Horror games for the season (and beyond)

[jimster]

Fanatical has a cheap horror bundle right now. Surely many of them are crap, but might be good bang for your buck. Can anyone vouch for these?

https://www.fanatical.com/en/pick-and-mix/build-your-own-spooktacular-bundle-2

 

[Riskbreaker]

I can vouch only for Detention and The Cat Lady. The former was already mentioned in this thread, the latter is fantastic with some caveats. It's an adventure game with keyboard only controls, sorta like Grim Fandango but with sidescroller movement. It's weird but not too offensive. It's also much more focused on narrative and atmosphere than on puzzles. The writing, tho, is exceptionally good for a video game.
The whole thing's vibe is, I don't know, like Proyas' The Crow meets New French Extremity. It's very striking alright.

Thanks for linking that bundle by the way, there's a couple of titles there, like Conarium and White Night, that I've been eyeing.

 

[ferratilis]

Stasis is great, it's a point and click sci-fi horror game with great art and atmosphere. Afaik, the dev is a fellow Codexer.

 

[Puukko]

Fanatical has a cheap horror bundle right now. Surely many of them are crap, but might be good bang for your buck. Can anyone vouch for these?

https://www.fanatical.com/en/pick-and-mix/build-your-own-spooktacular-bundle-2

Conarium has piqued my interest more than once. Hmm...

 

[Ivan]

The port of the Wii U Fatal Frame game is close to release.

I'm not too sure about that pricetag given the game's age... Ninja Gaiden collection costs the same and contains three content heavy games from PS3 era and even there people complained about its price.

Curious about these. Which is the best entry to start with? FF

 

[v01]

Metroid Dread. Then Chasm ~The Rift~.

 

[Puukko]

The port of the Wii U Fatal Frame game is close to release.

I'm not too sure about that pricetag given the game's age... Ninja Gaiden collection costs the same and contains three content heavy games from PS3 era and even there people complained about its price.

Curious about these. Which is the best entry to start with? FF

Most seem to recommend either 2 or 3.

 

[GreyViper]

Id add also Corpse Party with its dark humor and gore as a contender. Unlike Dark Chronicles its hard to know who you can save without spoilers or who are scripted to die. Also has some of the weirdest dialogue, ass cream ointment???
https://store.steampowered.com/app/1273260/Corpse_Party_2021/

Another interesting game I played was Song Of Horror. From what I understand it was originally released episodically, but it did have a novel approach, that you had a limited pool of investigators that got smaller each time you failed. It seemed like a well-executed Mansions of Madness.
Definitely worth a playthrough.
https://store.steampowered.com/app/1096570/SONG_OF_HORROR_COMPLETE_EDITION/

 

[agentorange]

But bro what about this siren 1 ?

its pretty scary
hope that helps

 

[Wunderbar]

Came here to ask Siren 1. They say that its creepy as fuck. But ps2 original game not ps3 remake. Is it really that scary?

it's very tense and unnerving, but it doesn't try to scare you directly.

The game gets under your skin through gameplay (the game is hard as fuck - you can't manually save during a mission, there are fail-states so you can get stuck if you didn't fulfill certain conditions beforehand. You also have a "sightjack" ability, which allows you to see yourself through the eyes of your enemies), unusual visual design (all NPCs have very creepy faces due to deliberately imperfect photoscanning technique), peculiar setting and a story that's told in a non-linear fashion (the characters you get to know and even play as later into the game turn into shibitos and start haunting you).

 

[Nifft Batuff]

People say that Siren 2 (PS2) is better as an entry point. It is still scary and unsettling, but slightly easier and less cryptic in the game mechanics.
Fatal frame 2 is also good. I prefer the PS2 version, it is more atmospheric. But I also prefer fixed/cinematic camera angles instead of over the shoulder camera, in general.

 

[Puukko]

Well, the season is nearing once again, so I figured I'd get an appetizer going before I leap into some proper horror. So I landed on Parasite Eve. I think this is a prime example of a 'horror themed' game. It's really not scary, at least not yet, but the elements are there. It's atmospheric and I like the opera vocals as a recurring theme. The prerendered backgrounds are far from the best when seen raw but with an appropriate shader I think the game's quite the looker. Of course the FMVs are more quaint than anything these days and the plot is straight from a B-movie but hey, how often do you get that in a game.

The combat's really simple and mostly boils down to positioning and timing. Some of the battle areas can be tight and dodging some of those more elaborate attacks can be tricky even when not. You get plenty of healing and I am stocked on revives as well. I wouldn't mind more difficulty, for sure.

Aside from that, it's more on the pixel hunting side. I spent a good while running around the zoo before finding out the key was in that small office in a drawer I just barely missed. Occasionally navigation can be a bit awkward and you have to approach objects and doors from a specific angle.

 

[Ivan]

Nightmare of Decay
a solid RE1 throwback, short, doesn't outstay its welcome, combat feels lethal, enemies aren't spongey

 

[Ash]

Well, the season is nearing once again, so I figured I'd get an appetizer going before I leap into some proper horror. So I landed on Parasite Eve. I think this is a prime example of a 'horror themed' game. It's really not scary, at least not yet, but the elements are there. It's atmospheric and I like the opera vocals as a recurring theme. The prerendered backgrounds are far from the best when seen raw but with an appropriate shader I think the game's quite the looker. Of course the FMVs are more quaint than anything these days and the plot is straight from a B-movie but hey, how often do you get that in a game.

The combat's really simple and mostly boils down to positioning and timing. Some of the battle areas can be tight and dodging some of those more elaborate attacks can be tricky even when not. You get plenty of healing and I am stocked on revives as well. I wouldn't mind more difficulty, for sure.

Aside from that, it's more on the pixel hunting side. I spent a good while running around the zoo before finding out the key was in that small office in a drawer I just barely missed. Occasionally navigation can be a bit awkward and you have to approach objects and doors from a specific angle.

Hold your horses. Everything gets more interesting and elaborate as you progress, like most good games. It's not a masterpiece but overall "solid" describes it well. Same with the sequel.

 

[toughasnails]

Nightmare of Decay
a solid RE1 throwback, short, doesn't outstay its welcome, combat feels lethal, enemies aren't spongey

I opened a thread for that one a while ago but there wasn't much interest here. Yeah, great game and great bang for the buck.

This one that just came out seems to be in the similar vein
https://store.steampowered.com/app/2026870/Night_At_the_Gates_of_Hell/
The dev's prior games seem to be on the short and gimmicky side but this seems to be a huge step up. There's combat, exploration, resource management, puzzles, the lenght seems to be around the same as for Nightmare of Decay.

 

[Morpheus Kitami]

Eh, I think there just aren't that many people around here who actually like games inspired by '90s shooters and/or survival horror. They like their comfort games and not much else. I thought it looked interesting, but never got around to it because I try to keep my gaming to a minimum whenever its not something I'm blogging about.

 

[Ash]

I do. Perhaps the biggest 90s gaming fanboy here. So I checked the link and...it doesn't look like a 90s game. 90s games were state of the art at the time, highly polished, professional, revolutionary. It can't compare to the 90s. What I saw (the first video on the steam page) it looks like your average indie attempt. Those enemies look so immersion-breaking. The animation quality is very poor. Now, I am a total gameplayfag and if the gameplay is good I could overlook that...or, I could just play some other survival horror that I overlooked from the 90s, or replay an old favorite with mods. Or play modern masterpiece survival horror Darkwood. Also the TCs Cry of Fear and Total Choas are supposedly good, free, and made on actual old engines. I'm skeptical, but more open to trying them out than this. For now, at least. I haven't written the game off entirely. Especially not without a deep dive into the gameplay.

Lastly, "the devs prior games seem to be on the short and gimmicky side" does not inspire confidence. At all.

 

[Morpheus Kitami]

I was actually talking about Nightmare of Decay. I should have quoted it. Night at the Gates of Hell looks cool too, but its another one of those games inspired by Italian horror films that more or less seem like they're only of interest to people who liked those films. Those films had a surreal quality to them where nothing made sense even as things were being explained to you. Maybe a tinge of some of the uglier PSX games. Its not a bad thing, necessarily, but the author is clearly exaggerating the awful aspects of his modelling and texturing abilities to make something he hopes comes off as disturbing and weird rather than cheap and unfinished. The way the faces sit on the models is something he's clearly doing intentionally, to try to exaggerate the uncanny valley of his creations. On the other hand, even if he is exaggerating things, those animations look awful.

 

[Ash]

Definitely a slight upgrade from that other game, but again still isn't 90s.

I watched this: https://cdn.akamai.steamstatic.com/steam/apps/256877714/movie480_vp9.webm?t=1647243278

Starts out with a direct, on the nose homage/reference to a 90s game, but at a lower quality. Be original...you know, like 90s devs were?
Is made in a modern engine with no concern for the technological advancements. This means things like unlimited draw distance showing everything in ugly detail, or super high resolutions leaving nothing to the imagination. It's low budget. Various effects, modelling and animation, basically anything that moves, looks like shit. The environment looks mediocre but serviceable. The inventory is super ugly and uninspired too. Visually it's just inferior to the game it is homaging. But since that game was mostly 2D, lets be fair and instead compare it to 3D games of the 90s instead, and again they looked better...well, most of them. Some 90s games looked like shit of course, such as Goldeneye (a mediocre game in general). Gameplay, well it's hard to say from a short clip. It really is. But at least it's not a walking sim (has enemies) & has an inventory, that's a good start.

Darkwood Darkwood Darkwood. Did I mention Darkwood? Buy this game. Steal this game. Play this fucking game. The only horror game in 20+ years that I've encountered so far that gets to stand alongside 90s survival horror.

 

[Morpheus Kitami]

Starts out with a direct, on the nose homage/reference to a 90s game, but at a lower quality. Be original...you know, like 90s devs were?
Is made in a modern engine. This means things like unlimited draw distance, or super high resolutions leaving nothing to the imagination. Various effects, modelling and animation, basically anything that moves, looks like shit. The environment looks mediocre but serviceable. Visually it's just inferior to the game it is homaging. But since that game was mostly 2D, lets be fair and instead compare it to 3D games of the 90s instead, and again they looked better...well, most of them. Some 90s games looked like shit of course, such as Goldeneye (a mediocre game in general). The inventory is super ugly too. Gameplay, well it's hard to say from a short clip. It really is. But at least it's not a walking sim (has enemies) & has an inventory, that's a good start.

Which ones? Surely not the company who originally started off doing a 3D remake of a licensed title they made back during the NES days by taking the gameplay from a French adventure game along with taking heavy inspiration from certain zombie films? I'm not knocking on Resident Evil, but it has pretty obvious influences and I can't say its all that original. Its not even the first Japanese survival horror title, I haven't played it yet, but I believe that honor goes to Doctor Hauzer. RE endured because its a great game and its visuals haven't degraded over time like for so many other games of the era.
That said, I don't think it looks unreasonable. I didn't see anything that looked worse than a mid-tier game from the time and the unlimited draw distance doesn't seem too unreasonable from what environments are shown. Resolution isn't really something that can be worked with, since people will whine at best, it'll outright break the game at worst. I dunno, I've seen a lot of PSX games over the course of the past week, so maybe I just have different standards for ugly at the moment.

 

[Ash]

Everything has inspirations, silly. Every piece of media ever made has inspirations. There's a difference between inspirations and straight knock-offs. It recreates the scene almost 1:1, but lower quality. What value does that have? So imbeciles can go "aha yeah I recognise that game. How coool"?

I've seen a lot of PSX games over the course of the past week, so maybe I just have different standards for ugly at the moment.

PSX had lots of amazing looking games. Many not-so good looking, but this is obscured by pixelation, old renderers, lower resolutions, high effort, and devs actually being pros and highly competent at their job. Check out the compound fracture thread for elaboration: https://rpgcodex.net/forums/threads...1-style-dino-survival-fps.137226/post-7180189

Of all these indie efforts, boomer shooter revivals and such, none are really capturing the 90s spirit visually, spritually, thematically or in gameplay.

 

[Morpheus Kitami]

Everything has inspirations, silly. Every piece of media ever made has inspirations. There's a difference between inspirations and straight knock-offs. It recreates the scene almost 1:1, but lower quality. What value does that have? So imbeciles can go "aha yeah I recognise that game. How coool"?

Imitating previously used shots and scenes isn't exactly something new. People have been doing that for a while, see the Mona Lisa or that one statue of Jesus Christ after he's been crucified. Its basically just a way of showing everyone too stupid to read descriptions to see that the game is inspired by Resident Evil. Lazy? Perhaps, but it seems like its been a very effective method of getting the point the author wanted across.
Either way, you're attributing much too much to the '90s. Certainly, no one has been able to capture the best, but then again, the way the industry is at the moment nobody ever will. But some of those lesser titles? That has definitely been done.

 

[Arthandas]

Good horror games were replaced by dumb walking sims like Medium, Remothered, Visage or Song of Horror. They have no real gameplay and barely even count as games.
The only good ones that came out "recently" are Darkwood, Tormented Souls and RE7 (if you're playing it on the Madhouse Mode).

I've heard good things about Alisa, World of Horror, Faith - The Unholy Trinity and The Horror Of Salazar House but I'm yet to play any of those.
There's also Super Lone Survivor coming out at the end of October. It's a remaster/expansion to Lone Survivor which is one of my favorites.

 

[Great Deceiver]

The problem with all this nostalgiabait that's been going on is that it's incredibly low-hanging fruit. It's exactly the same for the decade of pixelshit we've had by now. Developers can just dismiss their lack of technical prowess by claiming they're doing an homage to the classics. There's more talent displayed in a single screen of Darkwood, an honest and stellar effort by people that understand their limitations and worked around them to maximize the potential of their game, than in pretty much all of these PS1 rehashes put together.

Nostalgiabait games just feel very low effort and low energy to me at least, like modern filmmakers hiding their incompetence by claiming their movie is a "B" movie. People like Roger Corman didn't set out to make "B" movies, they set out to make great movies, even if they didn't have big budgets and had to churn out a million of them a year.

Anyway, the 90s were incredible for the breakneck speed of technological progress in gaming (and of course in other areas), there's never been anything like it and there'll probably never be anything like it in the future, at least not in our lifetimes. Newer players going through a back catalogue can't really grasp how it felt to go through it at the time. I realize this is true for a lot of creative media, and I consider myself lucky to have been able to experience it firsthand. Conversely, it makes it way harder to appreciate games as they are being made today (or for the past 15 -20 years).

 

[Puukko]

Alright, in the later half of Parasite Eve now. The difficulty has been on quite the rollercoaster. The hospital put up a decent challenge, particularly with those b-balling chimeras and the spider boss. Then I immediately went to the warehouse which was some proper ballbusting as I had no healing items and the enemies hit for a ton. Definitely the most reloading I've done in the game. I have a feeling that area was meant to be done way later. The Chinatown sewers on the other hand sucked and were piss easy, the enemies dealing one tenth of the damage and the bats being there just to waste your time. Thank God it was a fairly brief section, I didn't bother finding all the chests. The museum's the highlight so far in terms of effort put in, but it's still pretty easy and I am drowning in healing items like never before. I guess the game thinks I need em for that one upcoming boss fight. I've got pretty good firepower in my grenade launcher, so we'll see.

Is it even possible to run out of ammo in this?