A Pet Shop After Dark reaches Switch, PS5 and Xbox, and its crashes are still intentional

Plenty of horror games begin with a monster. npckc’s begins with a chore list. You take a night job at a little pet shop, and the owner hands over three tasks (water the plants, feed the pets, stay until morning) and one rule in capital letters: do not, under any circumstances, turn off the lights. The rose-and-grey shop and the wide-eyed petsitter look like the start of a cozy game. The menace builds out of the gap between that cuteness and the interface itself, because a pet shop after dark is a point-and-click adventure that breaks its own frame, and its feature list says outright that the crashes are intentional.

That design is what made the move to consoles tricky. On PC, part of the game’s unease came from what the release calls its computer-based interactions, puzzles that play with the machine itself and depend on a mouse, a desktop and a player who trusts both. Working with publisher Viridian Software, npckc has rebuilt those moments as an in-game virtual desktop that runs inside the game and is designed for a controller. The cursor and folders now sit inside the fiction instead of outside it.

The petsitter stands before rows of empty cages and tanks in a pet shop after dark — Image: npckc / Viridian Software

The setup is deliberately small. The cages and tanks look empty, and the to-do list tells you not to worry if you can’t see the pets, because they are shy. You feed animals you never see and water plants that are a little too strange, then you notice how quiet the shop has become. The art keeps to flat greys, deep rose and big-eyed characters, a palette that lowers your guard right up to the moment the shop stops feeling safe.

The game comes from a creator whose catalogue on itch.io runs to dozens of compact, personal projects, from the hot-springs visual novels one night, hot springs and A Year of Springs to the cozy A Tavern for Tea. a pet shop after dark is the outlier in that body of work, a horror piece that uses npckc’s economy of scale (one room, a handful of verbs) to make every click feel loaded. “Reworking those interactions for consoles also gave us an opportunity to add a little more for returning players,” npckc said when the console version was announced, pointing to new diary entries and pieces of lore hidden in the shop.

A faint figure whispers Let me out in the darkened pet shop — Image: npckc / Viridian Software

The game first arrived on Steam in August 2022, and that release earned it a cult following among players who like their puzzles to misbehave. At Brazil’s BIG Festival in 2023 it won the WINGS Spotlight and was a finalist for the Innovation Award. The console edition, with the virtual desktop, the extra content and the added lore, is out now on Nintendo Switch, Nintendo Switch 2, PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X|S, priced at $9.99.

For newcomers, the rule hasn’t changed. For anyone who has already worked a shift there, the new diary pages are the reason to go back, and there’s one more good reason to keep the lights on.

Tags: Nintendo Switch 2, Horror games, a pet shop after dark, BIG Festival, npckc, Viridian Software