Amanda The Adventurer

Amanda the Adventurer frames its horror as a found-footage children's show: you play Riley, who inherits Aunt Kate's house and finds a stack of VHS tapes starring a cheerful cartoon fox named Amanda. Since its indie release in 2022, its slow-burn premise, that the show itself is watching you back, has made it one of the genre's most imitated formats.

Each tape plays out like an actual kids' episode, complete with sing-along segments and simple on-screen games, until Amanda breaks the fourth wall and starts reacting to what you do in the room between tapes. Paying attention to small inconsistencies between episodes, and to what Amanda asks you to do rather than what the narrator says, is what pushes you toward the different endings instead of a single scripted conclusion. The success of this format inspired a wave of similar cursed-media horror games, including Andy's Apple Farm, which swaps the fox mascot for a different kind of unsettling host.