Sorry We’re Closed

"Sorry We're Closed" is a PS1 retro stylized survival horror game, with heavy Silent Hill influences. However, this game is extremely vibrant, colorful, and includes mostly queer LGBTQ+ characters. Gameplay involves cycling between the real world and a demon world with the push of a button. Your character explores creepy areas, talks to some very interesting characters, and shoots / stabs demons in search of a way to deal with a certain powerful demon that is searching for love. The game takes approximately 6-7 hours to complete your first playthrough. There is a New Game+ mode and a total of 4 endings for replayability.
+ The art direction is fantastic.
+ Excellent world building with interesting characters. I actively wanted to talk to everyone to see what they would say. Well written and funny dialog. Original story with many storyline branches to choose from.
+ The boss fights are incredibly well designed.
+ Awesome music, especially during boss fights.
- The original battle mechanic takes some getting used to. I found the regular battles to be more annoying than fun, hence why I will not be going for 100% on the game and get all the endings. This is not a typical survival horror game where you bash enemies with pipes and shoot them in third person mode. In this game the developers tried something new, you have to switch to first person mode and aim at the demon's heart, which moves around constantly. Interesting concept in theory, but not fun in practice. Protip: If playing with a controller, turn the look sensitivity up to the max.
- The last hour of the game drags on, lots of added filler.
- I did not enjoy the random puzzles at the end of the game.
- No unlockable outfits / crazy weapons for New Game plus?
Quality game, lots of originality here.
However, the annoying battle mechanics and filler last act bring the game's score down a bit for me.
Overall: 8/10

This one is something special. The less said about it, the better. Beautiful art, interesting and well-written story, fun gameplay. Some of the coolest character designs I've ever seen, bar none.
If Killer7 was about love.

Things go to hell for a convenience store clerk in the gayborhood.

Sorry, We’re Closed is one of the most interesting genre fusions I’ve played, and a game I think I’m still trying to fully understand. It is about love, it is about loneliness, it is about allowing one’s self to heal - or not.
The premise is as follows: you play as Michelle. Years ago, Michelle was dumped by a girl she was terribly smitten with, and now she watches episodes of the daytime soap opera her ex stars in while ringing up customers at the corner store where she works. She is well and truly stuck, in love with a woman who has already forgotten her.
Michelle is pulled out of her comfortable misery by an evening visit from The Dutchess - a terrifying, gender ambiguous, hypersexualized demon. Michelle is The Duchess’s newest object of desire, a guest of honor in the Dutchess’s demonic domain. Michelle’s first escape leaves her with an opened Third Eye - a way to see into the world of angels and demons that surround her. Michelle has four days to find a way to break her curse - or perhaps, to fall in love with her demonic admirer.
That on its own is an intriguing hook for me, I find interpretations of Christian mythology to be fun, and I have certainly spent some of my days as a depressed sapphic, wondering what I did to drive her away, what I was supposed to have done better.
Sorry We’re Closed plays like a mixture of Catherine, the bizarre and very unique Atlus dating sim/puzzle-platformer from the seventh generation of consoles. There have been a variety of quirky and strange dating sims since then, most of which with a comedic tone. Sorry We’re Closed makes two important changes that allow it to stand head and shoulders above its most direct reference point - tone, and gameplay loop.
Atlus has often incorporated these dating simulation elements in its Persona series, and while Catherine solved the main issue with these elements in Persona (the characters in Catherine are, ostensibly, of legal age by North American standards) Atlus has thus far always presented a very heteronormative, simplistic look at love - you play as a man, you pursue (or are pursued by) women. Sometimes she’s a demon, sometimes she’s your homeroom teacher, but the pairing is always the male player character and his digital honeypot. Sorry We’re Closed is not a power fantasy, at least, not inherently. The game asks more about the nature of love, and its worth, than what the player will get when they acquire it.
Should Michelle encourage a nearly-fallen angel to keep going after love, and accept being cast out of heaven so that he can be with his demonic lover? Is Michelle willing to meet The Dutchess on their terms, and understand why this person is so sure love will fix the hole in their heart? Can anyone truly experience love if they are not willing to be changed by it? For me, these are more interesting ideas to ruminate on than “hmm, should I go for the blonde or the redhead?”
Sorry We’re Closed looks and handles a lot like Resident Evil 2, with its Playstation esque graphics and blocky polygonal models for characters. They’re presented with much more fidelity than was possible on that old console, and the gameplay is both tense and enjoyable. Each night you’ll explore a new dungeon, using your Third Eye to navigate the underworld and battle lesser demons. Michelle is equipped with an axe, and later two firearms, and when aiming them you’ll switch from isometric to first-person view. Switching to first-person is also useful for solving puzzles and taking in more of the surprisingly tense environmental detail of these surreal spaces, often blending urban decay with heavenly splendor.
The art absolutely steals the show, as well. While the character models are nice, and detailed, the character portraits are nothing short of marvelous. At times beautiful, at times horrifying, at times both (but that might say more about me than about the art), the game feels distinct and original in the way it presents itself. The sountrack blends atmospheric horror tracks with hip-hop, which is probably the best relationship in the whole game.
Sorry We’re Closed takes about five hours to complete, but includes a new game plus mode to explore other endings, of which there are three - not counting different ways side stories can be resolved. None of the endings felt objectively good or objectively bad, they all felt like choices a player character could reasonably make, being in Michelle’s shoes. You can choose to be selfish, to be altruistic, to be self-destructive. That’s something I appreciate in games that offer these kinds of branching endings. There needs to be a reason why I might choose to do it, beyond “hey, I wonder what was behind door number 3?”
I played Sorry We’re Closed while working through my feelings about a difficult, up-and-down relationship. I saw my own equivocations about that relationship reflected back at me through Michelle’s journey. Was I chasing a real person, or a fictional ideal of what the relationship could be? If love can make an individual more whole, then what is the cost of packing yourself into the cracks of another person’s heart? In allowing yourself to change for someone else, how do you feel if you come out the other side worse for it? To me, it takes a fine piece of art to stir up those introspective, difficult questions, and Sorry We’re Closed is a very fine piece of art in my estimation.

For the aesthetic alone, I am in love with this game. Honestly wish there were more games with this girlypop style

I can fix her...
I have mixed feelings about Sorry We're Closed.
Which is annoying, because I liked it.
The easiest thing to praise is the aesthetic. Not because every character design landed for me, but because the game has an unusually strong sense of itself. The colors, the music, the blend of horror, romance, angels, demons, and melancholy. Every part feels intentional.
The phrase I kept coming back to was "haute decay."
Not glamorous. Not beautiful, necessarily. Just a world full of lonely people carrying around broken ideas about love.
I'm probably not the target demographic for this game. Then again, I've never really cared about that. If something looks interesting, I'll play it.
The game's queerness isn't some accessory bolted onto the side. It's woven into the world, the characters, and the way it thinks about relationships. Remove it and you'd have a completely different game.
What stuck with me wasn't necessarily the characters themselves. It was their motivations.
Everybody in Sorry We're Closed wants love.
The problem is they're often talking about completely different things.
Some want connection. Some want validation. Some want forgiveness. Some want possession. Some are trying to move on. Some refuse to.
At various points, the game had me sympathizing with people I didn't particularly like, questioning people I did, and wondering whether there was a way to ride off into the sunset with the Duchess.
I don't know what that says about me.
Despite the fact that a demon had become aggressively involved in my personal life, I often found myself wondering what everyone else was going to do next. More importantly, why.
My personal demon apocalypse frequently felt like the B-plot.
I had neighbors to check on.
The protagonist is probably my biggest complaint. Michelle isn't terrible, but she's surrounded by people who are generally more interesting than she is. Robyn was my favorite character by a mile, and several members of the supporting cast left a stronger impression on me than the person I was controlling.
As for the gameplay, I mostly enjoyed it, but my patience wore thinner than the game did. The Third Eye mechanic is clever, and I liked it quite a bit at first. By the end, I was noticeably less enthusiastic about opening my magic forehead eye and shooting glowing weak points for the fiftieth time.
The story never overstayed its welcome.
The combat maybe did.
By the time I reached the ending, I had a pretty good idea where things were headed.
That didn't stop me from feeling a little disappointed when I got there.
What I'm still not sure about is whether the game was disagreeing with my choices, trying to teach me something, or simply being consistent with the themes it'd been building toward the entire time.
Maybe all three.
Either way, I respected it.
Sorry We're Closed is messy in places. A few mechanics wear thin. The protagonist isn't nearly as memorable as the people around her.
But I kept thinking about it after it ended.
Not because of the demons.
Because of the characters.
And more importantly...
Because of why they were doing what they were doing.

To be honest I loved this game. HIGHLY recommended but a couple of things in the story got me confused. there are 2 characters that are in a relationship with one CLEARLY being an awful human being and the other being so nice and the only way to do the best for the good person is framed in a selfish way with us trying to get a leg up so to speak.
Felt weird. But overall adore this game.