Shift At Midnight Key Art
Image: Bun Muen & Kwalee

There's been an uptick recently in the number of paranoid doppelganger-identifying deductive mysteries, cozy retail simulators and co-op, proximity-chat Bad Job Survival games. Through forbidden trend-blending alchemical processes, we now have Shift At Midnight from indie developer Bun Muen and published by Kwalee, delivering all of the above in one shelf-stackable package. It's been one of this week's bigger indie releases, and looks rather fun, in a grimly comedic kinda way.

Shift At Midnight is a game about running the night shift at a small supermarket in the midst of a surreal doppelganger invasion. Y'know, the kind of retail nightmare that anyone working customer service is well familiar with. As well as stocking shelves, ringing up prices and generally serving the customers, you've also got to check their behaviors and appearances against their ID and figure out if they're a monster wearing someone else's skin.

If you reckon you've found one of those monsters, you shoot them. If they're a human, you thank them and wish them a good night. And if you got something wrong, either you've got a dead or wounded customer (generally considered bad for business), or you'll be visited later by the now-transformed monster you missed. It can be a tougher job than you'd think, as the kind of people visiting a supermarket in the middle of the night tend to be weird sorts to begin with.

While playable solo (or up to six players, thanks to a recent update), Shift At Midnight is designed to be a three-player experience. Not too overcrowded, not too lonely. While the game does currently have an ending (after surviving 13 randomly generated shifts with multiple endings), there's a public beta test currently running for an endless mode. Rather than just stretching out the experience past its sell-by date, Bun Muen promises "exclusive customers, weapons, traps, monsters and more" to keep players guessing until dawn. So, something to look forward to.

Shift At Midnight is out now for £10/$10 (that's not how exchange rates work...) with a 10% discount running until July 27th, plus a multiplayer-compatible demo here. There's some additional savings to be found if you own co-op ghost-hunting sim Phasmophobia, Yapyap or Escape The Backrooms.