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Is it worth playing?
68K people are in it right now and it holds a 82% positive rating, so the answer for most people is evidently yes. The more useful question is whether you are one of them.
What it does well
The premise lands immediately
Maps a huge number of players already know, with the lights off and something hunting them. No tutorial required and no lore to read first.
The monster is genuinely frightening
Every recorded first reaction is the same noise. Whatever else is unfinished, the thing coming out of the television works.
Rounds are short
A few minutes each. Losing costs you almost nothing, which is the right shape for a game this punishing.
What it does not
It is unfinished and says so
Doors that do not close, an attack that sometimes will not fire. The developers label it pre-alpha; believe them.
There is no counterplay
Nothing you can pick up will ever hurt it. If what you enjoy about Murder Mystery 2 is the sheriff duel, that is not here in any form.
Systems go unexplained
Keys accumulate with no visible purpose. Some players find that intriguing and some find it sloppy.
Who should skip it
If you want a fair fight, or a finished game, or the social deduction half of Murder Mystery 2, this is not going to convert you. It is a chase in the dark with no way to fight back, and that is the entire proposition.
If you came from Murder Mystery 2
Expect the maps to be familiar and everything else to be different. The role spin is the same ritual, but the murderer becomes a monster you cannot fight, and there is no sheriff. If the part of Murder Mystery 2 you enjoyed was the social deduction — working out who the killer is, or bluffing as them — none of that survives the translation. Everyone knows what is hunting them within seconds. What replaces it is a chase.
If you came for horror
It is a jump-scare-and-chase game rather than a slow-dread one. The tension is front-loaded — the monster breaks out of a television at the start of every round — and a round is short. That makes it easy to play in ten-minute pieces and thin if you were hoping for atmosphere that builds.
The pre-alpha question
The developers label it pre-alpha and the label is doing real work: doors that do not close and attacks that do not fire are both on camera. Whether that reads as charming or as broken depends entirely on what you expect from something free. If you want a finished game, this is not one yet. If you want to see something while it is still changing week to week, that is what is on offer, and the known bugs are worth reading before you decide the game is at fault for a round that went strangely.