The Baby In Yellow

The Baby In Yellow is a short horror game built around caring for a disturbingly unruly infant while odd things start to happen around the house. Its appeal comes from the mismatch between ordinary babysitting tasks and the game’s creepy tone, so the routine of feeding, carrying and putting the child down becomes the whole joke and the whole scare. By our assessment, that makes it more of a compact fright piece than a deep systems game, which also means the ceiling is fairly low once the basic pattern is learned. The downside is repetition: if the premise stops feeling funny or unsettling, there is not much else underneath it. In practice it is tense, simple and easy to grasp in a few minutes. The Baby In Yellow sits closer to a novelty horror title than to a long-form survival game, and that is exactly how it should be read.