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.
BOO! The the 7th generation was really long did you know that? Remember getting your very first 7th gen console? Well, my kids didn’t exist and your remaining time has been reduced by a decade. But hey, try not to think about time and entropy slowly taking you towards your final destination in a march you cannot possibly hope to stop. Stop thinking about all things you cannot see or accomplish, and how meaningless it will all be in the end. Read my spooky pics instead of thinking of things that are truly terrifying.
Dead Space (PS3, Xbox 360, PC)
During the mid year drought of 2010, I played a succession of games that accidentally seemed to have a theme in common: find your wife (and she is almost certainly dead) in a summer that my friends and I came to call Wife Quest. These games were Dante’s Inferno, Silent Hill 2, Gears of War 1 & 2, and Dead Space.
Now many people (such as Jared) prefer Dead Space 2 over the original game, and while I love me some Dead Space 2, they are wrong. Dead Space puts you in claustrophobic, alien environments. It gives you a character that is quite able to defend himself with tools designed to cut space age materials in deep space, then the game throws xenomorphs so resistant they make your weapons feel like mere annoyances to them. Dead Space nailed scarcity too, as you are given enough to survive, but you never feel you have enough to see things through.
Beyond the horror aspect, Dead Space is a beautifully crafted game with a lot to like. The design of the Ishimura is excellent, because it feels like all of its areas served a purpose. Details like the use of Isaac’s suit as a HUD felt innovative and immersive at the time. The detail of his weapons being the tools, the sound getting muted in places where there is no air, and a multitude of other small things really shows how carefully crafted Dead Space was not only as a horror story, but as a science fiction setting.
Lolipop Chainsaw (PS3, Xbox 360)
If Dead Space is well crafted sci-fi horror, Lolipop Chainsaw is your low budget, racy, B movie grind-house flick. Except in Lolipop Chainsaw the sexy cheerleader is the one holding the chainsaw and doing the mutilating. The game stars Juliet, a super popular cheerleader who just turned 18 (so you can perv in peace) and also happens to belong to a family of zombie hunters. While she is going to school, zombies attack resulting in her boyfriend getting bitten, and Juliet doing an ancient ritual that essentially turns him into nothing more than a head.
In a lot of ways, Lolipop Chainsaw is exactly what it looks like; a mindless zombie gorefest starring a hot cheerleader. The combat reflects this, and there are plenty of the kind of off color jokes one would expect from this entry. The combat isn’t great, but it is fun and varied enough to keep you playing, and there are plenty of collectibles for the completionists out there.
In other ways, I was pleasantly surprised. The boss fights were fantastic. Zombies styled after different types of rock, from psychedelic rock to the viking metal. The characters are surprisingly fleshed out. Way more than needed for a game of this kind. All the strong, proactive characters in the game are female (juliet and her sisters), proving that you can have strong female characters and still have fun and be sexy.
Also there are zombies.
Bioshock (PS3, XBox360 , PC)
A well crafted atmosphere is a common thing in games made by Ken Levine (Enemy Slime’s “Developer in Most Dire Need of a Hug” award recipient for 2013) but Bioshock was his magnum opus for creating a dark, claustrophobic, environments that keep you on edge.
From the moment you arrive on rapture and are stalked by your first splicer, the game never lets you feel as though you are safe. Whether you hear the footsteps of a Big Daddy in the distance, or the laughter of splicers, or you start feeling the oppressive weight of the ocean around you as rapture slowly falls apart around you, Bioshock made you feel as though you were one wrong move away from death.
Bioshock was released early in the 7th generation life cycle, and this worked in its favor. There were just not many games before Bioshock that looked that good, and that contributed immensely to increasing the spooky factor of the original game. Subsequent games on the franchise just did not capture this feeling of impending, oppressive danger. By the time Bioshock 2 came around, the novelty had worn off. And Infinite, while having a great city of its own, felt too open and colorful to get in your head as much as the original game did.
