Oneway.exe review: A love letter to lost media

Oneway.exe is an odd, uncomfortable experience; it’s a horror puzzle adventure game with a non-linear, fourth-wall-breaking narrative and gory cast of characters. Developed and published by Disordered Media, it’s one to keep an eye on as an indie horror lover.

Below, you’ll find The Escapist’s full, spoiler-free review of oneway.exe, looking at the core gameplay, quirks, and branching narrative. This game contains some heavy themes and imagery, so it’s worth checking the Steam page for content warnings. 

The Escapist recaps

• Oneway.exe is a horror puzzle adventure game for PC, developed and published by Disordered Media.
• In oneway.exe, you’re tasked with figuring out what happened to the three developers behind a seemingly haunted video game called untitled.exe, experiencing the story through someone else’s computer. 
• After a tense introductory sequence, the game takes a non-linear approach to storytelling, with multiple paths for the player to creep down. Each path has its own puzzles, monsters, and lore. 
• The game is inspired by old forums, lost media, and internet myths, offering a uniquely disturbing yet familiar experience that’ll resonate with horror fans who were on the internet in the 2000s. 
• While there was some clunkiness sprinkled throughout certain sections, oneway.exe remained impressive. It was visually strong, genuinely unsettling, and masterfully written, giving the best horror games of the year a run for their money.

A strange, branching story

Horror games can feel a little formulaic the more you play them; there’s a [MONSTER] in a [HAUNTED LOCATION] who wants to kill you, and you need to hide in lockers to dodge the villain while looking for three keys to escape, all while playing as a brooding [JOB ROLE] looking for their lost [PARTNER]. 

There’s nothing wrong with this necessarily, but after some time in the horror genre, you can predict what’s going to happen with a fair few titles. That’s why oneway.exe felt like such a breath of fresh air to play through.

Oneway.exe is a horror puzzle-adventure where you’re tasked with exploring a computer and figuring out what happened to three developers who made an incredibly unusual, seemingly haunted game.

When you get into the game, you’ll be presented with an unsettling maze of hallways to pick your way through. Without spoiling it too heavily, you are not the only creature in the maze, and you will need to use all the tools at your disposal to make it out in one piece.

This opening was a hell of a lot of fun, once it worked properly. It was slightly buggy at first – a core mechanic didn’t trigger, meaning the maze went on for longer than it should’ve – but once it worked, it was tense, startling, and atmospheric, acting as a fantastic introduction to the game’s tone and style.

After the opening scene, the game places you in a hallway with many doors. Each door takes you to a new puzzle room with its own neat theme and style, accompanied by ever-present pop-ups and developer notes to keep the mystery ticking along.

Cursed code, crafted with care

Every individual room in oneway.exe had its own horrific story to tell, weaving into the wider narrative of the game.

The gameplay varied from solving riddles to completing word searches, with the clear focus being the story over the gameplay. Don’t let that fool you, though – there were some truly unsettling and disturbing moments throughout, blending body horror with jumpscares and tense sound design.

Authentic writing is key with narrative-driven games; it’s immediately obvious if someone doesn’t care about what they’re typing into a dialogue box. Oneway.exe was evidently made by people who have an almost reverent view of internet culture, seemingly referencing everything from dead forums and flash games, to niche chain mails and creepypasta stories. 

Performance-wise, oneway.exe did leave a little to be desired. The initial hallway scene was somewhat buggy, as mentioned, and there was one instance where the game crashed – although this may have been a deliberate stylistic implementation, as silly as that sounds. It did fit the theme well.

Aside from a little clunkiness in places, oneway.exe was an absolute feast for horror-hungry eyes. It’s a strange game – there’s no other way of putting it. It was clearly created by individuals with a genuine passion for internet culture and lost media, and it’s a gory delight to navigate its non-linear strands. 

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References

1. oneway.exe: Module 1.0 on Steam (Steam Store)