Image credit: Disordered Media
It’s the most wonderful time of the year! Spiced drinks, crunchy leaves, and plenty of blood-soaked indie games to send you shivering into the night. While it’s always a good idea to play through classic franchises like Resident Evil and Silent Hill this time of year, there are plenty of indie games that deserve your attention.
If, like me, you’ve spent an unreasonable amount of time trawling the depths of creepypasta forums and weird flash game sites, oneway.exe needs to be high on your list of games to play this Halloween. Here’s why it’s the best horror game to play if you love lost media and urban legends.
An homage to the horrors of 2014
In oneway.exe, you’re tasked with unravelling the story behind untitled.exe, an unfinished video game from three indie game developers.
It’s a charming premise, at first – maybe it’s just me, but the idea of coming across a niche, unfinished game in a thrift store or at a strange market is delightful. I’ve picked up a few odd fangame cartridges over the years, and they always feel deeply special, regardless of if they’re finished or not.
The game feels like it’s been plucked straight out of an SCP forum from 2014 or so, merging a FakeOS format with horror and exploration mechanics. You’ll get to poke around on a desktop and learn more about the strange world you’ve found yourself in to begin, setting the tone for what’s to come.
After a little digital exploring at the start, you’ll be thrown into the first challenge of the game, forced to navigate a horrific hallway maze as reality seems to crumble around you. You’re not the only person in the maze, either – I’ll be keeping this article relatively spoiler-free, but there’s someone else in the maze who really wants to see you.
The game unfolds from this point onwards with different characters inside the fictional game of untitled.exe having their own special rooms, functioning somewhat like escape rooms where the player needs to complete a series of puzzles and mini-games.
Oneway.exe is incredibly meta in its storytelling. You’re not just experiencing fragments of untitled.exe as you might in a horror visual novel or puzzle game. You’re actively playing it on an in-world computer, while operating in a FakeOS environment.
There are sections in the game where you’ll be solving puzzles in your digital desktop instead of the actual overworld, using everything from the antivirus program to a virtual machine manager to unpick more of the story.
I’m a huge proponent of FakeOS and horror being merged. There’s something so deeply immersive about interacting with a fake desktop and seeing it splinter into a smiling face or being locked out of your files by a malicious piece of malware; the format lends itself naturally to a believable strain of mundane horror.
The scares in oneway.exe are solid, too. If you’re a horror fiend, chances are that you won’t be overly freaked out by the loud jumpscares or chase sequences – they are fun, regardless – but there are some genuinely unnerving moments where you’ll feel hesitant to press on. I was impressed with how well oneway.exe built up its atmosphere.
Careful, he’s going to Jeff the kill you
One of the main things about oneway.exe that makes me yell about it on a regular basis is how deeply it taps into a specific era of internet history.
For some added context here, I’m 26, and developed my rabid obsession with horror in roughly 2012 or so. My experience with horror media started off with SCP stories, wailing YouTubers running through the original Amnesia, and creepypasta stories like Jeff the Killer or Slenderman.
I also started gaming in the very tail end of the flash game era, spending an unreasonable amount of time on sites like Girls Go Games and Stardoll, along with scores of slightly untrustworthy sites with unnecessarily gory stickmen games and tower defense titles.
Playing oneway.exe felt like I’d fallen into a particularly creepy childhood memory, particularly the sections with Anita and Billie. The dress-up games and cute pop-ups mixed with the piles of guts and creepy pop-up images felt like an oddly nostalgic, gory smoothie, and I couldn’t get enough of its chunks.
The artwork in oneway.exe is ridiculously cool, too. I’ve never spoken to the team behind the game, but it feels like the developers have just as much reverence for the golden age of flash games and creepypastas as I do.
Each character has been meticulously crafted, and everything down to the mini-game UI felt like a purposeful homage to the older era of the internet. Younger me would’ve lost their mind seeing the blend of cute, creepy aesthetics with scary chase sequences and screaming pop-ups.
If you’ve ever scrolled through a creepypasta subreddit, spent too much time listening to conspiracy theories on YouTube, or played your fair share of disturbing flash games as a kid, this game will likely resonate with you as much as it did for me.
Oneway.exe smacks of 2014 message boards and ARG-style social media pages. It’s a sacrificial lamb on the altar of lost media, and if you’re looking for a unique horror experience to rip into this Halloween, I can’t recommend it highly enough.
On top of this, the Module 1.0 update means it’s richer than ever, with extra voice lines, character interactions, and lore. Arguably, there’s never been a better time to play oneway.exe – or revisit it, even – than right now, as the game is a joy to experience. Or rather, a joyful nightmare.
FAQs
Oneway.exe was developed and published by Disordered Media.
The oneway.exe release date was October 23, 2025.
Oneway.exe: Module 1.0 is a large update for oneway.exe that introduced bags of new voice lines, art pieces, and lore details, greatly widening the scope of the original game.
Yes, oneway.exe is a scary game, covering heavy topics and featuring both jump scares and chase sequences. It’s not as intense as something like Alien: Isolation, but it’s unnerving and startling at times.
