There are few things more unsettling than realizing something is wrong with your own family. Not My Dad takes that idea and turns it into a short psychological horror experience where the person sitting in the living room watching the game might not actually be your dad. It is a first-person, single-player psychological thriller, and this demo wastes very little time establishing that something is seriously off inside this house.
The game begins with the player taking the role of a child. Mom is working another double shift at the hospital, Dad has been acting strangely for several days, and nobody bothered to make dinner. Naturally, the solution is to get out of bed in the middle of the night and find something to eat. The opening is deliberately mundane, with the kind of household routine that makes the eventual horror work better. You heat up a slice of pizza, grab a soda, eat at the table, wash your plate, brush your teeth, and go back to bed.
Dad, meanwhile, is watching the game.
And honestly, at first, Dad seems pretty chill. He’s just sitting there watching football, completely locked in. As a kid, you might even understand why he doesn’t want to be bothered. But after walking around the house doing these ordinary little tasks, the game starts making you wonder why you’re being asked to avoid him so carefully.
Then Dad finally talks.
That first interaction genuinely got me. It isn’t some giant monster jumping through a window. It’s just Dad suddenly yelling at you to go back to your room, and because the game has spent so much time quietly building up the routine of the house, it catches you completely off guard. Suddenly, the guy who was just sitting on the couch watching television feels a whole lot less normal.
Night two starts changing things further. Mom is home long enough to make dinner before heading back to the hospital, and after finishing some homework, the player has to get up and use the bathroom. Dad is still watching television, but the house doesn’t feel quite the same anymore. There’s a news report playing about another person disappearing without a trace. Then another. Eventually, the number of missing people in the area reaches fifteen.
And then Dad is gone.
The television is still playing, but the chair is empty.
You go back to bed, close the door, and try to ignore what just happened. That’s when things get considerably worse. Dad appears to be inside the closet in the bedroom. You can actually watch him moving around in there, which is the kind of thing that makes you immediately question whether you’re supposed to investigate or just pretend you didn’t see anything.
I chose the second option.
The game continues this routine into Night Three, where the family has dinner together. Mom talks about work, Dad is quieter than usual, and eventually you’re back to doing the same household chores you’ve been doing every night. Take the plate to the sink. Brush your teeth. Go to bed.
Except now Dad is disappearing from one room and appearing in another.
The horror works because the game keeps mixing completely ordinary activities with things that are obviously wrong. You’re still brushing your teeth like nothing is happening while a creepy figure may or may not be wandering around your house. At one point, Dad walks directly into the closet, and the game basically dares you to follow him.
The more you look around, the more the story starts to come together. A newspaper reports that a missing man was found walking barefoot in the cold, but when his wife saw him, she repeatedly said, “That’s not him.” Other missing people have apparently returned to their homes, only for their families to insist that they don’t recognize them.
The explanation starts becoming pretty obvious.
Earlier in the game, there’s a children’s book called Fleshgate, the Skin Thief. The story describes a creature that can mimic human voices and appearances to lure its victims. The book even has a creepy little rhyme about not trusting what you see if the skin isn’t yours.
So, yeah. Dad might not be Dad.
Eventually, Mom enters the picture, and this is where the demo really leans into the concept. After finding you wandering around the house, she tells you that Dad is asleep in bed and that you should be doing the same. At this point, we’ve already seen Dad wandering into the closet, disappearing from rooms, and generally acting like the least trustworthy father in the history of video games.
Then you look toward the closet.
And that’s where the demo gets you.
I’m extremely easy to jump scare, and this one got me. The creature isn’t particularly complicated. It’s essentially a creepy figure with big white eyes, but because the game had spent so much time making me think Dad was hiding in that closet, seeing something else standing in there worked. The Dad comes rushing at you from the doorway.
It’s also where I think Not My Dad’s biggest strength and weakness become apparent.
The demo has a good idea of how to create tension, but it shows its main monster a little too much. The giant white eyes are creepy at first, but after seeing the creature repeatedly, it starts becoming almost funny rather than frightening. I think the game would benefit from keeping the creature hidden for longer and letting the player build the monster in their own head.
There’s a lot of room for that kind of expansion, too. The house itself is a good setting because the game already has you moving between familiar locations while slowly changing what those locations mean. Adding something like a basement, for example, could make things considerably worse. It’s one thing to investigate a strange noise coming from your bedroom closet. It’s another thing to realize you have to go all the way downstairs into a dark basement while knowing something in the house might be pretending to be your dad.
That’s the kind of escalation I’d like to see from the full game.
As a demo, Not My Dad is definitely on the slower side, but I still found myself entertained by it. The story is simple enough to understand immediately, the setup gives you just enough information to start questioning the people around you, and the contrast between the bizarre Dad and the completely normal Mom is honestly pretty funny.
Dad is out here acting like a complete freak while Mom is just going to work at the hospital and wondering why her kid is wandering around the house at night.
How did she marry this guy?
That’s almost the scariest part.
Not My Dad isn’t a long or fully developed horror experience yet, but there is enough here to make me curious about where it goes. The demo establishes its premise, gets a few legitimate jump scares out of the player, and leaves plenty of room to make the full experience more unsettling.
It’s also a nice reminder that you don’t necessarily need a huge environment or complicated gameplay systems to make a horror game work. Sometimes all you need is a dark house, a kid who needs to pee at three in the morning, and a dad who may or may not be wearing somebody else’s skin.
If the concept looks interesting, Not My Dad is worth keeping an eye on. The demo has some rough edges and could use a little more restraint with its monster, but there’s definitely something here. And if nothing else, maybe don’t trust Dad.