Our yearly tradition is back. Each day leading up to Halloween our editors will recommend a set of games of the spooky variety that you might want to check out in the spirit of the season.
This year when I think of horror I’m also thinking nostalgia. My picks for 2015 haven’t always aged well, but at the very least they’re games that gave a pretty visceral experience back when I first played them.
Manhunt (PS2, PC, Xbox)
Manhunt might be one of the creepiest games I’ve ever played, though it requires some rather specific instructions to make it so. Rockstar’s stealth title tells the story of James Earl Cash, an inmate on death row who finds himself inserted into a bizarre snuff film where he’s forced to murder his way through a vicious gang in order to potentially win his freedom.
Cash has a number of weapons it his disposal, most of which are fairly mundane items like baseball bats, crowbars, or the particularly noteworthy plastic bag. For the most part enemies need to be eliminated through stealth. If the player is able to spend more time lining up a kill they’ll get a bonus and a more gruesome kill as a result.
The game’s stealth components make it tense in its own right, but the console versions go the extra mile by utilizing the Xbox headset or PS2 USB microphone. With the microphone enabled players can actually make noise to attract or distract the enemy gang, but if you go into your settings and turn the microphone all the way up you’ll find that the game takes on a whole new level intensity, where even breathing too loud can alert enemies to your location.
The game’s violence and twisted story have earned it quite a reputation and a number of bans including heavy restrictions or outright confiscation in Australia, New Zealand, Germany, and Russia. While the other two games on my list have really softened up as they’ve aged, even today Manhunt can still be pretty brutal to behold. Although the PC version doesn’t seem to support the microphone I’d still recommend checking this one out today.
Night Trap (Sega CD, 32X, PC, Mac)
Oh man, speaking of controversy, back in 1992 there was nothing you could do to upset your parents more than booting up Night Trap. The game was contentious to the world at large but to my ultra conservative home state it was treated as though the devil himself had manifested in CD-ROM format.
In Night Trap Mr. and Mrs. Martin host a slumber party for a collection of girls, all five of whom disappear mysteriously. Now for…uh some reason there’s a new set of girls arriving primed for an all new sleepover. It’s a curious setup for a group of scantily clad twenty somethings pretending to be teens to be tormented by a group of vampires dressed as a SWAT team.
In order to save the teens from falling prey to the vampire’s strange (and fairly harmless looking) hook apparatus the player must manipulate security cameras around the house and activate traps (get it? Night Trap?) at the correct times in order to slow the vampires and keep the girls’ blood securely in their veins.
Today Night Trap probably wouldn’t even merit a PG-13 rating, none of the girls go beyond showing a shoulder or upper leg and most of the deaths are bloodless or occur off-screen. Of course for its time, it was unlike anything parents had to contend with before. I personally never owned a copy but I remember playing this at night at a friends house who had convinced his family to pick up a copy without looking into it too much. In the end the scariest part of Night Trap might have been the ever present fear of his mom walking in and catching us playing the game, but still, if you never experienced this it’s worth tracking down just to see what everyone was so riled up about back then.
Galerians (PSX)
Galerians had a younger me sold purely on the premise of being a psychic boy who made people’s heads explode. The game borrows heavily from Akira, telling the story of a young teen named Rion who wakes up in a top secret facility to find that he has some pretty dope psychic powers that he quickly turns against his captors before eventually heading off to do battle with a bizarre and horrific AI.
The game uses the same tank control scheme as the old Resident Evil titles with the guns replaced by Rion’s different telekinetic abilities. This changes combat quite a bit, and admittedly not always in a way that makes sense.
Galerians was never a critical darling but I always found some enjoyment out of its hokey story and creepy enemies. The developer Polygon Magic tried revisiting the series again in 2002 with Galerians: Ash but by then whatever modicum of magic that existed had vanished. It might be tricky to track down a copy, but if you missed this one and enjoyed games like Parasite Eve it might be worth going back and giving it another look.
