The Note (PC) review "Paper thin"

My first experience with The Note ended in mere minutes. I entered the game, progressed as far as the main menu, then couldn't go any further. It wasn't fear that held me back, but a black screen that greeted me when I selected 'start.' Try as I might, I couldn't get the app to run and thus abandoned the project altogether. The end.

...Or is it?

Like a monster in an old-school drive-in movie, this beast refused to stay dead. Years later, it appeared on my Steam Deck's “verified” list, telling me that I could finally play it to completion.

Oh, goody...

This one begins like so many—no, too many—horror games on Steam. Your car decides to take a crap in the “scariest” part of the world, and you get out and hoof it to a nearby town. Our protagonist, apparently named Mike, then gives us a rundown of the premise by letting us know he's searching for someone named Andy. He tells us, “It seems necessary to search for Andy foot (sic).” Oh dear...

“Maybe he left some notes.” I'm guessing many of you will groan upon reading this passage. Yes, this is another one of those games, where you wander around a landscape looking for pages and collecting them without getting killed by a malevolent force—a “Slender-like,” if you will. This time, though, the notes contain texts written by Andy, which attempt to offer some context to the strange phenomena happening around you. “Attempt” being the key word there...



So you pad into the quiet little burg, and right away you meet your threat this time around: an extra tall humanoid creature that looks like a naked Slenderman crossed with a Thanksgiving turkey. At first, you think the thing is going to pounce on you and unzip your torso for a quick meal. Instead, it just ambles past you while a flurry of static harmlessly pervades the screen. As it turns out, there are at least two such critters in the first level, walking preset routes and never break their patrol. Here's the catch: you don't have to touch them to die. If you so much as get too close to one, the screen blackens and the words “You are dead” immediately pop up. Of course, this means you must carefully make use of the run function when exiting buildings or rounding corners in case ol' Skinless White Meat makes an appearance.

So you embark on your first mission: to read all of Andy's scrawlings left around the city. You mostly find them either pinned to the walls of abandoned, unfurnished houses or stapled to exterior locales. You instantly read them upon snatching them, and boy, do they prove useful! At least two of them tell you to check out a hospital when you don't see one nearby. Another reads, “It is strange that the city no furniture can all burned.” I... what? However, most of the papers basically say, “Man, this place sure is strange,” as if that isn't obvious. During a couple of moments venturing into abodes to collect stationery, monstrous apparitions appear suddenly and vanish harmlessly. All you can do sigh and remember the 80,000 other horror games that pulled the same trick with precisely the same level of effect.

Much like the adversaries you face, the first stage proves somewhat skeletal. The scenery and lighting set a solid, creepy mood, but everything else comes across lackadaisically. Your opponents can't even be bothered to chase you, and death results in a tiring anticlimax that robs the experience of any sense of fright. All you need to do is walk cautiously and grab some papers, which proves just as tedious as it sounds.



You eventually locate the hospital, and you'll never guess what your objective is there. Yeah, grab more notes—hence the title. How the hell was Andy able to write and post so many memos? And why? Was he like, “Man, I just snuck past a horrifying monster. I better write something completely useless on a sheet of paper and attach it to the wall here in case some other idiot decides to snoop around.” And he had that same thought twenty times, writing such bangers as “At the hospital as was the battle.”

The clinic offers a slightly different experience than the town. Your foes here are more human-sized, and there's less wiggle room to work with. Plus, you actually feel like you're playing a legit game at this point, as the opposition here proves tricky to evade. You spend some time watching both enemy patterns and strategizing before entering a room or slithering down a hallway to nab a note. You learn quickly that it's difficult to tell how close is too close when dealing with these beasts, as the monsters don't even need to see you in order to kill you. If you traipse up behind one and you draw too near, you perish. The only way to know for sure if you're too close is to gauge the static on the screen, which intensifies as you close the gap between you and your foe.

After a few unfortunate deaths that result in you respawning at level two's front door, you mosey onto the third and final stage: a bunker under the hospital that was obviously the site of an experiment. Another sigh escapes you, because this is also the umpteenth horror title that features an empty hospital overrun by skinless humanoids born from a secret experiment. It's as if governments and researchers are out there kidnapping citizens and saying, “By golly, I bet we could remove this guy's skin, turn him into a man-eating abomination, and then just abandon the premises while leaving him and his brethren to roam indefinitely without consequence! What? Cure cancer with my scientific genius? No! I want man-eating abominations!”


The finale doesn't hit you with any challenges. You simply wander around the hallways of the bunker until you enter a specific room, then a half-assed ending kicks in. That's it. You're done.

The Note does little to distinguish itself from other first-person horror entries on Steam. It sports disengaging objectives, lackluster enemies, weak attempts at jump scares, and an overly familiar plot told through mostly incomprehensible messages. Right there, I pretty much described all of the products I've purchased on Steam for $1 or less. You might notice that this one is currently delisted, but rest assured that you're missing exactly nothing.

Staff review by Joseph Shaffer (October 10, 2023) Rumor has it that Joe is not actually a man, but a machine that likes video games, horror movies, and long walks on the beach. His/Its first contribution to HonestGamers was a review of Breath of Fire III.