Night Plane review – join the jumbo jet to hell in this indie horror head trip

There was always something creepy about the job-simulator genre. All those mindless automatons queueing up to use your bus, bar or bed store, or whatever workplace you are trapped in for the duration of the game. The endless repetitive tasks. The emptiness of the world beyond your corporate existence. Together, these elements scream existential terror … which is perhaps why we are now seeing a new indie sub-genre of job sim horror games, including Home Safety Hotline, Dredge and more recently, Grease Trap ’99, a Lovecraftian mystery set in a Scottish chip shop.

Now, we have Night Plane, in which you take on the role of a flight attendant on a jumbo jet to hell. It all starts kind of normally. You turn up for the first day of your new job, meet your colleagues, then take your spot at the departure gate, checking in customers and being careful to root out anyone with invalid tickets. Once on the plane, you roll your trolley down the aisle, serving booze and inedible meals, and occasionally dealing with passenger complaints. Then the plane crashes and, frankly, it all goes downhill from there.

Are you dead? Are you in purgatory? And what was that weird creature someone spotted on the wing just before the engines blew up? All you know is, you’re back at the airport, checking in customers again, only this time, some of them are demons disguised as humans and you’re the one who has to sort the people from the people-eaters.

Rendered in glitchy low poly visuals, Night Plane is another indie horror game that mimics the technical limits of the original PlayStation era to unsettle the player (see also Crow Country and Fear the Spotlight). The passengers already scare you with their boxy heads and expressionless faces, so when ghostly figures start walking across the aisle and disappearing, you’re already drowning in the uncanny valley. As the game goes on, the dialogue gets weirder, and then just turns into stutters and noises, the lights in the cabin flicker, luggage lockers open and close and rattle, and weird noises follow you. There are elements of the backrooms as well as Japanese onryō movies, as you warp between the plane and the airport, finding yourself trapped in endless passenger lounges and baggage claim areas, being pursued by heaven knows what.

It’s all overlaid with a droll sense of humour, so you tend to be laughing to yourself moments before a jump scare jolts you out of your seat. At the outset, New Zealand-based developer Liquid Static Studio cleverly lures you into thinking this is a daft horror spoof, and it kind of is, but its use of nightmarish imagery – from piles of dead rats in the janitor’s room to a recurring image of your burning plane’s wreckage strewn across a remote wilderness – is genuinely disturbing and rife with sick imaginative details.

Horror is increasingly the genre through which games dissect and examine themselves and their conventions, and Night Plane is a clever, absorbing example. You can “complete” the game in four or five hours, but subsequent playthroughs will reveal new sub-quests and endings, and priced at less than a tenner, it’s a steal. Even if you never set foot onboard this plane again, it gives you a fascinating budget flight into weird existential horror – and you’ll never take your cabin crew for granted again.