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.
For some reason each time our “Spooky Picks” come around I seem to be the only guy who could come up with serious, current entries. Could be that my love for the macabre drives me the extra mile to find something I haven’t played yet, and 2015 is such a strong year I had enough spooky picks for two lists over. Ultimately defeated was Layers of Fear; still in early access, Bloodborne; where the spookiest thing is the difficulty, and Resident Evil Revelations 2 which wasn’t very spooky, but boy was it good.
Okay, so one of my finalist spooky picks is a joke but cut me some slack – I give you three real ones. I warn you now my picks have two things in common. First, none of them are what they appear to be on the surface. Second, my choices are more narrative journey than slash and bash or run n hide, but who doesn’t enjoy a good spooky story? Enjoy!
Spooky’s House of Jump Scares (PC)
How appropriate that the game I decide to pick as my first spooky game carries “Spooky” in the title. The titular character Spooky, looking like a harmless little ghost girl out of Adventure Time or Steven Universe, presents you with the simple little task of exploring the 1000 rooms of her house. Your initial journey is a cutesy little romp between colorful randomly generated rooms with cute little cardboard pop outs that will jump at you in an attempt to “spook” you good. So naturally, contained within this saccharine candy shell is a world of utter fucked up madness that will have you screaming at your computer and running for your life.
It’s clear this title is rooted in a ton of influences, from the aforementioned misleading and screwed up backstories of worlds like Adventure Time, to the creep-tacular SCP Foundation wiki, various creepy pastas, movies and games such as Resident Evil, Clock Tower, Silent Hill and even Earthbound. In short, if you’re a horror fan or even a fan of the generally spooky, you should give it a go. The title’s main strength is both in how initially misleading it is, presenting itself as a ‘walking simulator’ where nothing too frightful might happen, to the feeling of claustrophobia that sets in being cramped into Spooky’s tiny rooms and hallways. If you’re not convinced by my pitch, if you think I sound like a baby or a sucker for entertaining this title, the good news is it’s completely free on Steam (sans DLC) and thus ready for you to install and launch instantly. Good luck getting through all 1000 rooms.
SOMA (PC)
SOMA tapped into what’s perhaps my only real world fear, the fear of the deep, deep, watery abyss. I first realized I had this fear when I was about 18 years old. It was my first year in college and I was tasked with an assignment to study exhibits in the Museum of Natural History. I hadn’t been to the museum in a very long time, but I remember sitting underneath a giant whale with friends and all of them thinking how cool it was and me personally thinking “That sumbitch is going to fall and crush us any minute.” I was eager in my young adulthood to get back to the whale to see just how silly my irrational fear of being crushed was, only to face another irrational fear, my knees going weak like jelly at the sight of giant tube worms and angler fish.
“The sea is full of some fucked up shit,” I decided. I walked away and never returned. I instead reported on vikings, I got an A on the assignment. SOMA makes me feel like that young adult and little kid respectively, with hybrid ocean deep/cyborg body horror creatures stalking me around the corners of a derelict underwater station. As a run and hide and puzzler it’s pretty good too. It also weaves a well crafted story of transhumanism. Though I’ll tell you, those illustrations of fishmen and being forced to walk the sea floor really makes me shudder.
Until Dawn but only featuring Matthew and Jessica (PS4 and a lot of patience)
Until Dawn is a video game that makes a lot of big promises it can’t keep, has an embarrassing amount of slowdown for a next gen title, and offers choices that are as tantalizing as picking between a Denny’s and a Waffle House. However along the way I discovered something pretty cool, I could kill most of the game’s insufferable cast (albeit within very small windows) and leave punching bag Matt and village bicycle Jessica as the only characters left alive.
Additionally since Matt does very little throughout the story, and Jessica’s asshole attitude is replaced with a softer, kinder, more monster eviscerated personality, they end up the two most likeable (well, not entirely hateable) characters in the plot. This makes for a pretty great scenario in which both survivors have no more clues as to anything that happened in the plot than the player does, and sets them up for what might be a tolerable sequel in ‘Matt and Jessica vs Evil.” Or not. One can hope we don’t visit wendigos again.
The Park (PC)
The Park just released this month, and I can compare it to two things I loved as a kid (and no I won’t assault you with another story of young me), amusement park rides and campfire stories. A good campfire story isn’t meant to make you crawl into your bunk and ponder deeper meanings of purgatory and what it means to be a good person, it’s just meant to spook you and excite you and make you wonder if that’s ‘Chad the murderous chipmunk mascot’ staring at you through your lodge window or if it’s just a really old tree.
What I’m saying here is The Park is purely a narrative experience, and it’s a relatively straight forward one at that. It’s not like Silent Hill 2 or Five Night’s at Freddy’s where you’re meant to interpret and re-interpret the narrative. Rather it’s a solid shot in the arm of the scary and thrilling, and I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that. Set against the backdrop of MMORPG The Secret World’s Atlantic Park, it’s a complete standalone tale designed as a digital amusement park ride meant to take you on heart racing ups and downs. I quite like what The Park has crafted, it reminds me of the Ghost Story collections I would eat up as a kid (or the creepypastas and SCP entries I enjoy reading now), and conveyed a tale I thought about well after completing the game not because it left me with cloudy philosophical meaning, but because of how damn cool it was.
