New survey! So far we've talked about card games, visual novels, roguelikes, hidden gems, itch.io games, Touhou games, 3D games, and turn-based RPGs. Folks have added great games in the shares and comments sections.
So, this time: What's your favorite indie horror games?
'Tis the season, right? 🎃
2D, 3D, thriller, suspense...whatever you want! Give me whatever you consider to be an indie horror game!
Which are your favorites? Let me know in the comments!
Horror visual novels:
- We Know The Devil: one of my favorite games of all time, about three queer teens at an evangelical summer camp forced to spend the night at a remote cabin and wait for the arrival of the devil.
- Soundless - A Modern Salem in Remote Area: an equal-parts compelling and stomach-churning story about an isolated and abused girl in a remote and fervently religious village. Heed the content warnings, this one was a genuinely difficult read.
Horror text games:
- Mastaba Snoopy: a nightmarish body horror Twine game about a universe consumed and remade in the warped image of Peanuts comic strips
- the uncle who works for nintendo: creepy and meta Twine game about a kid having a sleepover at their best friend’s house, during which the friend’s mysterious uncle pays a visit.
- Blaseball: an absurdist horror baseball simulator browser game that made for a fascinating experiment in storytelling through emergent sim outcomes and community engagement. It’s sadly now shutdown and basically impossible to experience after the fact, but I couldn’t not mention it even if it is kind of useless to recommend.
Horror adventure games:
- Cube Escape / Rusty Lake: twin series of spooky point-and-clicks; the Cube Escape games are primarily free browser-based escape rooms while the Rusty Lake games are paid releases with more varied premises, but there are shared narrative threads running through both series.
- The Room: an excellent series of mobile-designed point-and-click games with this great sense of tactility; the first game is basically just “what if the puzzle box from the beginning of Glass Onion was fucked up?” and the scope rapidly expands from there over the subsequent entries.
- Stories Untold: an anthology of short and spooky games centered around 80s technology, from text adventures to scientific instruments and radios.
Survival horror games:
- Signalis: an incredibly stylish game about an android stranded on a remote planet and searching a mysterious facility for her missing human girlfriend. I haven’t played any Resident Evils or Silent Hills or anything else in this particular subgenre so I can’t say how it stacks up to its influences, but I had a great time with it.
Traditional horror games (aka the first-person ones that I associate with “horror” as a gameplay genre):
- SOMA: an undersea sci-fi narrative with great atmosphere and some deliciously nightmarish existential conundrums (the one piece of fiction I’ve ever written was directly inspired by the game’s plot). I could take or leave the more “horror gamey” sequences where you have to run from or sneak by enemies, but the rest is so good that they’re worth putting up with (and these days you don’t even have to since they added a mode that minimizes that stuff)
- Anatomy: dense and terrifying experience where you collect cassette tapes in a haunted house. An instant classic.
