Game: Creepshow
Developer: PHL Collective
Publisher: DreadXP
Genre: Point-and-Click Horror Anthology
Released: August 13, 2026
Platform: PC (Steam)
Price: $14.99
Length: ~2.5 hours
Content: 1 frame story + 2 tales
Steam Deck: Verified
⚠️ Content Warning — Animal Death
PHL Collective’s own Steam listing flags disturbing imagery, mental anguish, strong language and animal violence/death. To be specific, because it’s the sort of thing people want warned about: a dog is killed off-screen in the second story, and you are then required to move its body and bury it. The ending also implies harm to a pregnant woman.
Neither is gratuitously depicted, but both are unavoidable if you play to the end.
$14.99Price
2.5hTo 100%
2Stories
16Achievements
3GBInstall
📖 Know this first: two stories, two and a half hours, fifteen dollars. Players who searched every corner and hunted every achievement finished in the same time. Whether that’s acceptable depends entirely on how much you love Creepshow — and the answer for a lot of buyers has been “not enough.”
⚖️ The Art Is Genuinely Great. Almost Everything Else Isn’t.
Let’s be clear about what works, because it’s real and it’s the reason this isn’t a straightforward pan.
The comic-book presentation is excellent. Players consistently praise the stylised environments, the menu and UI design, and the colour work — one called it “gaming in a comic book” and reached for The Wolf Among Us as a comparison. The music and sound design land well. The voice acting is solid. There’s even an option to switch between different comic art filters, which is a lovely touch.
And the comic splash pages narrated by the Creep are, by several accounts, the best thing in the game. One player put it exactly: “That’s when it really felt like Creepshow.”
Then you start walking around, and the problems begin.
The Creep has picked these out just for you
“When you finish this, it feels like they made a quarter of a game.” That’s from a player who wanted to like it — and it’s the sentence that keeps recurring in different words.
Creepshow is a point-and-click horror anthology from PHL Collective, published by DreadXP and based on Shudder’s Creepshow series. It launched in August at $14.99 and sits at Mixed on Steam, with recent reviews also Mixed.
Our verdict: This indie point-and-click adventure captures the delightfully twisted spirit of Creepshow with genuinely unsettling horror vignettes. The spirit is there. The game around it needed considerably more time in the oven.
Where’s the Creep?
💀 He’s Here. He’s Just Not Hosting.
This is the loudest complaint in the reviews and it needs stating accurately, because it’s been slightly garbled in the discourse.
The Creep does appear — he narrates the comic splash pages that open each tale, and those moments are repeatedly singled out as the high point. But the framing narrative is hosted by “The Reader,” a mysterious fortune-teller Danny meets.
For a chunk of the audience, that substitution is the problem. One reviewer was blunt: “Where is the famous Creep?! Throw the new purple fortune teller in the garbage.” When your franchise has a mascot as recognisable as the Creep, benching him for an original character is a decision that needs to earn itself, and for many players The Reader didn’t.
Worth being fair: the Creep isn’t absent, and the splash pages using him are the most Creepshow-feeling part of the whole package. The frustration is more that there isn’t more of what works.
Two Stories, and One of Them Lands
🐛 Metamorphic Love
The first tale. Camp, gross, genuinely funny — the one players point to as feeling properly Creepshow.
⛪ The Toll Keeper
The second. Longer, slower, and the source of nearly every complaint below.
🛒 Danny’s Story
The frame narrative — a bad day at the mall, and the truth about Danny’s father.
🔍 Missable Items
Hidden collectibles mean a second playthrough is needed for all 16 achievements.
The split is stark. Metamorphic Love draws genuine affection — the bug-wife premise is exactly the kind of lurid, silly, faintly horrible idea the source material trades in, and players enjoyed its camp. The Toll Keeper is where the wheels come off: one reviewer said it “bored me to tears,” and it’s the setting for most of the technical and design problems.
There’s also a defence worth airing. On the absence of multiple endings, one player argued that since these are framed as comics you’re reading, linearity is appropriate — a comic’s plot isn’t malleable. That’s a fair reading of the conceit, and it’s more generous than “no choices” usually deserves.
The Technical Problems Are Serious
🐛 One of These Requires a PC Restart
The bug list from players is long, and one entry is considerably worse than the rest.
The startup hang. Per one player: if you launch the game and click away to another window before it reaches the menu, it can refuse to finish loading — and become unkillable. Task Manager won’t close it. The only fix they found was restarting the computer.
That’s not a rough edge. That’s a process you can’t terminate, and it’s the single most serious thing in this review.
The rest, all reported repeatedly:
• The action button frequently does nothing. Players describe leaving an area, returning, and hoping — or reloading
• Textures fail to load
• Items reappear after being collected, and can be picked up multiple times
• You can see through walls in places
• Mouse input is unreliable — several players couldn’t select actions with the mouse and kept a controller on standby. You also can’t rotate the camera with the mouse at all
And there is no manual save. Which means every time a bug forces a reload, it’s a lottery how much progress you lose. That single omission makes everything above hurt considerably more than it needs to.
And the Design Problems Are Real Too
🚧 Missing Walls, Broken Puzzles, Useless Items
The second story doesn’t fence you in. Areas you have no reason to visit yet are wide open, so players report wandering for seven to ten minutes into a dead end, then walking all the way back. Invisible walls exist for exactly this reason and they aren’t here.
Some puzzles appear to be genuinely broken or unsolvable. One player never solved two of them — the graveyard shed and a third coin — searched online, and found nobody else discussing solutions either. They eventually discovered they could simply move on, which raises its own question about what the puzzles were for.
Items you can pick up that do nothing. Multiple players collected objects, hunted for uses, and found none.
No stakes at all. Your character can’t be hurt in any situation. One reviewer identified that as the root of the tedium — with no possibility of failure, walking between interaction points stops being tension and becomes admin.
Smaller stuff: the running animation draws mockery, a priest walks with a cane in a way that doesn’t match his animation, and there’s a visible gap between a bedroom and hallway you can walk into.
Things to Know Going In
📋 Setting Expectations
• $14.99, with a historical low of $11.99 at launch. Roughly 2.5 hours including a full achievement hunt
• Mixed on Steam across 75 reviews, and Mixed on recent reviews too — so it hasn’t recovered since launch. No OpenCritic score
• Two stories plus a frame narrative. Multiple reviewers expected three or four tales and said so
• Strictly linear — no dialogue options, no branching, one ending
• Keep a controller handy. Mouse input is unreliable enough that several players switched
• Steam Deck Verified with full controller support — genuinely the better way to play it
• Only one listed accessibility feature, which is thin for a dialogue-heavy narrative game
• Eight languages, with full voice audio in English
• Runs on almost anything — a GTX 960 minimum on a 3 GB install
• The ending is widely called abrupt, both for the second story and the game overall. More than one player used the word “letdown”
The Good, The Bad, & The Ugly
| The Good |
The Bad |
The Ugly |
| The Comic Presentation Is ExcellentStylised environments, strong colour work, genuinely well-designed menus and UI, and switchable comic art filters. “Gaming in a comic book” is how one player put it, with a Wolf Among Us comparison that isn’t unearned. |
The Creep Isn’t HostingHe narrates the splash pages — the bit everyone loves — but the frame story belongs to The Reader instead. For a franchise with a mascot this recognisable, benching him needed to earn itself, and for many it didn’t. |
A Bug That Needs a PC RestartClick away during startup and the game can hang unkillably — Task Manager won’t close it. The only reported fix is rebooting. That’s not a rough edge, that’s a process you can’t terminate. |
| The Splash Pages Nail ItRepeatedly singled out as the high point. “That’s when it really felt like Creepshow” is the recurring sentiment, and it shows the team understood the source material — they just didn’t build enough around it. |
The Second Story DragsMetamorphic Love has genuine camp charm; The Toll Keeper “bored me to tears,” per one reviewer, and hosts most of the design problems. Half the content landing is a hard split at this length. |
No Manual SaveIn a game this buggy, being unable to save on demand turns every forced reload into a lottery over lost progress. It’s the omission that makes everything else worse. |
| Music, Sound and Voice Work All DeliverThe soundtrack draws consistent praise, the sound design does real atmospheric work, and the voice acting is solid throughout. The presentation layer is not where this game fails. |
Nothing Can Hurt YouYour character never takes damage in any situation. With no possibility of failure, walking between interaction points stops being tension and starts being admin — which one player correctly identified as the root of the tedium. |
Puzzles That May Not Be SolvableOne player never cracked the graveyard shed or found the third coin, searched online, and found nobody else discussing them either. They then discovered they could just move on — which raises the question of why the puzzles are there. |
| Steam Deck Verified, and Cheap to RunFull controller support, a GTX 960 minimum and a 3 GB install. Given the mouse input problems, handheld with a pad is arguably the intended experience. |
Items That Do NothingPlayers collected objects, hunted for uses and found none. In a point-and-click adventure, pickups that lead nowhere aren’t mysterious, they’re just noise. |
It Feels Like a Quarter of a GameTwo and a half hours to 100%, two stories where three or four were expected, an ending everyone calls abrupt, and open areas with nothing in them. “This feels like a demo” came from a player who’d hoped otherwise. |
The Verdict
There is a real understanding of Creepshow in here. The comic-book art direction is genuinely lovely, the splash pages narrated by the Creep are exactly right, the music and voice work hold up, and Metamorphic Love has the lurid, silly, slightly disgusting energy the source material runs on. Nobody involved was phoning in the aesthetic.
What’s missing is everything around it. Two stories in two and a half hours, at fifteen dollars, with a second tale that most players found a slog, puzzles that appear to be broken, items that do nothing, open areas that lead nowhere, and an ending that stops rather than lands. The phrase that keeps surfacing in reviews is some version of “it feels unfinished,” and it’s hard to read the feature list and disagree.
The technical state compounds it. A non-functioning action button is annoying; a non-functioning action button in a game with no manual save is a reason to stop playing. And a startup hang that survives Task Manager and requires a reboot is the kind of bug that should have blocked release.
The honest read: wait for a sale, keep a controller plugged in, and go in knowing it’s an evening rather than a game. At $11.99 or below, Creepshow fans will find enough here — the art, the splash pages and the first story are worth seeing, and two hours is a reasonable ask for that. At full price, with these bugs, it’s very hard to recommend.
The frustrating part is how fixable most of this is. Manual saves, invisible walls, a pass on the puzzles and that startup bug would move this game a long way. A month on, the recent reviews are still Mixed — which suggests those fixes aren’t coming.
For more game reviews, check out our full reviews section.
Score Breakdown
Art Direction & Comic Presentation8.5/10
Music & Sound Design8.0/10
Steam Deck & Controller Support8.0/10
Faithfulness to the Source7.0/10
First Story — Metamorphic Love7.0/10
Second Story — The Toll Keeper4.0/10
Technical Stability3.0/10
Accessibility Options3.0/10
Final Score
5.5/10
Creepshow — PHL Collective
Understands the source material. Didn’t finish the game around it.
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