Otherside Tapes: Favela

What do you do when the only thing between you and a smiling, wax-faced creature is a camera battery? Otherside Tapes: Favela drops you into Rio de Janeiro in 2006 as a content creator chasing a supernatural lead, and the answer arrives quickly. The game is a first-person found footage horror built around one explorable location, a handful of puzzles, and a constant question about how much power you have left.

Cláudio da Silva and the Walk Into Rua 7

Cláudio da Silva is a content creator who covers supernatural cases, and he arrives at Favela das Almas to film the legendary Rua 7, a street tied to disappearances and an old, serious incident. Missing-person posters cover the alleys, the opening stretch is almost silent, and Cláudio keeps chatting with his camera as if none of it worries him. That confidence ends the moment he reaches Rua 7 and gets pulled into a dimension ruled by a malevolent presence and creatures that look like deformed wax figures.

From there, the goal is simple: get out.

The story arrives in scraps rather than cutscenes. You find archive files while backtracking through the same streets, and those documents slowly explain what happened on Rua 7. As the first episode of a larger horror anthology, the game keeps things short, though some players felt the plot never gave them a strong reason to wait for the next tape.

Camera Battery and Night Vision in Otherside Tapes: Favela

The camera is both your flashlight and your lifeline. When the street shifts into a version possessed by the creatures, almost everything goes dark and you navigate by night vision in the style of Outlast, with only a few light sources left to guide you. The battery drains as you go, so every charge becomes a decision.

• Night vision lets you read the darkened streets of Favela das Almas.
• The camera flash halts a creature for a short time but costs precious battery.
• A wrong turn burns charge, which makes backtracking expensive.

Horror fans who enjoy resource-managed dread will feel at home, since the margin for error is thin without ever feeling arbitrary. The map is small, which makes memorizing routes and item locations realistic.

The location also changes between versions of itself, from nearly normal to fully possessed, so one small area stays unpredictable from start to finish.

Eye Contact Chases and Repetitive Puzzles

Once the eye contact rule arrives, the game asks you to keep looking at certain creatures so they do not chase you. The trouble starts when you run while holding that gaze, because other creatures sometimes block the path, and you take damage, die, or burn battery on a flash to hold one in place. Many players call these stretches frustrating rather than frightening, and they are the most divisive part of the game.

Puzzles are the second sore point. The rules are easy to grasp, but the execution leans on repetition: one numeric code, for example, makes you line up four dials to the same value just to enter a single digit, and moving one dial shifts the others. Puzzle fans who want clever deduction may find this the weakest stretch, and the creature noises that keep playing in the background make concentration harder.

The game does let you tune the pressure. Combat and puzzles have separate difficulty settings, and puzzles start at Easy by default. Reports also mention crashes and bugs, and some players dislike how character names lean on popular Brazilian stereotypes.

Questions About Otherside Tapes: Favela

1. How do you stop the creatures from chasing you? Keep eye contact with them while you move, and use the camera flash when one blocks your path to halt it briefly. Each flash costs battery, so plan your route through Favela das Almas before you run.
2. How does the camera battery work? Night vision and the flash both draw on the same battery, and the darkened, possessed version of the street makes you lean on it harder. Cláudio can run dangerously low if you wander, so memorize the layout and avoid wasting charge.
3. Can you make the puzzles easier? Yes. The game has separate difficulty settings for combat and puzzles, with puzzles starting at Easy by default. You can raise or lower either one without touching the other.

Otherside Tapes: Favela scares best when Cláudio is alone on Rua 7, camera raised, watching a wax-faced creature grin from the corner of a dark room while the battery shrinks. It is a short, flawed, atmospheric trip through Favela das Almas, and its strongest moments come from lighting and sound rather than from its chase rules. Go in for the found footage dread and treat the eye contact sections as a hurdle, not the point.