TGS 2026 — Flawless Abbey Hands-On Preview: To Sleep, Perchance to Dream

Befitting their stable of indie games, Cypriot publisher Critical Reflex had a small but very atmospheric booth at Tokyo Game Show 2026. Packed into a few square meters of techno-horror machinery were 19 (!) games mostly in the horror adventure wheelhouse, save for TANUKI: Pon’s Summer, a post office-sim about a chubby tanuki on a bike. Funnily enough, a fluffy Pon mascot was often outside Critical Reflex’s booth, ushering players into their many other scary worlds.

Of note to me were developer Forest Reges’ SATED, a first-person roguelite with PSX-era graphics where you must cook nightmarish dishes for even worse clients; Monumental Collab’s survival-horror fishing game Drowned Lake was like a first-person Dave the Diver meets Silent Hill; and Militsioner, a first-person immersive sim by developer TALLBOYS, where you’re falsely accused and running from the law—namely, a giant policeman who can scoop you up like a doll. Suffice it to say, Critical Reflex is working with some very talented creators and making a lot of (mostly creepy) stuff I want to play, even if it’s outside of RPGFan’s usual coverage.

Critical Reflex Booth at TGS 2026

Within our coverage, however, is the eerily beautiful Flawless Abbey. I had an extended demo with the game while chatting with a member of Critical Reflex’s team. Revealed in 2023, Flawless Abbey has been under continuous development as the debut title for its small indie team, Bed Head Games. The titular Abbey is not a place, but rather a person: a fellow dreamseeker, like the player, whose job is to enter people’s dreams via H.R. Gigeresque machines.

For the first few minutes, I was a dreamseeker troubleshooting a dream machine, navigating a very bureaucratic sci-fi complex not dissimilar from Critical Reflex’s booth. When I finally got the machine running, it was like a game within the game. This frame narrative added to the sense of surrealism Flawless Abbey does so well. In moments, I was whisked away onto a train flying through the sky towards a distant, Babel-like tower.

The game is gorgeous—with a pop-up book aesthetic and painterly dreamscapes that loosely echo reality. The setting and its logic really capture the half-remembered liminality of dreams.

There’s a helping of Myst in the rich atmosphere and puzzle-solving, and many of the puzzles have a tactile quality similar to Amerzone. Like a puzzle box, items in the world must be turned, flipped, and toyed with to progress, which also progresses the protagonist’s enigmatic past: you are a dreamseeker with little memory of your past, led up the dream-tower by a coy architect of dreams I could only assume was Abbey. Abbey seems as keen to halt your progress as she is to help it, like a dungeon master of sorts.

The creepier parts of the demo reminded me of amusement park dark rides (think the terrifying Snow White ride at Disneyland), plus some clear inspiration from Amnesia: The Dark Descent. Mirroring a scene from that game, there was a moment in Flawless Abbey where I had to run from one lantern to the next, flicking on their temporary light and staving off an unseen but certainly not unheard beast gaining on me. The sound design is especially rich in this game, equal parts unnerving and dazzling.

I stepped through so many seamless moments that, upon reflection, made little sense in sequence, just as dream logic falls apart the next morning. One moment, I was in a theatre, the next, an observatory. A grand entrance hall, a broken elevator, an office, a domed building resembling the Pantheon in Rome—I was enraptured during my time with the game, and I look forward to the full dream.

Flawless Abbey has no set release date beyond a 2027 target for PC, though the demo I played had both mouse and gamepad controls, so I’ll keep my fingers crossed for console releases. In the meantime, the Halloween season might be the perfect time for me to dip into some of Critical Reflex’s other titles.