Released in 2019 for PC, When the Darkness comes is a walking simulator developed by Sirhaian that uses fragmented, glitch-laden digital environments to explore themes of depression, anxiety, verbal abuse, manipulative control, and suicide. Players navigate a series of abstract landscapes that shift in tone from darkly comedic to deeply unsettling, with recurring imagery centered on a clock, a piano, and a girl. The game is described by its developer as a personal act of self-exploration, conceived as a creative outlet rather than a commercial product, and is no longer in active development beyond critical bug fixes. The first arc runs approximately one hour. Due to its subject matter and heavy use of visual distortion, the game carries explicit content warnings and is not recommended for those sensitive to mental health themes or prone to epileptic episodes.
Taking around an hour on the first play-through, "When The Darkness Comes" feels like you’re wandering around a glitchy hard drive full of abstract dreams and beautiful nightmares. The narrator initially makes it feel like a comedic game, but it soon starts to take a darker tone as you travel down the bizarre broken rabbit hole that explores the darkest themes of the human mind. From a Factory to underwater, from a crystal forest to an Angel sanctuary, or from a dark metro to a white desert, When the Darkness comes offers a multitude of digital landscapes that will activate your senses and imagination.
