hopeful protégé. Sniff the evening air. Breathe deep! The small-town world that lies sleeping all around you is just teeming with cryptids, surely. Anyone seen a mothman lately? A werewolf? Grab a camera and get out there - but be safe, okay?

The genius, of course, is that Krypta FM, a short - and entirely free - exploration game, sends you out into two worlds at once. There's small-town Poland, with its abandoned train stations, dark woodland roads, and flickering street lamps, and there's the world of 2006, when the game is set. This era gives you chunky digital cameras with dodgy batteries, bulletin boards with flame wars and talk of "netiquette," and PC desktops still in thrall to Frutiger Aero. Because of this, Krypta FM is several things at once. It's sinister and nostalgic. It's creepy and often oddly sweet.

That's a wonderful combination for a game, and it's all driven by a simple, deeply evocative idea. Odd things are happening in your village, and you're hearing about it all online and on the radio every evening. It's a quietly snug business, being part of a club, an informal group that believes there's more to the world than most people are willing to see. So each in-game day, you get nudges towards what you should be investigating. What's been savaging cattle? Who's sending up smoke in the forest? Someone on the Krypta FM forums is talking about Tarot cards. Someone else wants you to get a picture of a statue in a graveyard.

These daily, or rather nightly, objectives give you just enough of a sense of structure as you start exploring a surprisingly rangy open world. There's your little house at the centre of it all, with its radio dial set to Krypta FM, the noble bulk of your PC monitor strobing through screensavers on the desk, and the narrow hallway to the front door where it gets so gloomy you'll already need to turn on your flashlight. But beyond that, and beyond your scrabbly garden with its missing fence panels and chain link gates, there's the paved road, the rest of the village, and everything that lurks just out of view.

And these places provide the game with its most evocative moments. Woods so dark that even with a torch you're moving between the prickly absences of trees and bushes you can't really see. A railway station that's currently padlocked and out of reach. There's that graveyard out there somewhere, but where exactly? And what's with the hissing, crackling electricity pylon out beyond the point where the road paving gives way to rutted mud?

You'll explore all these places and get to know them well. This is because your mission to snap pictures of local weirdness and post them on Krypta FM's bulletin boards flings you away from home in every direction. All very straightforward. But you'll linger in this haunting world far longer than it takes to just grab some photos. You'll be there until the whole place starts to feel real, and this is because of the map you use to find your way. It's a hand-drawn affair that you need to hold up in front of you and read by torch. There's no marker that magically appears on the map to show where you are, and no helpful compass rose that points you in the right direction. You need to work it all out for yourself, and rather than frustration, it makes for an ingenious bit of wonkiness that provides a lot of the spookier kind of fun to be had here.

And as you work it out, you start to realise that this map is defined by its abstractions. A road that seems short and straight on the map may be three times longer and filled with energising kinks out there in the real world. And it might be really, really dark. And you might wander in the right direction for a very long time, each new footfall making you more and more sure that you've left the correct path behind and are trudging into oblivion. Keep going? Turn back? Can you even find your way back from here?

This is prime territory for jump scares, and over its short running time, Krypta FM has at least one of these that is thrillingly simple and effective. But the game also knows when to hold off on tapping you on the shoulder or leaping out in front of you. The moments I remember the most are when I was out there in the woods and I was sure something was about to happen, but then it didn't. Krypta FM's world feels real in part because I spent so much time lost in it, sure, but also because I spent so much time just standing there amongst the trees, wondering if I was actually alone, or whether something - a beast? the hovering intent of the game's designers? - was out there with me.

So rather than shocks, this is a game most commonly punctuated by moments of relief. Just as I gave up hope, I would stumble upon the thing I was meant to photograph and I'd snap a decent picture of it. Lost in the woods I would glimpse the amber glow of town in the distance and I'd suddenly know the way home. Back on the forums, a picture I'd thought was a bit of a botch would get a decent reaction: I'd feel that peculiar buzz that comes from being part of an online community and of someone else's world, even though I only appeared in that world through the curved screen of an old monitor, the modern equivalent of Madam Leota's head floating in a crystal ball.

This is the sweetness, I think, that consistently balances out everything that's creepy in this stretch of midnight countryside: along with the promise of cryptids and photo assignments and local cultists and satanic graffiti, Krypta FM promises community, and creates a growing sense of belonging. The names on the forums start to become familiar, and I begin to be able to anticipate the things they might say, the replies they might leave under my posts. The map slowly starts to make sense, and by day three, say, I'm leaving the house pretty confident in the direction I should be headed in. Photo objectives are ticked off my list and the story of what's truly going on out there starts to come into focus. I go to bed buzzing at what I've seen, and the next day, at ten past nine, I'm ready to turn on the radio again and hear that familiar voice.