What do movies like Don’t Breathe, Abigail, The Collector, and The People Under the Stairs all have in common? They all focus on criminals who break into the wrong place at the wrong time. Burglarizing a home or kidnapping someone for a ransom is already stressful work. It’s worse when the house you’re breaking into is haunted. That’s what Dark Hours is all about, and the former PC exclusive is finally on consoles.
Dark Hours is played in teams of up to four players, uses proximity chat, and sends you into haunted locales like a casino, a museum, and a cruise ship to break and enter, though it’s getting out alive that proves trickier. It might sound like another “friendslop” game in the style of REPO or YapYap, but it actually predates those, having first hit Steam just before Halloween 2024. It then spent a year in early access and went 1.0 last fall. Now, it’s finally on PS5 and Xbox Series X|S.
My early impressions of the game are that it’s closer to something like Payday, with a touch of Phasmophobia, than it is to Lethal Company or Content Warning, though if you’re the type to play all these co-op horror games we’ve been enjoying as of late, this is definitely one not to miss.
You’ll choose your items, hop on a truck, and arrive at the scene. From there, the missions can unfold in any number of ways based on your actions and those of the monsters whose paths and behaviors can’t easily be predicted. You’ll have to achieve a main objective, but side objectives may keep you lingering for some extra rewards, or they might be what sends you to your death, having overstayed your welcome.
Like a lot of my favorite co-op horror games, its magic lies in those moments when your plan falls apart, and you find yourself scrambling and improvising. Finally getting into a high-security vault only to set off an alarm sent me and my team panicking, as we slowly passed out from a gas attack. And just like Phasmophobia, sometimes you don’t have to escape the monster, per se; you just need to outrun your slowest teammate. There’s even an achievement for pushing a teammate into a monster’s grasp.
Dark Hours features eight different monsters, each with its own strengths and weaknesses. There are more than 50 heist items to help you steal more efficiently–or simply survive the night, as well as 60 different map layouts split across five major environments. There’s a sizable unlockables tree with several branches, too, as you’ll be working for three different crime families and earning their rewards whenever you can get back to your safehouse with your head still facing the right direction.
There’s also a PvPvE mode, as well as other secondary modes outside of the heists, including the timeless Red Light, Green Light. If you’re wondering, it does have cross-play, too, which will help you find partners in crime. Dark Hours is out now on PC, Xbox Series X|S, and PS5 for $15.