SCP Foundation: its lineage, descendants, and standing in Japan

Below Zero 30 Degrees: Despair Buried gem

A free Japanese psychological horror novel game in which two grown men are locked inside a walk-in freezer, and there is no survival ending. As the cold sets in, the game walks them through the real progression of hypothermia, hallucinations, paradoxical undressing (a documented late-stage symptom where victims feel burning hot and tear off their clothes), and pain, toward a buried "truth" and one of four deaths. A single run is about 15 to 20 minutes, mouse only, rendered in a PSX-style low-poly retro look. Choices open special conversations and probability-based random events give each run small differences, so with the skip function full completion of all endings runs roughly half an hour to two hours. Made by the Japanese solo doujin creator Mitsudomoe Koubou, released November 2025, distributed across Japanese doujin and free-game platforms like BOOTH, note, novelgame, and PLiCy, with the Steam version supporting Japanese only. The creator names the SCP Foundation, which they encountered in middle school, as the influence behind the work. Very Positive at 353 reviews and 97 percent, yet with only about 16 English reviews (around 4.5 percent), the wider West has barely found this free doujin horror.

Days Like A Nightmare Buried gem

Per Steam's own listing, this is a logic game played in small rooms: somewhere among the humans living here is one whose heart has been colonized by a parasite called Rubyuk, and your job is to work out which. You are handed sensors, told no expertise is required, just place them and send power, then read what the displays say. The store text delivers all of this in the flat, cheerful voice of a workplace orientation, including the part where the sensor's waves make some people nauseous or hallucinate: 'there's no health problem, you know. Every job has things you have to put up with, doesn't it.' Useless mutant strains of Rubyuk are mixed in and also trip the sensors, so the deduction gets muddier as new variants appear; the game runs DAY1 through DAY7, with everything up to DAY4 close to a tutorial and DAY7 a special customizable mode. You can take your time thinking, but surviving the assault of the 'Nightmare' asks for some action from you. The title itself comes from graffiti on a wall, which your guide brushes off, surprised you can even read Arabic, insisting it's meaningless, just something scrawled out of boredom. Made and self-published solo by 727 Not Hound; AUTOMATON's Japanese edition states outright that the developer is 'a domestic individual game developer, Mr. Zama, and 727 NOT HOUND is his handle,' a rare case where this site has a third-party outlet stating nationality directly rather than circumstantial evidence alone. The developer has shipped roughly ten titles between 2019 and 2025, every one self-published with no external publisher at any stage, including the Switch versions. Released December 31, 2023 at ¥600, it is Positive at 100 percent over 29 reviews (29 positive, 0 negative per Steam's own review API), a paid title, not free, fully launched and not in Early Access, with no AI-generated assets disclosed and no Mature Content box at all, and per Steam's own content descriptors, nothing sexual. It supports English alongside Japanese, and yet after more than two years only 2 of its 29 reviews are in English against 18 in Japanese; a dedicated check of Siliconera, Kotaku, PC Gamer, AUTOMATON WEST, Destructoid, GameSpot, and Game Developer turned up no editorial coverage at all.