[Disclaimer: I received a review key for Fourth Time Around through Keymailer, a third-party website/company that connects publishers and developers with content creators. The game was given without promise or expectation of a positive review, only that the game be played and content be created through the playing of the game and the experience. Unless otherwise noted, all content in the following article is from my own playthrough of this game.]
Fourth Time Around Demo
Systems: Windows, macOS
Release Date: March, 2025
Publisher: Pennywhistle Studios
Developer: Pennywhistle Studios
Time Spent: 28 Minutes 27 Seconds
I have to keep reminding myself that the Fourth Time Around Demo is only a demo because, holy hell, it was effective. The disclaimer is upfront that a fair amount of the demo is not going to make sense or tell a cohesive story that the player will be able to follow or fully make sense of, but that really played to the strengths of establishing an uncomfortable and tense feeling throughout the whole 28 minutes. So rather than try and parse what I played, I'm just going to embed it right here.
Yeah, there's a lot to unpack there. Kind of? My biggest hangup, and what hampered my otherwise perfect cinematography, was that there was no option to invert the Y-axis on the camera, but since the game is more of a walking sim and less of a first-person shooter, I found I was able to adapt somewhat well.
The Itch.io and Steam descriptions tout that this is a game without jump scares, which I think is true for the most part, but there were several sudden moments that creeped me out. When I first gained control of the camera on the train and saw the woman's face scribbled out, it gave me a bit of a start. The frequent camera glitches seemed to always put me on edge. Then the green cabin scene when you click to "Leave" and when you turn there's a field full of the same woman in all of the poses you previously saw her in earlier in the stage gave me literal shivers down my shoulders and back. And once you get the gun both times made me woefully uncomfortable both in the game and its implications on the story. I also loved the moment at 12:27 when the kitchen started filling with white noise that became the phone ringing as I found it played on my anxiety about talking on the phone.
I don't really know how else to talk about this demo any more than this, which I recognize is fairly paltry. It really felt like the whole of the demo was informing players on how they're going to feel when the full game is released and even if only half of the game makes me feel as unsettled and tense as these 28 minutes, then I'm all in.
And if you want select moments from this playthrough, I made a couple of trailers, I guess you'd call them because just like Liminal Dimension, Fourth Time Around lends itself very well to creating unsettling snippits.
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