The love affair with analogue tech is alive and well in Game Over (2026); add to that a few clear nods to a fair few pre-existing films (Ring and Evilspeak in particular), and you’ll get a sense of what to expect here. Is it groundbreaking? No it isn’t. Is it affectionate? Yes it is.
We start with an online streamer called Emma (Samantha Acuña) with a gaming channel, who introduces us to Kaniva Games, a company founded way back in 1980 which could have been world famous, but mysterious calamity beset the studio and everything ground to a halt, even before they could get their first game released. Half of the programmers disappeared; the other half got off worse, as they all mysteriously died. The rest is urban legend: that game they were working on together, titled Goggi the Guest, is now rumoured to be ‘cursed’. But the game itself never made it to the shelves – or did it?
Emma’s only gone and got hold of a copy of Goggi the Guest from another streamer, so she intends to play it and then review it online. She has the vintage console of course (left nameless here for obvious reasons) and so the game goes in – a few moments go by – and then with little waiting around, creepy things start to happen: the lights glitch, the game begins to act in a eerily sentient way and then Goggi himself (itself?) is able to appear. He’s a monstrous menace, possibly has a cousin called Pumpkinhead, and he’s here only to maim and kill, which unfortunately he then does to Emma.
Next, it’s over to Emma’s formerly estranged sister Re (Costanza Andrade), now left grieving and, as it happens, full of all the wrong sort of curiosity about how her sister died. Rumours that she died because of this so-called cursed game have already reached her; alongside cousin Rebeca, she makes the executive decision to also play the game, letting the newly-busy Goggi loose once more…
I mean no great insult here when I say that any genre film fans could probably more or less write the rest of the screenplay themselves. Go on. If you were to do so, you’d likely identify: a group of young people, each with connections to the game, who now need to work together to solve its mystery before Goggi tracks them down too. Right? And so it goes: this isn’t, then, by any means a deeply complex film, and nor is it a visionary, genre-defying film, either. If it’s doing anything unusual, or at least less usual, then it’s in how director and co-writer Carlos Marin builds a bridge between different eras of gaming and gamer fandom here, bringing together his own vision of 8-bit gameplay (decently creepy, as it happens) with the far more recent phenomenon of streaming, online channels and online rumour mills, which does show an awareness of the now longstanding nature of gaming culture, something which is still shifting and changing as time goes on. But it’s not a philosophical work and it doesn’t dig into more contemporary anxieties, beyond that initial set-up; there are even some puzzling lags in pace in places, which feels surprising, given the film’s less-than-ninety-minute runtime. Despite some on-paper connections to Ring and even – given the stalking nature of the monster – It Follows, Game Over lacks that sense of existential dread.
But what does it do well? The young actors do a decent job with what they’re given, and the film knows well enough to add in some effective practical FX scenes (whilst sticking to sympathetic, briefly-there CGI effects). Yeah, there’s another dash of It Follows in the appearance of some of the death scenes, but they’re realised quite nicely in their own right. Whether you find Game Over way more derivative than an affectionate homage to pre-existing titles – I’m wavering, but largely find myself in the latter camp – then at least you can safely say that the film has come from a place of earnest love for horror cinema, with presumably no real wish to strike out somewhere unchartered with all of this. It’s clear to see why Dead Northern picked it for a festival audience, especially for a late-night slot – this kind of straightforward, but affectionate and at times bloody, grisly fare will probably do the job, even if it’s unlikely that anyone will have their world changed by the experience.
Game Over (2026) appeared at this year’s Dead Northern Film Festival in York, UK.