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Don’t Trust This Game

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Jacksepticeye closes out another horror triple bill with the strangest cut of the night.

Seán McLoughlin, better known as Jacksepticeye, dropped a new 37-minute-and-14-second entry in his long-running horror anthology on February 26, 2020. Titled “Sentient,” the video is Episode 28 of his “X Games, 1 Video” series — the format most fans still call “3 Scary Games” — and it runs through three unrelated indie titles rather than one full playthrough. The closer, a two-week passion project called “Sentient,” gives the episode its name and its most unsettling stretch.

• The episode, uploaded February 26, 2020, clocks in at 37:14 and covers three separate indie horror titles in one sitting.
• The lineup runs “Don’t Trust This Game,” the original demo of “The Mortuary Assistant,” and “Sentient,” a psychological horror teaser built by studio FORMA in Unreal Engine over two weeks and released on itch.io on January 27, 2020.
• Jacksepticeye called the trio “legitimately amazing,” singling out the contrast between disobedience mechanics, mortuary scares, and Sentient’s experiment-under-observation dread.

Three Games, One Sitting

The “X Games, 1 Video” format has become one of Jacksepticeye’s most reliable horror slots precisely because it never lingers on one idea too long. “Don’t Trust This Game” opens the episode by building tension around rules the player is explicitly told to follow — and then punishing them for either following or breaking those instructions, depending on the trap. It’s a short, mechanically sharp opener built around obedience and suspicion rather than jump scares alone.

From there the episode shifts into the demo build of “The Mortuary Assistant,” a clinical, body-horror-adjacent title set inside a funeral home where routine embalming tasks turn into something far more sinister. The tonal jump from the first game’s puzzle-box paranoia to the mortuary’s sterile dread is exactly the kind of pacing that keeps these compilation episodes from feeling repetitive — each title resets the type of fear before the next one starts.

Inside FORMA’s Sentient Corp

The episode’s namesake closes the video out. “Sentient” drops the player into the role of a test subject inside the sterile halls of a facility branded Sentient Corp, where an automated voice walks them through a series of obedience-based trials. Developer FORMA built the entire experience in Unreal Engine across roughly two weeks before releasing it as a free download on itch.io on January 27, 2020 — a turnaround that shows in the game’s tight, single-idea structure rather than any lack of polish.

What separates “Sentient” from the episode’s earlier titles is the source of the fear. There’s no monster chasing the player through corridors; the horror comes from the facility’s clinical calm, the sense of being tested and catalogued, and the implication that whatever is running the experiment understands the subject better than the subject understands it. Jacksepticeye’s reaction leaned into that shift, treating the automated voice and the facility’s sterile design as the real threat of the segment.

“These games are legitimately amazing.”

Enduring Effectiveness of the Format

Twenty-eight episodes into “X Games, 1 Video,” the appeal is less about any single title and more about the whiplash between them. Pairing a rules-based indie puzzle like “Don’t Trust This Game” with a narrative horror demo like “The Mortuary Assistant” and then closing on something as conceptually stripped-down as “Sentient” gives viewers three distinct flavors of dread in under 40 minutes — a pace that fits the same appetite that’s made indie horror releases such a consistent draw on itch.io and Steam alike. It’s also a low-risk way for a channel this size to spotlight tiny, self-published projects that might otherwise never reach a mainstream audience.

That exposure matters for developers working solo or in pairs, the way FORMA did with “Sentient.” A two-week jam-style build getting played in front of Jacksepticeye’s audience is a different kind of payoff than a Steam listing buried under thousands of other new releases — and it fits neatly alongside the kind of unnerving, mechanically small horror experiments that keep turning up on lists of games built around dread rather than combat.

Whether “Sentient” gets expanded past its current teaser form is still an open question for FORMA, but the itch.io page has the two-week build sitting there as a complete, free experience for anyone who wants to run through Sentient Corp’s tests themselves after watching episode 28 play out.