Horror Pharmacy
I know I have to reach in. I don’t want to.
A first-person horror shift where routine is the trap: take an unseen customer’s order, find the specimen in a wall of drawers, weigh and bottle it, then decide how long you can keep pretending the things inside are all dead.
The player creates the encounter by doing the work the shift demands.
- Experience
- Hand-led, tactile survival horror
- Platform
- PC · first-person
- Project stage
- First-person concept · hand-interaction prototype
Follow the game’s story and defining mechanics below.
H4 interaction-test controlsShow controlsHide controls
The first-person test rig uses WASD movement and mouse look. The H4 scene is a hand-to-drawer interaction spike; the final player control scheme is not yet set.
After midnight,
work becomes a dare.
The shift begins at a counter with no visible exit. A narrow customer slot separates the player from the people who keep arriving after midnight. A prescription comes through first; a voice or a small sound follows. The customer stays out of sight, turning the slot into the only connection to a world the player cannot inspect.
Then the work becomes physical. Find the prescribed material among the drawers, open one, reach inside, measure the amount, sort it, bottle it and pass the order back. Most specimens look dry and harmless. One may still be alive. The player chooses whether to listen, look closer, feel around or take the quickest handful and live with the result.
The design gives the ritual a long memory: seven regular nights lead into a final night, each shift changing one part of what felt routine before. A creature that slips away can become a presence in a later shift; captured specimens can be kept in jars as a record of what the player chose to bring back from the drawers.
There is no weapon, health bar or combat build to convert fear into a fight. The pressure comes from completing an ordinary order with a hand the player must willingly put somewhere unseen—and from wondering what will answer when the drawer is opened again.
Read a customer’s order, choose a drawer, reach in and collect the required specimen. Weigh, sort and bottle the ingredients before returning the prescription through the slot; an escapee may make the next night feel less empty.
Routine with nowhere to hide.
The player creates the encounter by doing the work the shift demands.
Work through the slot
The unseen customer gives an order and waits beyond the counter. Voice, paper and the occasional hand are the player’s only evidence of who is on the other side.
Turn the prescription into a route
Find ingredients across the drawers, take them by hand, weigh and sort them, then prepare the bottle the order calls for.
One living specimen changes the rule
Most drawers hold dried material. A living creature turns inspection into a choice about risk; one that escapes can be encountered again.
Let the nights remember
The concept spans seven shifts and a final night. Each night introduces a change, while jars preserve a quiet catalogue of caught specimens.
Read the order. Reach anyway.
- 01
Read the order
A customer leaves a prescription at the slot, and the player translates it into a search through the counter.
- 02
Find the specimen
Choose a drawer, listen or look for a clue, and reach into the uncertainty the player opened.
- 03
Prepare the remedy
Measure, sort and bottle what the order requires before handing it back to the unseen customer.
- 04
Meet what carried over
Close the shift with the knowledge that an escapee or a new nightly change may be waiting when the slot opens again.
A room prototype before the night shift.
Cabinet Phobia is an earlier room-scale horror prototype and a predecessor concept in the studio’s horror work. The Horror Pharmacy archive records a “Cabinet Phobia Horror” concept that was later superseded by the pharmacy direction. The selected Cabinet Phobia and Horror Pharmacy repositories remain distinct projects; this relationship describes design lineage, not shared code or a claim that the current room prototype became the pharmacy build.
Another world is waiting.
Looking at the work for a collaboration, feature or funding conversation?