In “Eldritch Everyday: The Third Eye,” the narrator is revived after a fatal car accident by a demonic entity with its own agenda. While the premise is promising, a series of bugs in the game prevented me from continuing past its early sections.

Gameplay: The game starts after the entity revives and possesses the narrator, who then struggles to return to work and continue his normal routine. Beyond that, I don’t know how the plot unfolds. In my playthrough, I ran into a series of markup errors and then fatal errors during the puzzle section of the second chapter. I don’t think I was trying anything unusual, and given the limited space of actions in a choice-based game, playtesting should have caught these bugs. 2/10.

Mechanics: The game (or, at least, the early chapters of it I played through) consists of alternating sections of linear narrative and choice-based puzzle solving. The former had very few branching points, and there wasn’t much interactivity in it. The inventory- and set-piece-based puzzles in the latter are awkward in the game’s choice-based format, but the oneiric setting and logic in them are interesting. Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to explore very far into them because of the game’s technical problems. 2/10.

Presentation: As the title imples, the game involves an odd juxtaposition of mundanity and paranormal horror. The plot involves the narrator’s trying to conceal those horror elements from the people around him, though, and so its theme seems natural in that context. There are suggestions that the narrator is transgender, and I interpreted his relationship with the entity and his post-accident transformation as a metaphor for it. That’s an interesting idea for a game, but I wasn’t able to play far enough into it to determine whether that’s a reasonable inference. The colors for the game and changes in fonts for the different characters are a bit awkward. 3/10.

You might be interested in this game if: You enjoy the paranormal horror genre.

Score: 2