Key facts
- The Guardian published a review of Night Plane on October 29, 2026, covering a retro-style indie horror job-simulator for PC in which players act as a flight attendant on a disturbing airborne journey.
- The critic places Night Plane within a growing indie sub-genre of job-simulator horror games that includes Home Safety Hotline, Dredge, and Grease Trap '99.
- The game begins with the player starting their first day as a flight attendant, meeting colleagues, and checking in customers at the departure gate while screening for invalid tickets.
- Passengers with boxy heads and expressionless faces already frighten the player, and ghostly figures walking down the aisle and disappearing deepen the uncanny valley effect.
The Guardian published a review of Night Plane on Oct. 29, 2026. The review covers a PC horror job-simulator in which players act as flight attendants on a disturbing airborne flight. It is a retro-styled indie title for PC.
On the first day, the player starts work as a flight attendant, meets colleagues, and checks in customers at the departure gate while screening tickets for validity. The player then pushes a service trolley down the aisle, offering alcohol and inedible meals while responding to passenger complaints. This routine sets up ordinary simulation play before the horror elements emerge. The crash ends the routine and shifts the game into horror.
After the crash, the player returns to the airport to check in customers and sort passengers. Some of those customers are demons in human form. The player must sort regular travelers apart from people-eaters. The review raises whether the player is dead or in purgatory, and notes that a strange creature appeared on the wing just before engine failure.
Now, we have Night Plane, in which you take on the role of a flight attendant on a jumbo jet to hell.
The Guardian critic, The Guardian
The review puts Night Plane in a growing indie job-simulator horror grouping alongside Home Safety Hotline, Dredge, and Grease Trap ’99 as prior examples in the sub-genre.
The game uses glitchy low-poly visuals that copy the technical limits of Sony’s original console, a style the review likens to Crow Country and Fear the Spotlight. The visuals intentionally summon the original PlayStation era to unnerve the player. Boxy-headed, expressionless passengers already frighten the player, and ghostly figures walking down the aisle and vanishing deepen the uncanny valley effect as the game advances.
Conversation becomes more bizarre and eventually breaks down into stutters and sounds while cabin lights flicker and lockers open, close, and rattle as the game moves forward. Backrooms and Japanese onryō film elements shape the layout, shifting the player between the aircraft and the airport and trapping them in endless lounges and baggage claim areas while unseen figures chase them through liminal spaces.
A dry sense of humor runs through the game, so players frequently laugh just before a jump scare startles them. New Zealand-based developer Liquid Static Studio first frames Night Plane as a daft horror spoof, though the critic finds its nightmarish imagery genuinely disturbing.
The review points to frightening details including piles of dead rats in the janitor’s room and a repeated image of the burning aircraft’s wreckage scattered across a remote wilderness as examples of nightmarish imagery. The critic calls Night Plane a clever and absorbing example of horror that increasingly takes apart and studies games and their rules and conventions.
One playthrough lasts four or five hours, and later runs add new sub-quests and endings. Night Plane costs less than a tenner, which the critic calls a steal.
The review’s final verdict calls Night Plane a fascinating budget flight into weird existential horror for PC. The piece concludes that players will never take cabin crew for granted again.
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