I can’t bear to play much of free horror game Toy Box, but I love the concept of pulling talking toys apart

Toy Box sounds like a very Xmassy game, but then you watch a trailer, and realise that it is not very Xmassy at all. It’s a free visual novel with a macabre puzzling element. The setup is that you’re a toy inspector working for a jovial Grand Toy Maker, his face hidden above the top of the screen. Your job is to disassemble toys – five in all – according to his eldritch written instructions, and either “salvage” them or “sentence” them to the incinerator.

The toys can be “sentenced” because the toys appear to be alive. They talk to you and share their memories as you pull them apart. The obvious thing to do is salvage them all – after all, who’d throw a miniature talking ballerina in the furnace? But the toys are Not Nice. Their talk is of suffering and malice, darkness and blood. Some of them have glowing eyes and teeth. And then there’s the enigma of the Grand Toy Maker, who returns periodically to evaluate your choices. “It’s of the utmost importance that inspectors upkeep the Maker’s image,” explains the Steam page, not very reassuringly.

I haven’t played all of Toy Box because, frankly, the subject matter is too much for me. I mean, look at the content warnings. There’s “no explicit imagery of sexual acts”, but there is pretty much everything else, including “visual and written depictions” of “Blood, Body Horror, Gore, Death, Unreality, Child Abuse, Pseudo-Jumpscares, Motion Sickness, Flashing Lights, Religious Themes, Swearing, [and] Violence.”

From what I’ve played, the ghastliness of Toy Box is partly just the fundamental uncanniness of toys, the grey zone they inhabit between objects and companions, though it’s possible the eventual and more straightforward twist is that these manky ornaments are possessed. The game doesn’t feel gratuitous or pornographic in its handling of the above themes, but it’s certainly disturbing: the worst of Pinocchio with a generous helping of FNAF and Thomas Ligotti.

Developers DEADline Studios are “a small POC and Queer-owned studio” who “seek to relay stories about just what it means to be human and dive deeper into the good, the bad, and the downright ugly”. There’s plenty of the latter here. Their other projects include Fool’s Paradise, a satirical horror visual novel with romantic elements.

I’m writing about Toy Box partly because it’s been a while since I last had to stop playing a horror game, and partly because I think the premise of telling stories by dismantling objects is wonderful, and I’d like to see more of it. It doesn’t have to involve horror – the closest parallel I can think of right now is Hardspace: Shipbreaker. Which is, I guess, a pretty horrible game in its portrayal of indentured servitude and self-cloning, but at least those spaceships don’t beg for mercy when you disassemble them.