China's Indie Horror Game 'JIAOHUN' Returns to a Millennium-Eve Town
A Chinese town called Xiannü, in Baishui County, has a name that sounds like a folk tale and a fate that sounds like a ghost story. Every calendar on every wall stopped on the eve of the new millennium. Now it is the setting of JIAOHUN, a cinematic first-person psychological horror game that was revealed globally on October 8 at the 3i indie showcase, with a planned release in 2027 on PC via Steam and PlayStation 5.
The developer describes Xiannü as a nameless little place that survived awkwardly in a crack between eras. When the tide of the new century arrived, the town tried to change with it. Every attempt failed. The image the game leans on is specific and quietly devastating: household calendars still hanging at the last day of 1999, as if the town collectively agreed to stop turning pages.
Players return to this half-abandoned settlement and piece together why it ended. The studio is calling it a psychological horror game with cinematic storytelling and a first-person perspective, which places it in a growing wave of Chinese horror titles that trade jump scares for atmosphere, memory and dread. The project’s Chinese title, 叫魂, refers to an old folk practice of calling back a wandering soul.
That title matters. It signals that the horror here is rooted less in monsters than in folk belief, small-town superstition and the uneasy space between what a community remembers and what it refuses to. A town that tried to modernize and failed is fertile ground: the fear is not just of what is lurking, but of being left behind by history itself.
The reveal came during 3i, a global indie showcase held on October 9 that has become a regular stage for independent studios to debut trailers to an international audience. JIAOHUN shared the spotlight with other China-linked announcements, including the hand-drawn action adventure Stumble Waltz from KRAFTON’s Flyway Games, which is set for a December 3, 2026 launch on PC, Nintendo Switch 2 and PlayStation 5.
Taken together, the two projects sketch a widening range for Chinese game development. One is a painterly fantasy; the other is a slow, unsettling trip to a dead-end town. Neither is chasing the scale of a blockbuster. Both are chasing a mood, and both are aimed at players far beyond China.
For global players, JIAOHUN offers something rarer than a haunted house: a haunted decade. The turn of the millennium in China was a moment of enormous optimism and dislocation, and a small town that bet on the future and lost is a premise that needs no local knowledge to feel cold. Whether the game delivers on that premise is a question for 2027. For now, the image of those calendars is doing a lot of work.