Make sure they’re well-fed
It's Not Me, It's My Basement is a free role-playing video game that puts you in the shoes of a child all alone in their house. Developed by arcadekitten, this is a 2D indie psychological horror RPG Maker game wherein you’ll encounter some disturbing imagery and a creepy storyline.
Here in It's Not Me, It's My Basement, the perspective of the story is centered around a kid who’s trying to cope with their unusual but dangerous situation. You must help them survive throughout each day—although there’s actually no player agency since there’s only one ending.
You’re a big kid now
The story of It's Not Me, It's My Basement is about Embry, a young child of ambiguous gender who’s currently home alone. Their parents aren’t around, so they have to be in charge of everything in the house. This includes making sure that the entity in the basement is fed during mealtimes. However, this means that they have to keep getting food—and unfortunately, it keeps getting hungrier.
There’s no quick tutorial for the controls, but they’re easy enough to figure out since you’re only using your keyboard. The arrow keys are for moving about and selecting choices. Meanwhile, the Enter key or Spacebar key allows you to interact with objects, progress the dialogue, and confirm your choices. Finally, the Esc key is for exiting out of a sub-menu and opening the menu during gameplay.
Story-wise, the game is deeply immersive and really pulls you into Embry’s perspective and fears about their situation. The psychological horror comes from the uncertainty of just how they’ll survive when they’re a helpless little kid. However, the story isn’t fully explored since the choices you make don’t affect the ending at all. It doesn’t help that the game may not work properly if you run the wrong EXE file.
Can be too linear in storytelling
Overall, It's Not Me, It's My Basement is a short and solid horror game if you’re a fan of this genre of RPG Maker games. Not only can it be finished within an hour, but its suspenseful storytelling really draws you in. However, your player choices don’t really matter since there’s only one ending. Plus, you should open the “nwjs” file instead of “Game” to load the game properly.
