A Star in the Desert: The Games of Desert Fox

Early on in my ownership of my Switch, I was surfing the storefront and lamenting a lack of good horror when I saw a game with a unique title: Bad Dream: Coma. I was drawn to it because I’ve always been interested in media that explores the nature of dreams and altered states of consciousness. It had a clever hand-drawn style and spooky vibes that stood apart from anything else in the Nintendo store. I took a risk, bought it, and not to spoil the rest of this piece, but it turned me into a massive fan.

Bad Dream: Coma from developer and now self-publisher Desert Fox is a point-and-click adventure title made in GameMaker Studio 2, in which you play an unnamed protagonist wandering through a drawing come to life as you attempt to solve the mystery: Why is everyone asleep, and how can we all wake up?

The puzzles are simple and the storytelling is as surreal and dreamlike as the visuals. At times, the game is surprisingly dark and somewhat macabre, though the player never feels in significant danger. The game is more atmospheric, like flipping through an Edward Gorey book, rooted in a sort of Gothic appeal. You meander through the landscape solving object puzzles and interactables and can easily wrap up a session in an evening. Replaying provides some subtle changes, but these are not games focused purely on choices.

I found the game so delightful that I bought the other available titles from Desert Fox. All of them have a similar PnC vibe with light puzzle solving and exploration and all of them have creepy, unsettling horror vibes, with the standouts being the rest of the Bad Dream series (Coma, Fever, Stories, and Purgatory) and Desert Fox’s new series called Faded Stories which already has two entries in it.

There’s also a set of other games with similar gameplay, but with a photo composite style. They’re slightly more traditional horror than the hand-drawn games, especially Darkness Under My Bed, in which you navigate passages made of items under said bed. It’s probably the truest horror effort of his collection.

As I began to collect and work my way through his games, I found myself curious about this developer and his seemingly endless well of creativity. Fortunately for me, Desert Fox, whose real name is Robert Gąsiorowski, was willing to chat with me about his work.

“I’ve been making games since I was a kid,” he said. “I started with board games and when I got my first PC at the age of 13, I moved to the digital arena.” Now at age 35, Gąsiorowski’s years of experience are in the double digits, which might explain his skill and breakneck development cycle, releasing two games—Faded Stories: Full Moon and Bad Dream: Purgatory—in 2023 alone. “That puts me in a nice position, where I feel natural and comfortable in this field, and I’m still relatively young to have enough energy and passion for my work.”

Desert Fox games communicate that passion wholeheartedly, no doubt this has helped build his following. He released some smaller games that gained enough traction to pull him out of a slump. “I published [Bad Dream: Butcher] on Gamejolt and---true story---I went to bed crying because I had no ideas for myself outside of gamedev. I felt like I lost the last four years of my life chasing wind. When I woke up, Butcher was featured on the main page.”

Gąsiorowski is part of a burgeoning Polish game dev community, though he doesn’t think it’s too different from the rest of the global industry. He also believes that developers around the world have adjusted to the industry’s demands in a somewhat negative way. “We work with passion, but more cynical people can sense that and they use this against us.” Perhaps this explains why he now prefers to self-publish his games.

Much like the gold standard survival horror games of the late 90s and early 2000s, Robert creates horror games not with the goal to scare, but to provoke something deeper. “Other than Darkness Under My Bed it's never my goal to make my games scary. I struggled with depression for my whole adult life and that strongly affected my approach to world building and topics I want to discuss. Because of that my games resonate with a more mature audience.”

Gąsiorowski’s brand of thoughtfulness reminds me of why games like Silent Hill stick with players in a similar way to something like Bad Dream: Coma — they’re not trying to scare you. The horror emerges from their closeness to those darker parts of the self — the parts obsessed with loss, grief, loneliness, the visceral depths of the human experience.

It was an honor to be able to talk about Desert Fox games and find out more about Robert Gąsiorowski. It’s rare now that I feel strongly about a developer’s entire suite of games to the extent that they become automatic buys for me. They’re clever, beautiful, bespoke creations deserving of all the praise I can heap on them.

Robert is, however, as humble as they come: “I'm always hesitant to talk about my work because I don't want to shine through my games. I put a lot of effort into them so I always think it's better if they speak for themselves.” For me, they are loud and clear.

*This feature has been lightly edited for clarity and was originally published in Issue #1 of Fearzine Magazine which was distributed in June 2024.