Rising from the collapse of Clever Trickster Studio, a core team of five Belgian developers has resurfaced with a dark new vision. Moving away from the management sims of their past, the team has announced Sefton Asylum—a first-person psychological horror game set in a mid-century psychiatric hospital.
Arriving this summer on Steam, the announcement was accompanied by a chilling official trailer. Sefton Asylum finds the team pivoting toward a “bio-real” horror experience that blends job simulation, exploration, and survival in an isolated institution.
In Sefton Asylum, players step into the shoes of a night nurse working the graveyard shift in a secluded asylum. While her official duty is to care for the patients, her true objective is a desperate search for her missing brother.
Shifts are built around a constant trade-off. Players can spend time diagnosing and treating patients or use those same precious minutes to explore forbidden wings, gather evidence, and uncover the horrors hidden within the institution.
At Sefton, failure has permanent consequences. With no weapons to rely on, the “survival” in survival horror is literal. Patients who go untreated do not simply fade away; they succumb to forbidden medicine and return as reanimated threats, making the hospital progressively more dangerous as the night unfolds.
The project draws heavily on the PS1-era aesthetic and H.P. Lovecraft’s “Herbert West—Reanimator,” favoring bodily transgression and medical tension over traditional cosmic dread.
“With Sefton Asylum, I wanted players to feel the anxiety of choice and the weight of guilt,” said Egon, the game’s Lead Designer. “The patient system is at the heart of that idea: those you abandon do not truly disappear, they come back and gradually turn the hospital itself into a threat…Beneath the horror, Sefton also reflects on techno-solutionist hubris, institutional violence, and the way certain systems can normalize suffering in the name of progress.”
The game’s development is as much a story of survival as the gameplay itself. After Clever Trickster Studio (the team behind Blood Bar Tycoon and Magic Forge Tycoon) went bankrupt, five members refused to walk away. They rebuilt under a leaner model, prioritizing creative ownership and a tighter scope.
“Sefton Asylum grew out of a difficult but clarifying moment for the team,” says Virginie, one of the game’s producers. “Beyond the PS1-inspired visual direction that really clicked with the team, what mattered to us was not just making a horror game, but making one that still carries our systemic DNA. Time pressure, limited resources, trade-offs, and escalating consequences are at the heart of Sefton.”