Gray Dawn is a game that plays out as an interactive psychological horror story. It was created by indie developer Interactive Stone, a small studio based in Iași, Romania, and was released June 7, 2018 on Steam, with a staggered release on various other platforms over the next few years. Its most recent release was on Nintendo Switch in early August 2024, though I played the Steam version.

Set on Christmas Eve of 1920, Gray Dawn takes you through the journey of a troubled man who teeters on the edge of madness. Accused of murdering an altar boy, Father Abraham struggles to grasp at the truth. He searches both through his home and through a fantastic, otherworldly realm, seeking answers, solace, and redemption. Told through exploration of a 3D environment from the perspective of Father Abraham, the story unfolds in a non-linear fashion and with a rather unreliable narrator, creating an air of mystery interspersed with surreal moments that give the game the unique feel of a light fantasy combined with a dark, grim drama.

Light Puzzles in a World of Exploration

The gameplay is mainly exploratory, involving roaming each area and collecting and manipulating objects to trigger progression into the next part of the story. Although there is also a puzzle aspect to the game, each of the puzzles is fairly simplistic – the difficulty lies in noticing the details of your surroundings. There are times when it's easy to overlook something simple and find it difficult to progress, but in general, the puzzles can be seen as straightforward and merely a part of the symbolism of the tale.

The game is divided into chapters, with an autosave to a new file at the start of each chapter as well as the ability to create your own save whenever you'd like. This can be helpful if you get carried away with the plot and end up completing a chapter without finding all its collectibles. For most games, this might not be a big deal, but Gray Dawn has two different endings based on whether or not you managed to collect all eight of the icons strewn throughout the game. Fortunately, each chapter that contains icons has a display near the beginning of the chapter that shows how many icons that chapter contains, so it isn't that difficult to keep track of them. Whichever ending you get, the rest of the game remains the same, so it may feel a bit tedious if you have to start over because you missed something.

"Disturbing" More Than "Scary"

Gray Dawn doesn't consist of horror in the conventional sense. Although there are one or two jump-scare type moments early on, there are no enemies out to attack you nor is there ever an immediate threat of peril. The "horror" part of the game mostly consists of a great underlying sense of unease as you explore each part of the reality you've been thrown into. Father Abraham's occasional lapses into madness warp that reality into something a little more sinister as he wages an internal war to fight off the devil.

A lot of the scenery has the more whimsical feel of a lighthearted adventure game, but every once in a while, it changes to something more gruesome and disturbing. There are some gory scenes containing sexual content as well as various scenes that could be triggering to anyone who has suffered the loss of a child, so it may be something to avoid if you have delicate sensibilities.

Beautiful Scenery full of Religious Symbolism

The main draw of this game is in its atmosphere. The game has a religious theme and each of the scenes throughout is filled with religious symbolism and religious paraphernalia that have a high level of detail in their depictions. The starting manor seems to be a treasure trove of fancy décor and trinkets that can lead a person to take their time looking through all their surroundings, even when quite a bit of it isn't interactable. The later areas with their fantasy realm take clear inspiration from locations in Romania, some scenes depicting customs and rituals of the area, giving a glimpse into another culture for those outside it or adding a sense of familiarity for those within.

The atmospheric sounds add to the realism of each scene, with a radio full of classic Christmas tunes while in the manor and the busy sounds of nature with some soft instrumental music in the background while in the dream realm. In contrast to this, the voice acting is a bit bland and tends to sound like someone reading directly from a script rather than a person being present in the scene, but since the lines of dialogue tend to be intermittent rather than constant, I didn't find it to detract too much from my immersion. The acting is much better near the end of the game in the bits of dialogue given in Romanian, adding a little more drama to some crucial scenes.

Quick Reference

Gray Dawn is a first-person psychological horror game in the form of an interactive story.
Best played when in the mood for a heavy religious theme.
Contains gore, sexual content, and disturbing scenes.

Strengths:
• Beautiful scenery to explore.
• An intriguing dark story.
• A useful save system.

Weaknesses:
• Mediocre voice acting.
• Replay for a different ending could be more tedious than engaging.