Home » Latest » Titles » I’M ALONE AND SCARED | The Convenience Store

I’M ALONE AND SCARED | The Convenience Store

2

InfoSearched 149 0 Titles

3.5

SaveSavedRemoved 0

A lone convenience store clerk, a flickering VHS filter, and Markiplier’s screams fill out one of February’s creepiest indie horror uploads.

Markiplier dropped “I’M ALONE AND SCARED | The Convenience Store” on February 22, 2020, and it’s exactly what the title promises: a full playthrough of a brand-new Japanese horror game that turns a graveyard shift behind a register into a slow-motion nightmare. The game, released on Steam just five days earlier, wastes no time trading mundane retail busywork for surveillance-camera dread and doors that open when nobody’s there.

• The video covers a complete playthrough of “The Convenience Store” (夜勤事件 / Yakin Jiken), released on Steam February 17, 2020, by Japanese developer-publisher Chilla’s Art.
• Players take on the role of a Japanese college student working solo night shifts, handling real konbini tasks like stocking shelves, heating bento boxes, and running the register while unease builds around her.
• The roughly 40-minute walking sim uses a vintage VHS filter — jitter, interlacing, phosphor bleed — to mimic classic J-horror cinema, and it has two possible endings, a good one and a bad one.

Inside the Night Shift

Chilla’s Art built “The Convenience Store” around the specific tedium of working alone overnight in Japan: sliding-door chimes, bar-code beeps, the hum of a bento warmer. Markiplier’s playthrough leans into that mundanity early, narrating the checkout routine and trash runs with his usual running commentary before the game starts pulling the rug out. Erratic customers linger too long, the automatic doors slide open with nobody on the other side, and the store’s own security cameras start showing things that shouldn’t be there.

What separates this from a jump-scare gauntlet is pacing. The developer, known in the horror-streaming space for short, atmosphere-heavy titles, lets tension build through environmental detail rather than loud stingers — a strategy that has made Chilla’s Art a name that keeps popping up on the same channels covering the biggest indie horror releases of the season.

The VHS Tapes and SD Cards

The game’s central mystery hinges on found media — VHS tapes and SD cards left behind in the store that the player has to track down and piece together. Markiplier spends a good chunk of the video chasing these clues down, reacting in real time as the footage on them reveals what’s actually been haunting the shop overnight.

Two endings. One good, one bad. And Markiplier’s reactions to finding out which one he got are half the reason the video works.

That branching-ending structure gives the roughly 40-minute runtime some replay value despite its short length, and it’s part of why the title has become a favorite pickup for content creators looking for a bite-sized scare that still delivers a genuine payoff by the credits.

Chilla’s Art Gains Growing Popularity

“The Convenience Store” isn’t Chilla’s Art’s first swing at this exact formula — cramped Japanese setting, ordinary job, supernatural intrusion — and it’s part of a run of releases that has made the studio a go-to for streamers hunting fresh horror material outside the usual AAA cycle. For channels that built entire series around games with unnervingly bleak outcomes, a cheap, tightly-made Japanese horror title with two distinct endings is easy to justify covering the same week it launches.

Markiplier’s video leans into that freshness angle directly, treating the playthrough as a discovery rather than a rehash of something his audience has already seen picked apart online. The comedic timing is still there — his reactions to the doors opening on their own are pure Markiplier — but the fear reads as real, which is the whole point of a game built to run in under an hour.

“The Convenience Store” launched at a low price point typical of Chilla’s Art’s catalog, and given how quickly it found an audience through let’s plays like this one, it’s already looking like a template the studio will keep running with on Steam.