The most horrifying thing that ever happened to me while playing Game Boy was a school ‘friend’ flicking the power switch while getting off the train, just as I’d finally beaten that one maddeningly obscure block puzzle in The Legend of Zelda: Link’s Awakening. He’s lucky he’s not buried somewhere under the railway lines between Shipley and Baildon. There were Game Boy horror games, but they were mostly crammed-down approximations of Resident Evil and the like, and I found them about as spooky as a frowning Potato Head. The Third Shift is out to address this lapse, and so far, it is doing it extremely well.

Played on a nested 10:9 display, the game casts you as a freshly hired security guard at the Roanoke Museum of History – Roanoke being an island legendary for the mass “disappearance” of some European settlers in the 16th century. The Third Shift’s intro alludes to these events. I’m not sure how it plans to explore them. Right now it seems more interested in intestines. I’m about an hour in and am currently patrolling the Human Body exhibit, a labyrinth of flayed, dismembered, plastinated cadavers that is none the less appalling for being a bunch of 8-bit single-screen layouts.

There’s an exhibit down there called something like “Just Beyond A Mother’s Touch”, which looks like a Bloodborne boss made up of grossly spaghettified muscles. There is also a smashed case with a missing occupant. I do not have any weapons, just some loose coins, a busy isometric tourist map that tires my eyes, and a key for employee areas. I guess I do have a crowbar, but I’m keeping that quiet – my supervisor ordered me to put it back in storage, after I used it while repairing a power-out, but I figure a crowbar in the hand is worth any number of ravening peeled abominations in the bush.

In keeping with the recent trend of horror games starring blue collar workers, your supervisor could be the real villain of The Third Shift. Much of it is discreetly played from his perspective. The game’s fixed vantages and scrolling segments are actually CCTV footage, viewed from the security office, with a recording icon blinking in the corner and your vital stats scribbled on a notebook page to the left. Screens within a screen within a screen.

Distracted by the macabre attractions, I soon forgot that I was being surveilled, or perhaps, surveilling myself. But then that power-out happened, and I found myself gazing at my supervisor’s reflection in a dark CRT monitor, his expression as grim as his previous walkie-talkie messages to me were folksy and cheerful. A terrific moment.

In general, The Third Shift has a real knack for playing tricks with perspective. Not every part of the museum is on camera. When you’re invisible to your supervisor, the game switches to static first person, and becomes more of a point-and-clicker with a touch of pixel-combing – look out for coins and balled-up notes under furniture. In theory, these backroom areas allow for acts of disobedience, like pinching that crowbar. But they also make the scenery more frightening: you’re ‘closer’ to the art, with more screen space available to really dial up the gristle when Something crawls out from behind a boiler. Given that your supervisor can’t see these spaces, he may also doubt your tales of what you encounter inside them. Or at least, pretend to be doubtful. I love the knottiness of all this.

Sometimes, you’ll visit and revisit areas from different perspectives. For example, a menacing vista of a dripping locker room might be reinvented as an elevated cutaway shot. I like the suggestion that each space harbours a different version of itself, revealed by glitchy CCTV. I’d sure hate the perspective to suddenly switch to first-person while I’m traversing the Human Body exhibit.

All that, plus some more familiar and generic, but smartly executed fixed perspective shenanigans you might recognise from Resident Evil. Sometimes, the third-person view flips round unexpectedly when moving between screens. You were walking forward, but now you’re walking sideways. Hard not to imagine how that might complicate the situation while running away. Yeah, I’ll be keeping hold of this crowbar.

Read more about The Third Shift on Steam. I think this could be a gem. Other museum attractions include The Terrors of the Deep, in which there are sharks and octopi. At the very back of the museum, there’s an exhibit called the Mystery of Roanoke, which I guess is where all that preamble about missing colonists will come to fruition.