Out of all plots you could use in order to make a horror game, it’s shocking to realize that few, if any of them, are based around the classic tales of alien abductions and conspiracies. You know, the kind that made movies like Signs famous in the first place, the real tinfoil hat crap. This is what made me look forward to play Greyhill Incident, published by the same company behind the surprisingly competent MADiSON. What I ended up experiencing, however, was one of the most boring and unintentionally hilarious horror disasters in recent memory.

Greyhill Incident takes place in a rural community in the boondocks of Midwestern America, where a collective consciousness of hilariously voiced imbeciles is ambushed by alien invaders. And I mean the classic ones, the borderline adorable-looking greys with big heads and ginormous eyes, automatically rendering them funny at best, cute at worst. You play as Ryan Baker, some random guy equipped with a baseball bat, a gun, and voice acting so bad I am pretty sure he suffers from schizophrenia. At least that’s how I picture him in my head canon.

Where to even begin with this mess? Well, the story and gameplay loop are completely pointless, wasting the interesting premise of an alien abduction with atrocious voice acting, and lunatics wearing tinfoil hats telling you to go to nearby houses to collect some random item in a pointless series of fetch quests. I was never able to take any character seriously due to their voice acting and also due to how horrendous they all looked. Greyhill Incident doesn’t feature bad environments, but every single human character you meet looks more alien than the aliens themselves.

What’s weird is that, in theory, the technical aspects of Greyhill Incident aren’t terrible. The button responsiveness is passable. The framerate does its job. It’s never a looker of a game, but it runs well enough. It even takes advantage of the Dualsense in a basic, but neat way, forcing you to keep pressing L2 in order to charge a flashlight, complete with controller sound effects and some trigger resistance. But everything is thrown away with how terrible the game is from a design standpoint.

The stealth elements are bizarre. You have this flashlight, but if you turn it on even once, the aliens will magically figure out where you are and hunt you down. If you hide in a bush, they will also discover your location, as if they had cellulose-based x-ray vision or some crap like that. At the same time, you have means to defend yourself against them; they just don’t work as well as they should.

You have a baseball bat which can stun these aliens, at the cost of the single slowest swing in the history of gaming as we know it. There were big chunky Elden Ring bosses that took less time to telegraph their attacks than good ol’ Ryan here. You also have access to a revolver, which kills any alien in two shots, but weirdly enough, there’s barely any bullets in the entire game. You know, a game set in rural America. In the nineties. With your neighbor even bragging about having killed people in Vietnam. Are you really telling me this piece of redneck nowhere is a bastion of progressiveness? C’mon…

This is one mess of a game, isn’t it? Greyhill Incident could have been considered a hilarious, “so-bad-it’s-good” experience due to its dumb premise and Wiseau-esque levels of voice acting, but it’s way too boring to be considered worthy of an ironic playthrough. Poor stealth mechanics, samey environments, and an emphasis on being an Amazon delivery boy for a bunch of tinfoil hat lunatics cozily sitting in front of your house make this slog of a game feel less like an unintentional gaming version of Plan 9 From Outer Space and more like an exercise in how long you can stomach it before turning your PS5 off.

Graphics: 4.0 The environments themselves aren’t terrible, though the lighting effects are poor. The character models, on the other hand, are laughably bad. The humans look worse than the aliens themselves.	Gameplay: 4.5 While there’s nothing particularly egregious with the button responsiveness, the gameplay loop is pointless, the stealth is clunky, and the combat is half-baked at best.
Sound: 3.0 The voice acting is so schizophrenic it’s almost possible to enjoy it as some bizarre piece of outsider art.	Fun Factor: 3.0 A stealth horror game about alien conspiracies and abductions shouldn’t have bored me to death, but Greyhill Incident sure found a way to make one of the most appealing gaming concepts feel like one of the most uninteresting experiences of 2023.
Final Verdict: 3.5

Greyhill Incident is available now on PS4, PS5, Xbox One, Xbox Series S/X and PC.

Reviewed on PS5.

A copy of Greyhill Incident was provided by the publisher.