Shift at Midnight: Serving Customers With A Smile and Killing Doppelgängers Onsite
Shift at Midnight is riding the indie night-shift horror train! You’re a regular guy working at a small gas station, following the same-old chores: restock, clean, and check out customers. Your job description has an additional clause where you must identify humans from doppelgängers. If any bit of info doesn’t line up with the customer’s story, you have to dispose of it immediately.
A Gas Station Along The Road
Shift at Midnight drops you into a lonely 90s-style gas station where the fluorescent lights hum, the aisles feel too narrow, and the customers stare a little too long. The graveyard shift is brutal, but for very different reasons. Some of your customers are doppelgängers, and one mistake can turn a quiet night into a frantic scramble to barricade doors, set traps, and pray the creature doesn’t find you.
Customer Service is an Interrogation
Your job starts with something familiar: checking IDs, cross‑referencing details, and watching for suspicious behavior. But Shift at Midnight twists that routine into a psychological trap. You study the customers’ movements, their tone, timing, and conversations. You look for the tiny tell-tale signs that separate a human from a doppelgänger wearing a human guise.
The tension builds with every interaction as you have to pay very close attention when verifying information. You’re deciding whether the thing in front of you deserves to walk out the door or gets a free bullet or two. The game effectively turns customer service into survival training.
When a Creature Slips Through
If a creature manages to leave or escape the store, you need to get your butt in maximum overdrive! The doppelgängers are an invasive species that will bring backup to the places they successfully scope out. When a timer appears on the top of your screen, you’d better be boarding up windows, dragging shelves across doorways, and setting traps in the dark. That gas station needs to become a make-shift fortress by the end of the countdown because that creature’s coming back with a swarm of their managers!
You Don’t Have to Work Alone
Shift at Midnight works best with friends, so the devs patched in a co-op feature. The game supports up to three players, and the co‑op dynamic turns every decision into a group debate. Someone checks the ID. Someone watches the door. Someone panics too early and ruins everything. The chaos becomes part of the charm, especially when you realize the game randomizes each run.
Shift at Midnight’s Demo
The developers released a single‑player demo on Itch.io, giving players a taste of the tension before the full game arrives. It’s a small slice, but it captures the atmosphere perfectly — the quiet dread, the slow build, the sudden shift from routine to terror.
Shift at Midnight is still in development, with a planned release in Q2 2026. The team is shaping it into a co‑op horror experience that blends humor, fear, and the kind of late‑night paranoia only a rural gas station in the middle of nowhere can give. Check out the demo and see for yourselves. If you don’t have a compatible console or you’re not a total gamer, there are plenty of Let’s Plays out there for you to experience the panic and hilarity of what this game delivers!
Putting the “Grave” in Grave Mistake and Graveyard Shift!
Shift at Midnight stands out with a simple truth: the scariest monsters are the ones pretending to be people. The game turns the standard retail routine into interrogations and teamwork into a frantic fight for your lives. It’s a horror experience that knows exactly how to get under your skin — one customer at a time. It’s an analog horror with a cozy balance of suspicion, paranoia, and morbid humor.
