Project Kat is a short narrative horror game that’s free to play on Itch.io (here) and on Steam (here). A playthrough culminating in the game’s “true ending” will take about half an hour, but adventurous players might spend another fifteen minutes experimenting with paths leading to a premature death.

You play as a high school student named Kat who stays late at school one night to undertake an occult ritual of unknown origin and with unknown consequences. Kat has attempted a number of similar rituals, all to no avail. She claims not to believe in the supernatural and seems to be performing these rituals as a hobby. Unfortunately for Kat, this ritual is different.

As Kat, you have the run of three empty classrooms, a meeting room currently being used by the school’s Occult Club, and the Drama Club’s storage closet. Your job is to collect the materials needed for the ritual, such as chalk and candles, and then to perform the various steps of the ritual itself.

Coincidentally, the three members of the Occult Club are also spending the night at school. Kat taunts them as they experiment with a Ouija Board, saying that they’re deluding themselves. Despite getting the night off on the wrong foot, Kat can continue to talk with the three girls, and she can even recruit them to participate in the ritual with her.

This might be a mistake, however, as the instructions for the ritual state clearly that it must be performed alone.

Should Kat manage to complete the ritual successfully, the game ventures into a surreal space reminiscent of Yume Nikki. This is when the story stops pulling its punches, and the player begins to understand why Kat has started performing occult rituals – and also that her odds of surviving this one are very low. I was impressed by the visual creativity of the final section of the game, and also by the darkness of the ending it leads to.  

I’m a fan of the Japanese tradition of occult “solo games” like One-Person Hide and Seek and Satoru-kun. While many of these rituals are meant to summon a spirit, the purpose of others is to create a gateway to a different dimension. If the dimension-linking ritual is performed correctly, what happens then? No one ever says, and Project Kat offers as good of an explanation as any regarding why this might be.

Since it’s a relatively short game, Project Kat leaves a number of questions unanswered. Still, I really enjoyed the story, which has good pacing and a nice tonal creep from camp into horror. Project Kat is a neat little game to play in one sitting, and the creators have released a longer story set in the same world, Paper Lily, which is free to play on Itch.io (here) and on Steam (here).