Night Record: Thin Walls Brings Slow-Burn Post-Soviet Horror to Steam

Released on 19 September, Night Record: Thin Walls is a first-person psychological horror game now available on Steam, turning the everyday routine of a decaying post-Soviet apartment block into something considerably less comfortable.

The story initially follows maintenance worker Vadim, who leaves town to care for his sick mother and hands his responsibilities to his wife, Elvira. She takes over the ordinary work of dealing with tenants, checking rooms and moving through the same ageing corridors, only for the building and its residents to gradually stop behaving quite as expected.

Neighbours appear to know things they should not, familiar encounters begin to feel strangely rehearsed and subtle details shift around Elvira as she continues following her husband’s routine. The idea of privacy becomes increasingly important in a building where sound carries through thin walls and information has an uncomfortable habit of surfacing by itself.

Rather than relying on constant jump scares, developer Althera Games describes Thin Walls as a slow-burn psychological horror experience built around atmosphere, environmental changes and the feeling that something familiar is becoming progressively wrong.

The presentation leans heavily into that idea. Thin Walls uses Unreal Engine 5 for its photo-realistic environments while layering a VHS-inspired visual style across a dense apartment building containing lived-in rooms, narrow corridors, an old elevator, utility spaces and a boiler room.

What players are seeing in the finished game is also considerably different from the version originally demonstrated earlier this year.

Following feedback from the playable demo, Althera says it put Thin Walls through what it called a full restoration. The lighting system was rebuilt from the ground up, dialogue was rewritten around the final narrative, gameplay pacing was changed to remove repetitive stretches and alternate endings were added before release.

Guidance was another major target. Demo feedback suggested players were sometimes unsure where to go or what to do next, so the final pre-launch work added clearer inner thoughts, contextual objective guidance, navigation hints and markers designed to appear when somebody spends too long searching.

The launch itself was not completely smooth.

A critical bug discovered on 19 September could prevent players from reaching and completing the ending. Althera patched that problem the same day and then began a rapid series of updates covering navigation, audio, localisation, dialogue and the final section of the game.

Several of those updates have gone beyond bug fixing.

Update 0.0.3 added new endgame mechanics and scenes, while later patches continued expanding dialogue and narrative content. Full Steam Achievement support arrived on 29 September, followed two days later by one of the stranger additions for a psychological horror game: a driveable nostalgic Russian bicycle that can be used to move around the environment.

The latest announced development goes back to the story itself. Update 0.1.1 confirmed that Althera is working on a new cinematic ending scene intended to resolve remaining narrative questions and close several story points while setting up future content.

I think that is the more interesting part of the post-launch support. Adding a bicycle is certainly memorable, but the studio is still modifying and extending the actual narrative rather than treating the released story as completely fixed while it concentrates only on technical patches.

The response on Steam has improved alongside those updates. At the time of writing, 80% of 92 user reviews are positive, enough for Valve to give Night Record: Thin Walls an overall Very Positive rating.

The current Windows version supports Steam Achievements and Family Sharing and requires 5GB of storage. Minimum specifications list an Intel Core i5-6600K, 8GB of RAM and either a GeForce GTX 970 with 4GB of VRAM or AMD equivalent.

Steam currently lists 13 interface and subtitle languages, including English, Turkish, French, German, Spanish, Japanese, Korean, Russian, Ukrainian, Polish, Simplified Chinese, Brazilian Portuguese and Arabic.

Althera has also been unusually specific about its use of generative tools. The studio says pre-generated AI material was used for some store capsule assets and selected in-game audio elements, while gameplay, narrative, level design, voice direction and final artwork were produced by the development team.

Thin Walls is not planned as a standalone name either.

Althera has confirmed that NightRecord is becoming an anthology series in which each entry tells a self-contained story with different characters and locations. The next project, NightRecord: Duty, is already in early development and moves the formula into a hospital night archive, where horror revolves around noticing anomalies while processing patient records.

Duty will not require players to finish Thin Walls first, although Althera says people familiar with the first game may notice connections between entries. Development began in July, but there is currently no Steam page or release date.

That leaves Thin Walls as both a complete short-form horror story and the starting point for a larger series that is already taking shape. With new ending material still being developed less than three weeks after release, its own story may not be completely finished evolving yet.

Night Record: Thin Walls is available now through its official Steam page.