Horror splatterfest Outlast 2 [official site] has been patched to reduce the difficulty and boost the measly battery life of the player’s night vision camera – two issues that Adam flagged up in his review.

The camera is your main tool for seeing the game’s over-the-top gore through the shadows, and worrying about how much juice it has left can get in the way of exploring what is a technically brilliant setting. Read the rest of this entry »

I like playing games that are about a character sitting in front of a screen, using an operating system or playing a game. Essentially, if the window onto the world is a computer’s screen, I enjoy the sense of being in front of my own screen and pretending it’s the fictional one that the character is interacting with. Uplink is still my favourite example of the form but there are many others, including Her Story and recent freebie The House Abandon sort of fits as well.

Archimedes [official site] is a game about interacting with a haunted operating system. Think Pony Island, without the laughs.

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“The horror,” said famous army colonel Walter Kurtz. “The survival horror.” Outlast 2 [official site] will have some of that, by the looks of things, and good news for impatient people who like to be scared: it has a demo out today. It’s a short one at 10-15 minutes and will be familiar to anyone who saw the footage from PAX. But for those of you who were disappointed to hear about the sequel’s delay into 2017, it is something to enjoy in time for spoooooky Halloween.

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Besides being misspelled, Asemblance [official site] is an upcoming first-person psychological horror game from Nilo Studios – a newish crew of ex-Bungie, Monolith and Visceral bodies – that’s set to launch its first episode next month. As far as I can gather, its story is centered around a memory simulating machine that you’re trapped inside/forced to view the world through without immediately obvious reason. “What do you remember? Do you remember your home? Your wife? How you met?” it asks. “Are you sure you want to remember?”

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I love Sylvio [official site]. It’s a psychological horror game about exploring a sprawling abandoned park, searching for EVP recordings, and it scared me so much that I couldn’t play it at night with my headphones on. Manipulating audio files – here presented as tapes that you can play backwards and forwards at various speeds – focuses your attention on every scratch and pop. You’re effectively staring into the static, waiting for recognisable words to emerge. And when they do, they bring warnings, threats and tragedies.

We already knew a sequel was in the works but now news reaches us of a remastered version of the original game. That’ll be out May 2nd.

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NightCry [official site], which arrived on PC yesterday, is a spiritual sequel to the Clock Tower games, created by a team with original series creator Kono Hifumi at its head. Although it looks like a 3d survival horror game, it apparently hews closer to Clock Tower’s point and click origins rather than the slightly more action-heavy Clock Tower 3 and Haunting Ground. Reviews on Steam are ‘mixed’ at the moment but I’d like to investigate for myself.

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What if you could talk to the monsters? The Wuss Mode: Monsters Won’t Attack mod for SOMA [official site] doesn’t quite allow you to hold conversations with the denizens of Frictional’s latest creation but it does prevent them from chasing you around the place until you die. I’m excited to try this because it might just improve the game significantly, simply by focusing on the fact that fear does not need to be followed by violence and death. Vague spoilers ahead for those who haven’t played.

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DARQ [official site] is “a unique psychological horror game set in a zero-gravity lucid dream”. My lucid dreams tend to begin with a sense of drifting away from my own body, which could account for that ‘zero-gravity’ sensation, which seemed like an odd addition to the game’s description when I First saw it. Weightlessness and a lack of being.

Judging by the trailer DARQ has taken a few tips from Ice-Pick Lodge’s Knock-Knock, which is one of my favourite horror games. The unnerving twilight wanderings of that game are a fine place to find inspiration, but DARQ’s flexible funding indiegogo campaign makes me slightly uneasy in ways that aren’t related to its setting. [update regarding that below]

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In truth, Ben ‘Yahtzee’ Croshaw’s Lovecraftian roguelike has been available for a while already, but the Steam version that launched moments ago brings fresh horrors to The Consuming Shadow [official site] in the form of new monsters and creature variants, challenge modes, an infinite dungeon mode, and more. I’ve dabbled with the original release, which I reckon manages to make a suitably grim atmosphere from its barely animated silhouetted characters and scenes. It’s sort of like a miniature Arkham Horror, set in the UK.

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The Boogeyman (Bogeyman in my lingo) is your typical nightmare creature. An anti Santa Clause, in that it is a threat rather than a promise. Of course, Daddy Christmas can be used as a threat as well: “If you don’t behave, no presents!” That’s a damn sight less intimidating than “tidy your room or a hideous supernatural entity will creep out of your closet and eat you from the toes right up to the scalp” though.

Boogeyman [Steam Page], currently in Early Access, is a game about that entity. It’s a bit like Five Nights at Freddy’s crossed with Among the Sleep.

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