Virtual Reality Horror is Amazingly Great

I played Alien: Isolation at the Oculus booth at E3 last week. Alien is a high-end experiment in the genre I’ve been calling “exploratory first-person horror” for the last few years. Mechanically, it’s a lot like Slender or the hiding bits of Amnesia: you are running around a dark space ship with an obfuscated radar, […]

More Indie Horror Games to Back

It’s been a busy summer for indie horror game announcements. There are so many horror games in development, looking for funding, or recently shipped that you might think the world has gone insane. Actually, I think the real reason is that we suddenly have platforms where niche communities (like this one) can vote with their […]

The Problem with Dark Souls

It took me a long time, but I finally figured out why I can’t play Dark Souls. I tried to play it–put a good 15 hours into it, which is longer than it takes me to complete most of the games I play. I even played a bit of Demon Souls before that, so I […]

Let’s fund some indie horror games

I don’t think it is an exaggeration to say that the best horror games in the last few years have not come from traditional console game developers. They’ve come from independent developers, run on PCs rather than consoles, and are scarier than anything we’ve seen from the console space in years. Amnesia and its predecessors, […]

Year Walk

Given the tremendous glut of mobile games available today, it surprises me that there aren’t more horror games. There are a number of zombie shooters, a bunch of Halloween-themed games, and some interesting text adventures, but very little designed to actually scare you. Other than End Night and amateur-hour Slenderman knock-offs, serious attempts at horror […]

Dark Escape 3D

Every once in a while I get an angry message asking me why I omit PC games from this site, or why I fail to include visual novels and light gun shooters. The reason is mostly logistic: I have a limited capacity to buy and play games and so I need to contain my research […]

The Value of Uncertainty Part 2: Negative Space

In the last post I wrote a little bit about the value of uncertainty in the mechanics of horror games. The idea is that the game may obfuscate certain game play systems (health, remaining ammunition, the location of enemies, etc) in order to keep the player off balance. A key trait of effective horror is […]

The Value of Uncertainty

My TV was hissing. It was a small set, 15 inches across, set on a short table in one corner of my ten-tatami-mat room in Kyoto. It was 1998, the middle of the night, and though my hosts were two floors below me, I worried that the sound would reach through the thin walls and […]