Amanda The
Adventurer Review

Amanda The Adventurer (2022) is a found footage horror game where you watch tapes from your attic and discover a scary story. What starts looking like a kid's TV show soon starts acting strangely with distorted messages and the game playing itself.

Play involves clicking on the different items on the screen. However, the game intentionally subverts this interaction so you are forced to follow a particular path into scary scenarios. At the end of each level you have to type a word, although again, this becomes distorted and often types itself.

The game plays with the unease of half-remembered childhood TV shows. The shows in the game are made up, but manage to capture the uneasy sense of these peculiar videos. This approach has made the game popular with a young audience and it pops up in playground games.

At one point in the game, a character says they are "allergic to apples", to which Amanda tells them they should "never be afraid to try something new". Later, the same character seems to be scared and wants to escape.

It was a short game created for a game jam competition. However, its popularity has led to copycat unofficial Amanda the Adventurer games on Google Play. However, the only official location for the game is the creator's Itch page or Steam page, where there is an expanded version with more episodes.

As is common with these kinds of cyber ghost stories, YouTubers and other creators have made videos about the game where they add content to exacerbate the scariness of the game - pictures of animal carcasses and photos of people's homes. These things aren't in the game itself but can be unsettling to children.

Our examiner, Andy Robertson, first checked Amanda The Adventurer 18 months ago. It was re-examined by Jo Robertson and updated 7 months ago.