The Rise of Casual Horror

A while back I wrote about a Wii horror game called Juon: The Grudge, based on the film of the same name. In that article I focused on how Juon seems to be a great translation of a teen horror flick to game form, and that it is interesting because it appears to be targeted […]

Day of Scouring, Night of Sacrifice

This weekend I decided that I’d put it off for long enough: it was time to play イケニエノヨル (Ikenie no Yoru, Night of Sacrifice). You might have heard of this game; it made a bit of a stir when it came out in late 2010 because it uses the Wii Balance Board (!?) and had […]

Dead Space 2

I have finally finished another horror game and written a review. This time it’s Dead Space 2, which I quite enjoyed. You can read the review, which turned out a bit longer than I had anticipated. I’ve been itching to write about horror games for months (not to mention the horror conference I attended back […]

Sweet Home on Destructoid

Destructoid has an extremely through write-up of Sweet Home, the best I’ve seen. It’s also the most information you can find about this game in English, as far as I can tell. If you are interested in the history of the Resident Evil series, or want to see how horror games on the NES work, […]

Biometric Analysis of Horror Games

Gamasutra is running the most complete biometrics study of horror games that I’ve seen. It’s fascinating research, and the end page of conclusions is particularly useful for the horror game designer. Most interestingly to me, the study finds key differences between how “core” gamers and “casual” gamers are scared. Core games see through scripted sequences […]

Corpse Party

Hey, remember I wrote about Corpse Party last year? Turns out it’s actually coming to the US in English. It’s a pretty well-done game, at least based on the first couple of hours that I played. Don’t let the top-down JRPG interface fool you, there’s some pretty high-tension scenes here. That said, the whole thing […]

Playing PC Games is Hard

One of the most contentious aspects of this site is my decision not to include PC games in the Quest. This decision is not borne of some hate for the PC as a game machine, as some have supposed. Nor does it stem from some imagined key difference between PC horror and console horror. You […]

Recursive Unlocking, Now in Korean

I got a lot of positive feedback about my article on the recursive structure of Resident Evil’s map design, but the highest praise comes from a user named 9L, who translated my entire feature into Korean. I can’t read Korean (maybe some day), but I assume that translating a long text about game design and […]

Catherine

I finally finished Catherine last week after about three months of trying. It’s a hard, hard game, easily the hardest game I’ve played for the Quest. It’s harder than Siren. The hardest parts of Devil May Cry are on par with the hardest parts of Catherine, but Catherine has a lot more parts like that. […]

Well Played 3.0: Siren

You might have heard of Well Played before. It’s CMU’s series of books on game design, authored by a wide range of critics, journalists, and armchair game anthropologists like myself. The third book in the series, Well Played 3.0, is now out, and I’m happy to report that it contains an article I wrote about […]