As has become a staple of the Moving Pixels podcast, we try to do something special for Halloween week by checking out horror games. This time we looked to two free indie games.
Both are first person walker games set at night in a mostly open style creepy outdoor environment. However, the two games seemed to be illustrative of how to do it right and how to do it wrong.
Haunted Memories is an episodic game on Steam that never seemed to move passed its first episode and is pretty terrible on all counts. What was interesting turned out to be glitches in the game code and for all three of us became rather unplayable after a while. A horror game that ceases to be scary due to its own problems.
The other I wouldn’t resolutely call but also wouldn’t object to calling it a horror masterpiece. The Cursed Forest is designed around horror set pieces. But these aren’t the set pieces of Dead Space, but more one-off style encounters that remix elements and rules of the environment so that it doesn’t get stale or routine and thus cease to be scary.
We also were going to talk about a third first person walker indie horror game, but lines got crossed in the emails and we never definitively said which 3 horror games on the list we were going to play. Each of us had their own take away from the conversation so I ended up playing Sepulchre instead of One Late Night. We spend some of the extra time talking about what works about horror and the cultural desire for such things a communal activity.
Maybe it’s because there are more of them, but indie games are where you can consistently get great horror experiences in video games. Check out the games or rather The Cursed Forest and Sepulchre and check out the podcast.
“I don’t want to. I don’t want to see. Oh god! Get me out of this place!”