[Disclaimer: I received a review key for [HERROR] Gas Station Case 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.]
System: Windows, SteamOS, Linux,
Release Date: Q2 2026
Publisher: [HERROR]
Time Spent: 79 Minutes
Is it a cop out to say that I have mixed feelings about [HERROR] Gas Station Case right off the bat, mainly connected to historical, geographical, and economic anachronisms. I know that's kind of a strange thing to fixate on, but that's where my brain went nearly half a dozen times each time I played the demo.
Before we start nitpicking, let's actually get to the game, assuming you haven't yet watched my playthrough video, linked above.
[HERROR] Gas Station Case is sort of a minimal story-driven gas station simulator. You're filling in for a coworker, and you perform a few standard tasks such as filling gas, sweeping/mopping up dirt on the floor of the store, restocking shelves, and bagging up items people buy. There's a bit of a side story going on around your playable character, Dan, that he seems to only have a passive role in. During the two partial nights Dan works at the gas station, there are a couple of weird events that happen, including one jump scare that legitimately got me the first time I played, and a couple of unsettling, "what's that?" moments.
When I played the game on the Steam Deck, I was able to invert the y-axis manually in the controller settings, but on my (new) laptop, I was able to manage with an apparent industry standard uninverted y-axis. This actually didn't bother me as much as I had feared, as there is no need to make quick turns, and the only targeting you're doing is when you literally throw bagged-up goods at customers. Although yes, it did take me several tries to throw those bags of garbage into the dumpster behind the store. There's no excuse for that.
As for the anachronisms, there were quite a few.
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The first one I noticed was the price of gas. The game takes place in Ohio in 1998. Now, I grew up in Central California and had just graduated high school during the summer of 1998, which had me filling up my parents' car to drive to the next town over to work a summer job, so I was buying gas every couple of weeks. I remember being really excited when the cheap gas was $0.89/gallon because this was one of the last times I can recall ever buying more gas than what I was spending. Even the gas at the marina in Lake Arrowhead, CA, was upwards of $2.50/gallon, which seemed ridiculously expensive, so seeing a sign with gas at over $4.00/gallon in Ohio in 1998 seemed very out of place. Late in the game, you go inside the phone booth outside the store, and you can see a notice asking you to "use fewer coins to pay the initial minimum of 60p." I remember that Pacific Bell phone booths in Northern California would cost $0.30 to make a call, because I was annoyed at having to carry more than just a quarter when I needed to get picked up after a tennis game, and I'm pretty certain that people in Ohio wouldn't refer to "sixty cents" as "sixty p;" a little too British.
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Price-related anachronisms were how much people pay you after you bag up their goods at the cash register and hand it (chuck it) to them. The First customer you help pays you $7 to "fill up" their car, which is either historically accurate if they needed about 2/3rds a tank, or maybe they really only needed 1.74 gallons of gas. Inside the store, a customer pays you $27.00 for two apples, a can of soda (maybe it's beer), and a can of beans. Later, two women pay you $28.00 for a can of soda, a snack pack of Nutter Butters (as in the pack only has four cookies), and some kind of vanilla-flavored something-or-other. The only potentially correctly priced object is a $12.00 flashlight that, after ordering it using the computer at the register, is delivered immediately right outside the door to the store; although the fact that the money you use is the money that you've been paid by customers comes across as a little suspect.
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The demo ends on a bit of a cliffhanger, which is either the end of the whole Gas Station episode in this proposed Horror Anthology, or hopefully, the first third of this particular story. There was a VHS grain filter that added to the feeling that this was a low-budget horror movie that you could have picked up on Friday night at a Blockbuster before the DVD boom of 2000 (all thanks to The Matrix). It actually fits with the whole pre-2000s campy horror aesthetic, and it was pretty easy to find myself enjoying the actual gameplay once I stopped thinking about how the prices of everything were all over the place. I think I also really enjoyed that this was a lite gas station sim implanted in a horror movie because I would be more likely to play this than Gas Station Simulator 2026.
~JWfW/JDub/The Faceplantman/Jaconian
This Grevious Revelation is a New Beginning
P.S. Spoilers below, so beware.
At the end of the game, your friend Michael makes a reappearance, and I can't quite tell whether his face is supposed to be mutilated to make him look like he has a mouth full of fangs, or something else. Because the character model looks like they just have a bunch of face paint depicting a horrific mouth. The look of the blood is fine, though. I'm otherwise fine with the graphics, but this seemed a little off, and not in an unsettling way or uncanny valley way.
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