Paper Lily - Chapter 1

Most indie horror games made by one person borrow a mood. Paper Lily - Chapter 1 builds its own. It comes from Leef 6010, a solo studio, and it continues Project Kat, a free prologue that you can skip without losing the thread. That decision matters. Episodic horror often charges new players for an older chapter before the new one makes sense. This one doesn’t, and that removes the first reason to walk away.

You play as Lacie, a girl who is rejected by nearly everyone around her. The game doesn’t soften that. Something terrible happens early on, and then a golden letter leads her into a hidden world full of demons. There she meets creatures like Rune, who are kind in ways that feel slightly wrong, and she starts to learn that a curse may explain her misery. That’s a strong premise. It changes Lacie’s loneliness from backstory into a mystery the game can actually solve.

It sits in a crowded but loyal corner of the market. Players keep comparing it to OMORI and the wider tradition of RPG Maker-style horror, and that’s fair: top-down exploration, anime-style portraits, and a steady mix of sweetness and dread. Fans of the genre are demanding, though, and the game’s reception suggests it has met that standard with a broad audience rather than a small group of fans.

A full run is short, and there are several endings. That makes it a game built for replays, not an epic, and your opinion of it will depend largely on whether you value density over length.

• Puzzles with more than one solution: Most obstacles can be solved in more than one way. The solution you pick can change later scenes and which characters survive.
• Multiple endings: Choices add up to different outcomes, and Steam achievements push you to find the ones you missed.
• Stealth and evasion: You avoid unsettling enemies and use objects in the world to get past threats instead of fighting them.
• Minigames: Short changes of pace break up the exploration so a short run doesn’t settle into one rhythm.
• Cloud saves: Your progress follows you between machines, which helps a game built around replays.
• Content warning: Blood, light gore, swearing, and difficult themes around abuse and isolation.

The Core Loop: Consequence Instead of Combat

Paper Lily’s main idea is simple. A puzzle solution is also a moral choice. In most adventure games, a puzzle is a lock and you’re looking for the key. Once it opens, it doesn’t matter how you opened it. Here it does. Several routes past an obstacle can lead to different later scenes, and in some cases they decide who is still alive at the end of the chapter.

This fixes a long-standing weakness of the genre. Branching narratives usually put their choices in dialogue menus, where the stakes are announced and the “good” option is obvious. Paper Lily puts them inside the puzzles. You aren’t choosing between labeled options. You’re solving a problem, and you find out later that your solution had a cost. It’s a more honest kind of consequence, and a more upsetting one, because you only learn it was a choice after you’ve made it.

The downside is predictable. With several solutions per puzzle and a short runtime, a single playthrough shows only part of the game’s design. That’s deliberate, and the achievements and multiple endings exist to bring you back. Still, if you finish once and move on, a lot of what’s good here will pass you by.

Exploration and Threat

The top-down areas are dangerous in fact, not just in tone. You move through them avoiding enemies, and you get past obstacles with objects from the environment, not a weapon. That keeps you vulnerable, which suits the character. Lacie isn’t a fighter, and the game doesn’t pretend she is. Giving her a sword would have undercut everything the story says about her.

The minigames keep the pacing moving. In a game this short, a change of rhythm every so often stops the evasion sections from feeling repetitive. How well each minigame lands will vary by player; they’re pacing tools more than systems with real depth, and they work in that role.

Writing and Character

This is where the game earns its reputation. The writing draws consistent praise, and Lacie and Rune are the two characters players bring up most. The relationship between a mistreated girl and a demon who treats her better than any human does is an effective horror setup. It makes you wonder whether kindness in this world is real or bait. The game keeps that question open, and the dread comes from it more than from any jump scare.

The mix of cute moments and real dread is hard to manage. Many games in this style lean too far one way: either sweet for so long that the horror feels tacked on, or grim for so long that the cute moments seem ironic. Going by what players report, Paper Lily moves between the two often enough that neither tone gets stale, and the cute scenes make the cruel ones hurt more.

The Episodic Problem

This is the most serious criticism. Paper Lily - Chapter 1 is a first chapter, and it feels like one. The curse, the demon world, and Lacie’s situation are all set up for a larger story that isn’t finished yet. Players are right to call it short, and right to point out that the full story is still unfinished. A short horror game with several endings is a reasonable package. The opening hours of a longer saga, with no release date for the rest, is a riskier purchase. You’re paying for a strong start now and trusting that the rest will arrive later.

The art direction pairs pixel-art environments with expressive anime-style portraits, a standard combination in the genre that Leef 6010 uses well. The pixel art makes spaces readable and a little eerie. The portraits carry the emotion. Faces are where the horror lands, and the game knows that. The moody soundtrack gets consistent praise and does a lot of the atmospheric work, especially in the quiet stretches where nothing is chasing you but something feels off.

The interface is conventional for top-down narrative RPGs, which helps. There’s little friction getting started, and a game this short shouldn’t spend its first half-hour teaching you systems. As for performance, a 2D pixel-art game of this scope is light on hardware, so most PCs should handle it without trouble. Check the Steam store page for the official requirements.

Paper Lily is available only on Steam, and it fits PC well. Top-down movement, interaction prompts, and menu navigation all work with a keyboard, and the slower, deliberate pace means you won’t need a mouse for precise aiming. Check the store page for controller support and Steam Deck compatibility before you buy for a handheld. From what the game asks of you, a gamepad should feel natural, but that’s an educated guess, not a confirmed spec.

The Steam-specific features do real work here. Cloud saves matter more than usual in a game built around branching outcomes, because keeping save files at key decision points is the practical way to explore alternate routes. Achievements work as a guide to what’s left: they’re the clearest sign that a different solution or ending exists.

Paper Lily - Chapter 1 does the one thing most branching horror games avoid: it makes the choice part of the puzzle and then makes you live with the result. Add Lacie, a lead character you’ll want to protect, and Rune, a demon you won’t be sure you can trust, and you have a solid, distinctive entry in indie horror from a solo developer.

It isn’t new in form. It follows the OMORI style closely. And you’re buying the first act of an unfinished story. Those are real limitations, not small complaints, and they’re why this lands as a good game rather than an essential one. If a short, unfinished story doesn’t put you off, play it, and then play it again. The second run is where you see how much the design is doing.