Don't Fret blends music-school horror with puzzle survival and it's already unsettling

Don't Fret is an upcoming puzzle-infused survival horror game from Scary Kid Productions, and a Summer Game Fest demo already had IGN's preview writer's heart pounding before the two-minute mark. You play as Fret, a young boy who wakes up transformed into a wooden six-string guitar — four strings already broken — inside an abandoned music school, with no memory of how he got there.

The demo opens with a genuinely unsettling intro: a man in a suit hammers at a door in the pouring rain, demands to see Fret, then retrieves a crowbar from his trunk and smashes through a window while Fret hides in a closet clutching a guitar. The game never explains who the man is, and that deliberate vagueness does the heavy lifting. Once inside the school, the tone shifts to classic survival horror — disheveled rooms, scattered papers, broken windows, and a still-smouldering cigarette on the desk that makes it clear you're not alone. A stranger on a radio knows Fret's name and tells him to reach the main hall. Getting there means finding keycodes, booting up old computers, and solving environmental puzzles.

Scary Kid Productions grew out of Rockit Music, a popular YouTube music channel whose songs covering Skibidi Toilet, Five Nights at Freddy's, and Rainbow Friends have racked up millions of views. That background shapes Don't Fret in a concrete way: a full 25-song album is scattered throughout the game as collectibles. The soundtrack pulls in a strong lineup of horror-adjacent YouTube musicians — The Living Tombstones, The Stupendium, and JT Music all contributed.

No release date has been announced yet, but the demo suggests Scary Kid Productions has a firm grip on atmosphere — both visually and sonically. The reviewer admits horror games scare them even on a bright afternoon, and Don't Fret apparently wasted no time proving why.