For days, montages of the same game keep appearing on my Instagram reels, which resembles more of someone's high school passion project than a legitimate title. It looks hilarious... in translation.
It's about Scary Game 2: The Mad Shepherd. Yes, that's the official name. And we wonder, "what is Scary Game 1 then??"
In the absence of time and with a desire for a fresh review, I reach for this title priced at €3 on Steam. Surprisingly, Steam reviews are labeled as “Very Positive,” and there are already 421 in just 17 days since the release date! [the date of this article is May 25, 2026.] The publisher is KanGames, an indie studio, or perhaps just one very inspired individual?
It is available exclusively on Steam for WinOS 7/10/11 - crazy, right? When was the last time you read the ancient name “Windows 7”?! Given that it can run on a 17-year-old computer, don't hesitate to buy it if you want to experience the current hype around this game.
After five necessary minutes to download and install the game, we enter a bare bones menu with just a few basic sound and graphics settings options. Controls? What's that? Never heard of it. The motto is you'll find out!
We enter a world with a written monologue from our protagonist accompanied by a retro-synth sound of characters being printed on the screen. Cool.
We immediately see that we are in a world (a room to be precise) that many of us haven't seen in over 20 years. The game looks truly RETRO. The world around us is low-poly, the space we are in is a carpet of publicly available textures and assets. “Great, I missed this,” I think to myself.
The sound design is non-existent, the sky is a PNG file, the shadows of objects are not fully rendered, and the physics of light and shadow work almost identically to some nightmare from your childhood.
We immediately encounter a nonsensical story and hilarious characters, most of which are animals - it didn't take me long to realize that this is not a horror game, despite the title (logically).
We get the option to silly scream, we have a walking option and a slightly faster walking option, interaction with various objects and characters. We get stuck on invisible textures, of course.
In this game, we talk to birds, watch horses harnessing people into carts, and farm animals dancing in a circle, while a well-known character from the cult title Outlast plays Turkish folk music from behind the DJ booth.
Nothing makes sense and you will laugh a lot. We promise.
Scary Game 2: TMS is essentially a silly walking simulator of someone's crazy (maybe alcohol-inspired) idea, which will completely capture you for just about 30 minutes of your time, after which you will actually regret that the gameplay is so short.
How many more skeletons with stylized genitals could we meet? How many bad fight montages could we see? What about the whole occult theme of that one house?!
We won't find out, but I personally hope that we will be greeted with a few more titles from KanGames, preferably just as inspiring as this one, the second in line.
PC version of the game purchased for review purposes
