Share??d fear is one heck of a drug. There's something comfortable about being part of a group of scared people, especially when everyone knows they aren't in genuine danger. Every October, I feed my addiction to collective dread by playing my favorite ??spooky video games with my nearest and dearest.

We're examining spine-chilling games that reach their peak performance when played ??by a group of players. Some games we'll discuss are multiplayer, while others are single-player games that benefit from the audience experience. Despite their differences, every game on this list ??will love you with Halloween memories that'll stay with you for years.

10. DOORS

Inspired by Spooky's Jumpscare Mansion, DOORS is one of the most impressive Roblox games ever crafted. Th??e goal is simple on paper: you and up to three other players must make your way to the one-hundredth room of a sprawling, eerie hotel. Unfortunately, each room between you and your ??destination is the hunting grounds of a horrifying host of "Entities," each more terrifying and competent than the last.

DOORS' strength lies in i?ts deceptive complexity. Initially, the game may seem straightforward, but as more Entities and it?ems are randomly dropped into the mix, things escalate quickly. Luckily, while the exact location of the game's enemies and artifacts change, their behavior and function never do. This consistency allows players to learn from mistakes and improve their subsequent runs, creating an addictive gameplay loop that doesn't dampen the game's scares.

9. Resident Evil 4

Resident Evil has never settled into a constant formula, and Resident Evil 4 proves why that's a good thing. Leon Kennedy's second run-in with runaway bio-weaponry exchanges a significant chunk of the raw survival horror that defined previous installments for a more action-oriented gameplay structure. Ironically, this restraint allows RE4 to instill a different terror in you.

There are more toys to play with here than in most Resident Evil games, but it also throws more enemies at you. Environments are brightly lit and open-ended, which gives monsters more opportunities to ambush you from corners you can't see. Resource management, situational awareness, and improvisation are the name of the game here, and RE4 ??will quickly become a terrifying game if ?you don't learn to balance these skills.

Whether you're playing the 2005 original or the 2023 remake, RE4 is excellent fun, especially with friends. The game's linear, chapter-based progression gives you plenty of opportunities to pass the contro??ller to another player, who's probabl??y learned a few tricks from watching you play.

8. Luigi's Mansion

Mario’s green-capped younger brother was barely a character until Luigi’s Mansion turned him into the goofy coward Nintendo fans know and love. In the GameCube’s launch title, Lu??igi discovers the mansion he supposedly won in a contest is full of ghosts. Armed with a special vacuum, the younger Mario brother sets off to capture every ghost in the mansion and rescue his kidnapped older brother.

Luigi’s Mansion operates like a score-based arcade game, challenging you t??o rack up the highest point total possible as you navigate the titular abode. Competing with your friends to see who can catch the most ghosts never gets old, and it’s a fantastic way to spend a Halloween night if you have a GameCube.

7. Five Nights at Freddy's

There are a lot of Five Nights at Freddy's games these days, and all of them are fa??ntastic picks for this list. With that said, there's something about the simplicity of the franchise's first ??game that keeps players like me coming back whenever October rolls around. If you can talk some of your friends into revisiting it with you, that's all the better.

The original Five Nights at Freddy's didn't become the viral phenomenon it did by accident. The light-flickering, door-slamming gameplay loop has just enough moving pieces to keep things exciting but uncomplicated, and the grungy art design gives its four murderous mascots an air of menace their later incarnations lack. I was in high school when the first FNaF dropped, and I s??till remember the times?? my friends and I jumped whenever one of us closed a door a bit too late or too soon.

6. Until Dawn

Interactive graphic horror titles have been bringing players together for a good, scary time since the heydays of Telltale's The Walking Dead, but Until Dawn firmly cemented these games as prime Halloween party material. One year after the deaths of their friends, si??sters Beth and Hannah, eight college-age young adults face their demons, and something much worse, on the snowy slo??pes of a creepy mountain.

Until Dawn is, at its core, an interactive horror movie. You decide how this teen horror story ends through timed button inputs, exploration, and choices that determine who lives, who dies, and how everyone feels about each other. So imagine how exciting things get when you arrive at a significant story branch and hand your controller over to a friend you know will make very different choices ?than you would.

5. Lethal Company

Lethal Company??'s only been out for about a year in early access, but it's become one of the most popular co-op horror games out there right now. You and y??our friends are workers employed by “The Company,�tasked with retrieving valuable scrap from abandoned space colonies. Alien threats and dangerous environments jampack these colonies, but the real enemy is the ever-increasing scrap quota your employers expect you to fill, no matter the cost.

Besides your in-game salary, there’s a lot to love about Lethal Company. Despite the simplistic graphics (or maybe because of them), the monsters are surprisingly terrifying, and no one will hear you scream if you wander too far from your teammates. However, if you want to amp up your Lethal Company experience, I’d recommend looking into the game’s mod scene. Seriously, the Rolling Giant has never been more terrifying.

4. Buckshot Roulette

Russian Roulette is a dangerous game of chance smeared in glossy paint that gets people killed. Buckshot Roulette is one of the m?ost addictive and creepy games I've played. The rules are simple: you and a grotesque grinning ghoul known as “The Dealer�take turns shooting at yourselves or each other, praying to whoever or whatever you believe in that the round in the chamber’s a bullet or a blan?k, depending on who the gun is pointing at.

Buckshot Roulette combines the dirty, industrial aesthetic of its developer’s other projects with the pixelated tabletop charm of Inscryption. An in-depth item system turns a glorified lottery into a complex game of strategy that will make you sweat. Right now, the only way to play the game with friends is to pass the keyboard around, but that will ??change once the game’s multiplayer update drops this Halloween.

3. Left 4 Dead 2

Valve can’t count to three, but their sequel game is second to none. Left 4 Dead 2 is every bit the strategic four-player zombie shooting experience the original game was and more. This game is still getting updates, and it’s still fun to play a decade afte?r its orig??inal release.

Left 4 Dead 2 thoroughly sells the message behind almost every scrap of zombie med??ia: cooperation is the key to survival. The levels encourage multitasking; a lone player can’t kill most enemies, and you can’t move on until every living player makes it to the end. The only thing holding L4D2 back is that every player needs a copy of the game and a working computer, so it’s not ideal for gamers working on a budget.

2. Dead by Daylight

Dead by Daylight is what you get when you take a game of hide-and-seek and give it the most horrifying digital glow-up imaginable. Four players step into the shoes of survivors trying to escape a bleak hellscape before a killer, con??trolled by a fifth player, sacrifices them to an evil god. Both character groups have tools the other doesn’t, and it’s a race to see who can complete their goal first.

The massive cast of survivors and killers and an ever-expanding list of perks means you’re never short on ways to customize your play style. On top of that, Dead by Daylight nails the horror aesthetic. Everything in the game thrums with Halloween vibes, even the HUD. Whether you’re the hunted or the hunter, DbD is a fun time.

1. Phasmophobia

What’s more Halloween than a good old-fashioned ghost hunt? Phasmophobia has reigned as the unchallenged sovereign of horror multiplier for the past four years, and I don't see that changing soon. You step into the shoes of a ghost hunter, and it’s up to you and up to three other players to find out what species of haunt is menacing a specific reside?nce, then make it out alive before the ghost ensures you take its secrets to your grave.

Phasmophobia makes you feel like a genuine paranormal investigator. The tools at your disposal are straight out of an episode of Ghost Hunters, and you’ll need to learn how to use them to identify each of the game’s twenty-four ghost types. If you’re ready for the ultimate Halloween gaming experience, ??suit up with three of your friends and get hunting.

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Bernband is a simple game, but its effectiveness cannot be overstated. It is, essentially, just a game about walking around. A walk?ing simulator that is actually just walking. No puzzles, no objectives, just walking.

What makes it meaningful is its ?atmosphere. It takes place in a small chunk of a futuristic city. A commercial center of bars and shops and narrow corridors and walkways. You can't talk to anyone or interact with anything; you just wander aimlessly. You might discover a raucous bar, then wander lonely, empty corridors looking for whatever else might be happening. Many of the rooms and hallways are empty, simple, and grey. But, through the use of vivid lighting and surreal atmospheric sound, it made the alien seem familiar and weird. It tangibly conveyed a hot summer night after leaving a venue.

I had never heard of Grunn until it released. Somehow, after watching the initial trailer, I saw Bernband in it. Maybe it was the protagonists' strangely placed hands or the gaze of random strangers, but I somehow knew it was from the same creator. And while it’s an entirely different beast than Bernband with a?? totally different focus, you can see where th??e lessons have been applied.

Grunn (PC [Reviewed])
Developer: Sokpop Collective, Tom van den Boogaart
Publisher: Sokpop Collective
Released: October 4, 2024
MSRP: $12.99

In Grunn, you wake up on a bus in the countryside. After following the only rout??e out, you find out that you’re a gardener. You’ve been hired to maintain the yard around a house, but suspiciously, you?’re told that you’re not allowed to actually go into the house.

You quickly find that the only tool you have available is a pair of hedge trimmers. Clearly, the yard needs more work than that. Your only choice is to go out looking for more tools, but first, you need to get out of the yard, as a waist-high fence blocks your egress. It wonâ€?™t take long before you notice that you’re being watched. You only catch glimpses, but you’re definitely being followed. And while there are townsfolk around to talk to, you can’t understand a word that any of them are saying.

The town is a dangerous place. If? you stay outside too long after midnight, the darkness will swallow you up. Touch something you’re not supposed to, and things might end poorly for you. And death is death; you’re sent back to the start of the game to try again, though each one counts as an “ending.�Grunn keeps ??track of all the endings you’ve found, so collecting them all is a goal if you think repeated failure is something to shoot for. Otherwise, there is a good ending.

Permadeath may sound pretty harsh, especially when it means you’ll be re-cutting the grass every time it happens, but Grunn only takes place across three-ish days. It is, to be honest, somewhat annoying to have to trim the sam??e hedges every time the game kills me for my curiosity, but not enough to really ruin the experience. A loop takes about 45 minutes, and it took me around 6 hours to hit the good ending. I just became rather proficient at speedrunning my chores. Reminds me of w??hen I was a teenager.

The multi-day loop works in Grunn’s favor, as it forces you to look at the cause and effect of your actions. Ther??e isn’t a whole lot of branching, but you may not recognize exactly what caused a myster??ious portal to open in the garden and give you a quick way to the park. After a few laps through the game, you will.

The overall goal of the game is unclear. It isn’t actually just to ensure the yard is in top shape for whe??n the owners get back. You’re not trying to escape the town. The only way to discover what you should be doing is by just poking at things until something happens. You eventually learn to quiet the ghosts? of the dead, and you may learn what the hell is up with those kids on the ferry. Many of the items you pick up don’t have an immediately discernable purpose, so much of the discovery is rubbing things on other things.

To help you figure out what c?an and should be done, you come across a number of polaroids scattered across the world. They don’t reveal what you should be doing with the subject depicted, but they at l??east let you know to take a closer look.

It’s an odd formula that may s??ound mundane, and that’s because it is. You’re essentially a stranger to a quiet town. There’s weird stuff happening, but nobody else seems to really notice or care. Not that you can ask them. There’s obviously something dark going down, but rarely does it attack you directly.? Most of the scares come from catching brief glimpses of someone watching from out of sight.

You’re sort of just existing in the snapshot of a world, attempting to preserve it as?? it is and exorcise the evil from it. You know, while also keeping the flowers watered and the hedges trimmed. It isn’t exciting. It doesn’t have to be.

I’m not sure that Grunn is going to remain cemented in my mind the same way Bernband is. The goals here are a lot more modest and less bold. On the other hand, it is an enjoyable experience. No matter how many times I woke up in that seat on the bus, I was always ready to take on the game again. Gradually unraveling its mysteries while keeping the hedges trimmed kept me engaged. Without thinking too hard about it, Grunn is probably the most rela??xing horror game?? I’ve ever played.

_{[This review is based on a retail build of the game purchased by the reviewer.]}

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There are now more PS1-inspired horror games out now than there were actual horror games on the PS1. That isn’t a milestone that was crossed by Crow Country, it’s just an observation.

It’s hard to say what, exactly, made the PS1 the perfect vis?ual home for horror. It’s possible that it’s because it was modern enough to enable various ways of depicting the horror, but old enough that your imagination was left to fill in some of the blanks left by the low-poly, low-resolution graphics. It could also be because it was probably the last console that a lot of people played through fuzzy RF, and something about video noise makes the experience feel more tangibly real.

Nonetheless, returning to the blocky pixelation of the early 3D era brought about a renaissance in the horror genre, and if Crow Country is any indication, it’s still a l??ong way from running out of gas.

Crow Country (PC [Reviewed], PS5, Xbox Series X|S)
Developer: SFB Games
Publisher: SFB Games
Released: May 9, 2024
MSRP: $19.99

Crow Country is heavily inspired by the survival horror sub-genre, taking cues from games like Resident Evil and Silent Hill. This not only is apparent from the v?isual style, but the puzzle design as well. The eponymous amusement park that you explore was built by people with strange notions towards door locks and where keys should be stored.

You play as Special Agent Mara Forest, who is investigating the disappearance of Edward Crow, the namesake creator of the amusement park Crow Country. The park closed down two years prior to the start of the game, following the injury of a guest and ??other strange happenings.

Crow Country is played from a ¾ angle. While the graphics try and replicate the low-resolution blockiness of the PS1 hardware, it does so in an interesting way. The environments are actually quite detailed in a way that wouldn’t be possible on the console, and that’s because, while they’re 3D in actuality, they’re supposed to look like the pre-rendered 2D backgrounds used in games like Resident Evil and Parasite Eve.

This is done surprisingly well, since you’re still able to freely rotate the camera, but through the use of clever lighting, it still manages to replicate the awkward 3D of the era. Characters and interactive objects still stand out because they don’t ?have the same sheen as everything e??????????????????????????lse in the environment, so the whole effect comes off quite cleverly.

While the camera is at a fixed angle, you’re still free to aim for the heads and shoulders, knees, and toes of your enemies. Headshots do more damage (if they have anything identifiable as a head), but att??acking from a close range is the most important factor.

While being a survival horror game, you can’t carry much ammunition for your weapons, but vending machines throughout the environment will provide a bit more to keep you going. Enemies in the environment will stay dead, but as you progress, areas change, and new enemies will take their place. This means that the whole “survivalâ€?part of survival horror is pretty understated. It isn’t difficult to? stay alive, but that’s maybe not the point.

When I played the demo back in October, I was kind of worried that Crow Country wouldn’t do enough to differentiate itself from the games that inspired it. However,?? I think what manages to separate it is the aloof confidence it pre??sents itself with.

The dialogue is laced with humor, but it’s rarely in a self-deprecating way. When it does poke fun at its own video-gaminess, it does ??it with a sort of wink?? without laboring on a joke. It’s not a parody of survival horror, it’s just amiable and light-hearted.

While I didn’t find Crow Country to be all that scary (I’m rarely horrified by horror in general these days, so I’m not the best judge of fear factor), I was extremely impressed by the plot and storytelling. I probably sh??ouldn’t be surprised with Adam Vian behind the pen.

The story is largely told through docu?ments in the environment and characters that you meet. There aren’t really a?ny cutscenes, but there are moments of dialogue. Mostly, you’re given pieces of the greater mystery, and it’s extremely competent at giving you just enough that you’re able to start figuring things out before it’s more overtly told.

There are threads to the mystery, and you follow them, bit by bit, until they all converge in the end. Information that ties into Crow Country’s overal??l conclusion is handed to you directly from the start. If you’re really sharp, you can guess some of the twists, but even then, I did not see the?? ending revelation coming.

If anything, I’m jealous of how masterfully the story is told. But, again, it's to be expected from SFB Games.

When all is said and done, Crow Country clocks in at around 6-8 hours. There are some optional bosses and secret puzzles that you can do that will stretch things?? out a bit. Then, once the game is complete, some extras get unlocked for your nex??t playthrough.

Crow Country doesn’t exactly rewrite the playbook for survival horror. It leans pretty heavily on those that came before it. However, what it builds on top of the foundation is extraordinarily impressive. This is easily one of the best horror games I’ve played, and it doesn’t even seem like it’s trying that hard. It maybe lacks some of the more psychological themes that have made others stick firmly in my memory, but the playfulness and confidence of Crow Country more than make up for that. It’s d??efinitely wo??rth a visit.

_{[This review is based on a retail build of the game provided by the publisher.]}

The post Review: Crow Country appeared first on Destructoid.

The resurgence of 3D platformers in the indie and alternative development sphere has left me a bit cold. While a lot of developers get the general mechanics of the genre, nailing the actual feel of their inspirations is often missed. It takes mo??re than chunky polygons and a ju??mp button.

The demo of Yellow Taxi Goes Vroom suggested to me that it was g?oing to be kind of the same. The difference is that, while some of the platformers I had played I just didn’t really like very much, t?his one was at least going to be a hyperactive good time.

Weirdly, while the mechanics of Yellow Taxi Goes Vroom are somewhat unique to the genre and the sugar-ch?arged movement system seems contrary to what is typically expected, the flavor of early-3D platformers is one of the things it gets down perfectly.

Yellow Taxi Goes Vroom (PC [Reviewed])
Developer: Panik Arcade
Publisher: Those Awesome Guys
Released: April 9, 2024
MSRP: $16.99

The collectathon platformer seemed to die out way too soon. Super Mario 64 cemented the standards in 1996, Banjo-Kazooie was already making fun of those standards by 1998, and by 2001, Conker’s Bad Fur Day was telling us that those standards were no longer enough. A lot of the games that followed in the genre are mostly forgettable.? Maybe Conker had a point.

Yellow Taxi Goes Vroom is a lot more hyperactive than anything of the early-3D era. You play as the eponymous yellow taxi, which is unique because it runs using a spring rather than fossil fuels. Tolsa and its leader Alien Mosk have corrupted the oil supply, and now every other vehicle on t??he plan??et has become evil. Being the only incorruptable mode of transportation, it’s up to you to collect all the green gears scattered about.

It’s a pretty recognizable framework from there. You start out with one world accessible to you, and as you collect more gears, you unlock more levels. There are also c???oins, but the only use for money here is to buy cosmetic hats. That’s it for collectibles.

That’s certainly not to say that Yellow Taxi Goes Vroom is just an imposter reading from a??n old script. It distinguishes itself in a couple of major ways. The first is that you don’t increase your ?taxi’s abilities as you advance; the only thing that improves is your skill with handling it. The second is that there is no jump button.

That’s not to say you can’t jump, it just isn’t as si?mple as pressing a button and seeing your taxi hop. Instead, you have to learn various ways to get your wheels from platform to platform, and up vertical climbs. After all, if everything was at ground level, it would neither be much fun, nor a platfo??rmer.

What you can do is a Flip-o-Will, which is essentially just a dash. However, it can be used to traverse gaps, break your fall, or, when performed on an incline, launch you into the atmosphere. You can also “dash interrupt�by pressing the button again before your car shoots off, and that will flip your car over. When you land on your roof, you’ll bounce and can either dash from?? there or interrupt again to go further upwards. Finally, you can hit the brakes before dashing to backflip, which pops you up higher, but going backwards. Knowing when, where, and how to use your dash is key to getting anywhere.

As I said, it’s a skill that ??requires building on. Knowing how to manipulate the physics and hit the reverse or accelerator takes time to get a feel for. And when you do, it feels great, but you’ll have to continue refining your abilities to get to every last gear. Or at least as many as? you need to complete the game.

The worlds have a great deal of variety to them. Some are basically obstacle courses, some are mostly about exploration, while others have a system similar to Crazy Taxi, where you need to pick up fares to extend your timer. On the latter type levels, it really isn’t as intrusive as it may sound. When there isn’t a fare around,?? you can just pick up clocks, and you can easily build up the minutes in your reser??ve.

However, it does give you the opportunity to interact with the weird characters who populate the world. These range from dogs to bodybuilders who hold their breath and don’t work their legs. The dialogue and humor is one of the weaker aspects of Yellow Taxi Goes Vroom. It’s every bit as hyperactive as the gameplay, but the jokes are all over the place. Your handler is Morio, and the antagonist is Alien Mosk, but that’s as far as they really go with paro??dy. It doesn’t mean anything; it’s just silly.

And silly ??is alright. It lands occasionally, like the hectic gym sub-world. It, at t??he very least, doesn’t lean on self-parody.

It works a lot better visually. Not just in the environmental gags, but overall. While its appearance doesn’t conform to the limitations of the N64 that inspired it, its retro 3D stylings and obnoxiously bright colors are appealing in a Katamari Damacy sort of way.

On the other hand, I live for the sound design. I’m not really an ears person, but everything about the way Yellow Taxi Goes Vroom sounds is appealing. From the fanfare music that introduces a stage to the way it screams “Psychotic!�at you whenever you deliver a fare quickly, everything fits so well. The soundtrack is similarly diverse, including some tracks that sound like they’re lost tunes from Super Mario Galaxy to the gym backing of “Head and shoulders, knees and toes and knees and toes and knees.�/p>

Whil??e playing, I found a number of the gears to be frustratingly out of reach for me. Simply finding them all is quite a feat, so I figured I wouldn’t even try to reach for all 250 of them. Then I finished the game, a??nd immediately returned to some of the earlier levels to completely sweep them of the collectables. I might not be done yet.

What I mainly took away from Yellow Taxi Goes Vroom is that its creators had a lot of fun crafting it. There’s a lot of love poured into it, and it show?s in all the small ??ways it goes the unnecessary extra mile. It’s surprisingly polished, even if there is the odd frustrating moment of fighting with the physics. It just feels like a complete, uncompromised package that succeeds in what it sets out to do.

_{[This review is based on a retail build of the game provided by the publisher.]}

The post Review: Yellow Taxi Goes Vroom appeared first on Destructoid.

David Walters has announced on Twitter that his “new helicopter game from 1992,�Thunder Helix, is launching on Steam Early Access on March 21.

I’ve been keeping an eye on Thunder Helix for a while now. It’s a helicopter comba??t game made in the style of early PC flight sims. The style emulates the fractal landscapes used in pre-polygonal flight games, and goes as far as using a 256 color completely with pixel stippling. Although, the store blurb says it can also run at 16-?bit color.

I didn’t play very many of those flight sims. I was a bit too young. I did play Dungeons & Dragons: Dragonstrike, and a friend once brought over A-10 Tank Killer. I can’t believe I remember that game.

Thunder Helix contains all the bells and whistles: multiple helicopters, day and night gameplay, a winch. Everything you could possibly want from helicopter flying. It also supports multiple control schemes, including flight j??oystick. Unfortunately, I think my Microsoft Sidewinder Precisi?on 2 Joystick is packed up at my parents. I haven’t bought anything more modern.

I’m pretty jazzed. I could technically install a DOS flight sim right now, but whenever I do, I usually just struggle to get ??the controls working for a while and get tired.? Something with a modern backend sounds pretty rad right now.

Thunder Helix will? be out on PC via Steam Early A?ccess on March 21.

The post Early?? flight sim inspired Thunder Helix takes off into Early Access this month appeared first on Destructoid.

At this point, slasher horror games are kind of an old hat, having never totally reached escape trajectory from the indie sphere. 2022’s Stay Out of the House seems like the culmination? of the standards, and we’re in need of innovation before falling back into the distressing comfort of abstract, existential horror.

Cannibal Abduction is not that innovation. It is very much submerged in the conventions of the sl??asher horror genre. But even having said that, it is an enjoyable, bite-sized sampling of what the genre offers.

Cannibal Abduction (Switch [reviewed], Xbox One, Xbox Series X|S, PS4, PS5, PC)
Developer: Tomás Esconjaureguy
Publisher: Torture Star Video
Released: February 8, 2024
MSRP: $11.99

The console release of Cannibal Abduction is actually a compilation of Tomás Esconjaureguy’s two releases: 2022’s Night of the Scissors and 2023’s Cannibal Abduction. Since Night of the Scissors was released first, I’m going to start with that, even if it’s not the feature p??res??entation here.

Night of the Scissors has y?ou play as Adam, who, with an accomplice, breaks into an abandoned post office to rob its valuables. Stamps, I’m guessing. However �and you may be able to guess this �Adam’s exit gets cut off, and he finds himself trying to escape while a scissor-wielding maniac tries to cut him into paper dolls.

And not like Clock Tower’s ginormous ??set of sheers, either. This guy just has the kitchen scissors. The type you cut open a bag of milk with. My lawyer was unable to convince the jury that these cannot be used as a weapon, so it’s certainly a plausible murder implement, if maybe a bit sub-optimal.

Night of the Scissors is a lo-fi, PS1-style game with fixed camera angles. You can switch it to full rotational third person, which I did because it gave me better di??rectional awareness. However, I found I couldn’t hold the run button and move the camera at the same time, so it wasn’t perfect. I had to check, but the run button isn’t alternatively bound to a should button or a thumbstick press. That might be by design since you’re typically supposed to panic and scramble when a killer sees you in these ?games.

Night of the Scissors is very short at under an hour. There isn’t a whole lot of puzzle-solving, and some rooms don’t have much function.? It’s not bad, but it is kind of rough. It’s nice that the slasher isn’t constantly circling you like a vulture, leaving some quiet moments. You can tell they’re getting close to you when you hear “snip snip, snip snip,�cutting through the silence. Get it?

Cannibal Abduction is only slightly more ambitious but far more polished. In this one, you play as Henry, who gets picked up by a one-armed hillbilly after his car breaks down. The stranger offers to fix his car if Henry, in turn, will fix his wife’s wardrobe, and it’s absolutely hilarious that nothing smells off about this exchange to Henry. Obviously, Henry discovers that his furniture repair job is nothing more than a ruse, and he’s locked in the house with a roaming? killer.

Predictably, this stays more focused on a puzzle-solving escape from the house while under du?r?ess. The mysteries mostly involve finding a key to open a lock, but sometimes, the lock is a dog, and the key is food. It’s rather boilerplate.

That’s not a compliment, but I’ll soften that by saying it’s a very solid boilerplate. The fact that the killer isn’t constantly present and sometimes can’t even be heard preserves the tension, never losing momentum along the way. It actually makes for a comfortable experience, which may sound counter to the horror genre, but I couldn’t stop thinking about how great Cannibal Abduction felt.

Most of these lo-fi indie horror games have rough edges. Even the best of them. And some of the worst have edges so rough they can lacerate you. So, to find? one where it’s just simple and solid feels kind of good. I feel smart and horrified without all of the added frustrations of something too obtuse,?? and that’s a good feeling.

If it fumbles anywhere, it’s with the last puzzle. It’s slightly cryptic. The hints are there, but if you overlook them, you might wander around trying to find a way forward. Also, the fixed camera angles are back, and there isn’t an alternative. I had better directional awareness in the house than I did in the post office, but at one point, I missed a really obvious door because of it. However, I again stress that the ??camera system is rather important to the horror feeling.

Cannibal Abduction also uses a VHS effect, so there’s visual noise on the screen at all times. Usually, there’s an option to turn this off that I never use, but there isn’t here. However, the noise is used to indicate that the killer is nearby, so turning it off would be a disadvantage. I like the VHS?? effect, though, so it didn’t bother me.

To circle back, Cannibal Abduction doesn’t really do anything surprising or innovative. It’s another indie horror game with lo-fi PS1 visuals where you’re stuck in a house with a killer. It’s terrain worn bare. And in terms of house-dwelling horror, Stay Out of the House kicked the ball down the field.

However, Cannibal Abduction is solid for what it is. It’s to the point where I might recommend it to any newcomers. If you want to introduce someone to slasher horror games, it’s a comfortable entry point that might not immediately scar??e them away. For any longtime fans of the indie scene, however,? it might feel a bit too familiar. Nonetheless, it's still an enjoyable morsel that, at the very least, justifies its price tag.

_{[This review is based on a retail build of the game provided by the publisher.]}

The post Review: Cannibal Abduction appeared first on Destructoid.

Torture Star Video, the publishing arm of Puppet Combo, is bringing Tomás Esconjaureguy’s slasher adventure, Cannibal Abduction, to consoles. ?It will arrive on Switch, PlayStation, and Xbox co?nsoles on February 8, 2024.

Tomás Esconjaureguy previously brought us The Night of the Scissors back in 2022, which sounds like a localization title for Clock Tower. Cannibal Abduction followed ??in 2023 on PC, where it was self-published by Selewi, Esconjaureguy’s publishing label.

As is standard for cannibal stories and common in horror, Cannibal Abduction has the protagonist, Henry, bre?aking down while on a road trip. A friendly local stops to give him a tow, and you know how this goes. Henry finds himself on the menu and has to escape before the ?meal begins.

To be honest, it sounds rather standard with fixed camera angles, hide-and-seek gameplay, limited inventory, and “soft�puzzle solving. However, the reception to it seems pretty warm.

Speaking of warm reception, while it doesn’t explicitly say it's a compilation in the title, Esconjaureguy’s previous title, The Night of the Scissors, is included in the pricetag. The game has you play as Adam, who breaks into an abandoned post o??ffice to rob it, only to find it inhabited by “The Snipper,�who doesn’t take trespassing lig??htly.

It might be worth noting that by Esconjaureguy’s estimation, Cannibal Abduction will take two hours, while The Night of the Scissors is around 40. I generally prefer my horror games on the shorter side, but it’s something to keep in mind when you look at th?e price tag, which, at $11.99, is a bit higher than the combined price of the games on Steam.

Cannibal Abduction is on PC ri??ght now, but it’s coming to Sw?itch, PS4, PS5, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X|S on February 8, 2024.

The post Torture S?tar Vide??o is bringing lo-fi slasher horror Cannibal Abduction to console appeared first on Destructoid.

Crawly Games has announced that their deckbuilder horror game, Draft of Darkness, is leaving Steam Early Access and going full version on August 23, 2023.

If you’ve never heard of Draft of Darkness, just look at it. It’s like if Pit-Fighter had a personality beyond just �a href="//jbsgame.com/weekly-kusoge-pit-fighter-arcade-retro/" target="_blank" rel="noo??pener">oi?led beef.�It has grainy, digitized actors fighting with grainy, unspeakable horrors in rusty lo-fi locales. It has just the right mixture of goofy and sleaze that makes it seem like a lost PS1 game from the creators of Chiller. Ugh, I suddenly have the urge to play Loaded.

//youtu.be/9sZE1xr7wvI

Draft of Darkness was actually billed to me as Slay the Spire meets Resident Evil. It’s an ammo-focused turn-based deckbuilder where you recruit survivors and battle ??monsters and government robots. It uses a roguelite system. Maps are procedurally generated, and you keep advancing until you’re overwhelmed by the darkness. You gain cre?dits that can buy booster packs after each run, allowing you to build up your arsenal over time.

It also has a “meta-story progression system.�They say, “Every decision can alter the story's outcome and allow for new ways to progress. Different choices are available in each run, but be careful; some will have serious consequences.�/p>

I’ve recently had s?ome success when it comes to clicking with deckbuilders recently, and this looks right up my alley. I mean, 90% of that statement ??comes from just looking at the visuals. It’s like pixelated poetry to me.

Draft of Darkness is available right now for PC on Steam Early Access. The full version? 1.0 will hit on August 23, 2023.

The post Draft of Darkness makes? its escape from Early Access August 23 appeared first on Destructoid.

The Destroyer of Drywall

The original build of Power Drill Massacre was my introduction to Puppet Combo’s body of work way back in�wait, I think it was only 2021. Time reall??y has lost all meaning.

In any case, even though Power Drill Massacre was unfinished at the time, it was a pretty good first impression. Originally released in 2015, it helped establish the lo-fi horror genre among the indie market. Maybe??. I mean, it pr?obably helped, but I think it was something that gradually emerged through the work of Puppet Combo and others.

What was I getting at? Oh, right, Power Drill Massacre has been unfinished for all these years. Soon, we’ll finally get to really bore into the delicious meats of the full version. Right now, though, we’ve just got the demo?? as part of Steam Next Fest.?? Which means�oh wait. We’re still waiting on the full version.

[caption id="attachment_389086" align="alignnone" width="640"] Screenshot by Destructoid[/caption]

The Plaster Perforator

The demo will be very familiar to you if you played the original Power Drill Massacre build. It starts with an unseen car cras??h. You’re then placed in the role of a hapless woman. Rather than, I don’t know, backtracking to the road they were on, she travels up a mountainside to a derelict mill.

Huh? You’re locked in! Oh no! There’s someone who makes pig-squealin??g noises and wants to aerate your skull!

T?hat’s about all you’re given. The old mill is a horrifying maze of concrete corridors, and the only thing you know is that you don’t want a battery-powered lobotomy. Y?ou’ve got no choice but to avoid the Driller Killer and find some way to escape the mill.

[caption id="attachment_389085" align="alignnone" width="640"] Screenshot by Destructoid[/caption]

The Hole Horror

There are two possible endings to the demo. This is how it was with the original build of Power Drill Massacre. However, I didn’t realize that. I had only found the “good�endi??ng, and didn’t even notice there was a different way to complete the portion of gameplay.

The good ending requires you to find three keys scattered around the mill and use them to unlock a door. That’s generally the whole of it. There are newspaper articles scattered around to provide context and backstory, but largely it just boils down to “you’re trapped with a serial killer and you’d rather not be.�/p>

That said, it’s an effective approach to the formula. The tight corridors are marked with textures that seem to be intentionally misleading. Even those quite adept at navigating virtual environments can very easily lose their place. The Driller Killer could pop out at any time, and it’s hard to tell if you’re running straight toward a dead end. Power Drill Massacre doesn’t strive to be realistic. Inst?ead, it tries to keep you tense and scared.

[caption id="attachment_389087" align="alignnone" width="640"] Screenshot by Destructoid[/caption]

The Timber Terminator

The content in the demo largely resembles the build released in 2015. I actually checked with Mr. Combo himself, Ben Cocuzza. He told me that, yes, this is largely the same content as the 2015 build, but “The Code has been completely rewritten.�/p>

That’s pretty obvious. Beyond the fact that Power Drill Massacre looks better (though still lo-fi),? he implemented additional perspectives and control schemes. You can choose from first-person, “orbital�third-person??, or cinematic angles. You can also use analogue or classic horror “tank�controls. The differences are appreciable, as it makes the game, as a whole, feel a lot more approachable and comfortable.

Unfortunately, this means we’re still waiting for a hint on what happens with Megan. What’s in the demo is a great look at what to expect from the finished product, but if you’ve been following Puppet Combo for any great length of time, it’s not revolutionary. If anything, it’s a great example of how much he’s improved at his craft since the first release. It will leave you hungry for more of Power Drill Massacre’s delicious violence.

The post Power Drill Massacre’s demo shows how Puppet Combo’s next game is coming together appeared first on Destructoid.

Games have CHAINGED

Anthology games are not my thing. I just can’t get into DreadX titles and prefer to take my short-form narrative experiences à la carte. The concept itself, however, is rad as hell, which is demonstrated by CHAINGED. The overarching idea is that a buttload of developers all contributed short experiences that make up a choose-your-own-adventure. It’s like Give Yourself Goosebumps books, except sometimes it’s a disturbing version of a??nimal crossing.

CHAINGED was organized by Andrew Pype and consists of a heaping helping of the HauntedPS1 Community. However, the real draw here is just how unhinged things can get. Each developer was only given the context of the games preceding theirs in the branch and wasn’t al??lowed to communicate with one another. The result is extremely unique.

[caption id="attachment_384838" align="alignnone" width="640"] Screenshot by Destructoid[/caption]

Antichrist on a tidal wave

You play as Catherine, who finds herself at the end of the world. She clings to the last precious possession she has: her daughter, Lucy. Unfortunately, Lucy is snatched away by the Antichrist, and Cather?ine turns to her good friend Chronos for help. Her plan is to ?travel back in time and prevent the Antichrist from ever happening.

Your first choice is a whole lot of nothing. You get to choose whether you travel to Wyoming or Kyoto with no guidance on which one makes more sense. The choices from there, however, get a little more clear-cut. Do you fight tooth and nail, or do you seek help and cut a deal? It’s always a binary choice, though one is not obviously meant to be “good�and the other “bad.�Often, both decisions suck, but you just have to choose the one that might suck the least.

Whatever you choose, you’re dropped into a game that could be any genre. First-person games are well-represented, but you’ll also find games that lea?n more toward RPGs or even rail shooters. None of them are particularly deep, nor are they very long, but that’s kind of the point of the whole experie?nce.

[caption id="attachment_384843" align="alignnone" width="640"] Screenshot by Destructoid[/caption]

The CHAIN gang

I initially chose a route that wound up turning me into some kind of time god. That’s pretty cool. Once you’ve reached a conclusion somewhere along the chain, you can view the whole string of games and choose a different branch. You can replay games, but if you just want to skip ahead to the decision-making, there’s the option to fast forward. One of the best parts of CHAINGED is the ease with w?hich you can explore new narratives.

CHAINGED is the sequel to a previous anthology simply called CHAIN. CHAIN was a linear experience with the same idea of having different developers forge ahead in a narrative using incomplete knowledge of what’s going on. The choice-based progression in CHAINGED is not only structurally more interesting, but it also means that if you hit a game that isn’t as well executed as the oth?ers (it happens), y?ou can choose another direction and hit a conclusion elsewhere. You can then easily return to the link that you backed out of and try again.

The downside to the format is that I don’t feel it really highlights the developers involved all that well. While the final product is compelling as a whole, the inset games are too short and simple to really get a feel for a creator’s approach. I was more excited to see folks that I recognized, but I don’t think I came away with any new back cata??logs to dig through.

[caption id="attachment_384845" align="alignnone" width="640"] Screenshot by Destructoid[/caption]

Communal toil

It’s great to see communal art projects become more widespread in vid??eo games. Considering any singular creator is a mash of focuses, perspectives, and skills, seeing them all directly compare in a singular context is always interesting. I also like to see it evolve past simple themed anthologies and into cohesive narratives.

I sort of wish that the package was similarly cohesive, however. Really, CHAINGED is a launch platform. Every time you select one of the nodes along the chain, it launches a separate executable, possibly in a comp??letely different resolution. I imagine compiling them all into a singular executable would be extremely time-consuming, and CHAINGED is offered for free, so it’s something not worth complaining about. My capture program just really hated ??it, so I couldn’t record video of it. Whatever.

Oh, wait. It recorded. But it saved it under Stealth Inc. 2: A Game of Clones. That's weird. I wonder why that is.

Anyway. As I mentioned, CHAINGED is free, and while there’s a lot of content to sift through, it can be easily put down and picked back up later. It’s a well-exe??cuted concept and a great showcase for the communit?y’s talent, even if the format makes it difficult for any of them to stand out. It’s exactly the sort of thing that reminds me of why I love this community.

The post CHAINGED strings together haunte?d games in a horrifying anthology appeared first on Destructoid.

I did not spell the title wrong

We take for granted how difficult it is to do a bad thing well, especially in video games. There are plenty of bad movies intentionally made to be fun to watch. Digital marketplaces are full of bad games ??made badly and good games made poorly, but creating a game that is intended to reflect bad desi?gn but is actually fun to play; that takes work.

However, with the emerging sub-genre that I like to call jank-pop, there have been better examples of it. Cruelty Squad, for example, features eye-piercingly garish colors and spaghetti-nest level design, but it winds up being fun to play with its dark but off-kilter sense of humor and deep (sometimes unintentionally broken) mechanics.

Some people take Cruelty Squad way too seriously. However, I don’t think anyone’s really going to do that with Slayers X: Terminal Aftermath: Vengance of the Slayer, which looks to be the embodiment of video gaming’s awkward adolescence. Yet despite the fact that it is set up as a tribute to the worst circle of the late-�0s FPS modding scene, Slayers X manages to f???ind depth and value as an extremely unconventional character exploration.

[caption id="attachment_383401" align="alignnone" width="640"] Screenshot by Destructoid[/caption]

Slayers X: Terminal Aftermath: Vengance of the Slayer (PC)
Developer: Big Z Studios Inc.
Publisher: No More Robots
Released: June 1, 2023
MSRP: $16.99

If you played Hypnospace Outlaw, you’ll no doubt remember Zane. He was a teenager during that game's events and was an accurate reflection of a certain type of internet denizen that still exists today. He was a very self-centric type who mistook his alienation as a sign of being above everyone else and destined for greater things?. The type who would make up a story like, “A drunk guy stabbed me ??at a party, so I pulled the knife out and threw it back at him.�Someone who thinks that life absolutely revolves around them.

Of course, Zane is a fictional char??acter, but it’s totally possible to forget that.

Jay Tholen, one of the people behind Hypnospace Outlaw, obviously holds deep fascination for the Zane character. So, he went back into the Hypnospace universe and asked what it would be like if Zane had created a mod for a first-person shooter like Doom or Duke Nukem 3D. What he came up with is Slayers X: Terminal Aftermath: Vengance of the Slayer, which is simultaneously ridiculous and com??pellingly believable.

//youtu.be/M3dn445UJSM

Revenge her

The story around Slayers X is that Zane’s friend finds the incomplete mod that the two had worked on together in the �0s, finishes it, and releases it. I find that background hard to swallow because I feel like any adult would be embarrassed by Slayers X.

The idea is that Zane (not some Gary Stu, but actually Zane himself) is some mystical warrior-hacker called an X Slayer, who is still in training but quickly shaping up to be the best there ever was. A rival gr?oup called the Psykos attack one day, kill Zane’s mom, and do away with his fellow X Slayers. So, Zane goes out for revenge becaus?e he’s the best.

I don’t know if it was specifically a millennial thing to have a phase where you think you’re due for some world-changing event to prove yourself in, but I definitely had something close. The whole setup is intensely familiar to me. I even had a notebook back when I was a kid, where I was outlining the design of a game. Not strictly a self-insert thing like Zane did, but definitely an edgy shooter that I tried to replicate in Duke Nukem 3D. Slayers X just speaks to me at a core level.

The game even takes place in an early-3D representation of Boise, Idaho. Or at least a version that exists in Hypnospace’s parallel reality. One of the things that was most interesting about Duke Nukem 3D at the time was that its environments were more based in reality, whereas games like Doom, Blake Stone, and even Quake were a lot more abstract in their approaches. As such, the idea of setting a game in a familiar place was still v??ery novel? and tantalizing.

This approach rarely translated well to gameplay, which Slayers X actually replicates. Levels have a lot of pointless exploration available, the flow is often just�not there, and the critical path through levels doesn’t feel very well-curated. Duke Nukem 3D avoided this with some of the most clever designs in FPS history, but a lot of amateur-level designers didn’t know how to replicate this. You can just browse through Duke!Zone for clear examples of this.

Slayers X deliberately lets i??tself fall right into this, and it’s jus??t so, so charming.

[caption id="attachment_383402" align="alignnone" width="640"] Screenshot by Destructoid[/caption]

The trial of the deuce

Slayers X pulls off the amateur aesthetic expertly. This isn’t just in regards to the level design. Some of the texture work uses di??gitized and hastily altered images of (fictional) real-world graphics. Some textures have been blatantly repurposed for new contexts, like the metal interiors of ventilation shafts just being ??grey dirt. I’ve never seen someone make shortcuts taken by casual developers feel so deliberate and difficult.

There are many indications that betray the amateur facade, however. For one thing, the CGI cutscenes, while intentionally done poorly, wouldn’t likely have been possible for teenagers at the time. Facets of level design wouldn’t have been easy to pull off in the days of the Build Engine, such as level-over-level stage construction. This can be explained by pointing to the fact that the Hypnospace Outlaw universe has a different approach to technology.

Despite this, Slayers X still feels like a?? classic FPS. The weapons are fun to play with and varied (though limited), and you’re frequently fighting hordes of identical enemies. There a??re some innovative wrinkles (like breaking glass to get ammunition for your shotgun), but it largely plays like a �0s FPS, right down to the exaggerated head-bob.

[caption id="attachment_383403" align="alignnone" width="640"] Screenshot by Destructoid[/caption]

Thou truly art the final X-Slayer

Whether or not you actually appreciate the deliberately terrible design, I enjoy Slayers X for its fascinating character exploration. The whole experience is absolutely believable as the product of an edgy teenager’s imagination. Zane put a lot of his own world �fantasy and otherwise �into Slayers X. We learn a lot about him, even as we cringe at the humiliating depictions of the people from his life. We see the worl??d through his eyes. But Zane doesn’t exist.

It digs at me in the same way that Hypnospace Outlaw did. It is a clear window into a time that I remember so well. The exploration of a fog-enveloped place in ??my memory is just so deeply moving that I’m not sure it would matter if the game itself was any good.

In fact, as a game, Slayers X isn’t that great. It’s not bad enough to be repulsive, but you constantly bump up against problems that, while prob??ably being deliberate, are still problems. Its?? flow isn’t great, it’s incredibly short, and there aren’t a lot of enemies or weapons. But it still manages to be innocuously enjoyable.

However, as a piece of fiction, Slayers X is ??something both indispensable and unique. It gives me goosebumps that someone could convey such a detailed narrative by indirectly telling it through a character’s unrelated creation. It’s an elaborate lie that feels completely honest. But with lots of poop jokes.

_{[This review is based on a retail build of the game provided by the publisher.]}

The post Review: Slayers X:?? Terminal Aftermath: Vengance of the Slayer appeared first on Destructoid.

Or so I'm told

Purveyor of lo-fi horror games Torture Star Video has announced that they will be publishing Marevo Collective’s 2020 indie hit, No One Lives Under the Lighthouse on consoles May 18, 2023. This includes PS4, PS5, Xbox One,? Xbox Series X|S, ?and Nintendo Switch.

Released on PC April 21, 2020, No One Lives Under the Lighthouse is a short-form horror that sees you taking over the duties at a lighthou??se after the previous keeper went missing. Presented in terrifying PS1-o-vision, you’re tasked with unraveling the mystery while also tending to the needs of the ti??tular lighthouse. It’s estimated at two hours long, which is usually a good mark for these sorts of games.

//twitter.com/PuppetCombo/status/16544764923262853??18?s=20

I actually bought No One Lives Under the Lighthouse on Steam, but hav??en’t gotten around to playing this. I’d probably prefer to stick with the PC version, but these sorts of games do tend to be a good fit for consoles.

Also, while I don’t believe Puppet Combo had any involvement with the development of the game, having their publishing label, Torture Star Video, handle the distribution of it is a good fit. Both brands are pretty synonymous with lo-fi horror, so it’s a good way to get more eyes on the title. Especially when it’s alongside games like Nun Massacre and Murder House.

Torture Star Video has promised that? it will be bringing more games to console in the near future.

No One Lives Under the Lighthouse is currently available on PC. It wi?ll be coming to PS4, PS5, Xbox One, Xbox SeriesX|S, and Switch on May 18, 2023.

The post Torture Star Video publishing No One Lives Under the Lighthouse on ??console May 18 appeared first on Destructoid.

Trapped in another house

Vertical Reach and publisher Armor Games Studios have announced that their puzzle-focused retro horror title, The Tartarus Key, is chambered for a May 31, 2023 release.

Putting you in the shoes of the hapless Alex Young, The Tartarus Key takes place in a bizarre mansion where doors are locked with all manner of puzzle??s. Lifting the aesthetics of the PS1, it promises a horror experience without the use of jump-scares. That's a fairly common goal f??or horror games. Hopefully, they can pull off the scares without all the jump.

[caption id="attachment_376924" align="alignnone" width="640"] Image via Armor Games Studios[/caption]

The Tartarus Key reminds me somewhat of the recent Madison, which is itself part of the emerging escape-the-room sub-genre. I don’t mean that as a bad thing. I’m just bringing it up as a matter of classification. In one of my guide-writing gigs, I would sometimes be tapped to tackle puzzle games like this since, apparently, I have a mind ??for it. That, or the editor jus??t really liked pumping up my ego. And it worked! I feel like a boss!

There are three different endings to find. You have the option to either rescue your fellow captives or leave them to their fate. We’ll see how annoying they are. If we’re talking something like the SNES�SOS, where everyone else sucks, then maybe they should just be eaten by the house. The only NPCs worth saving are the dudes from Metal Slug.

//youtu.be/1pEJ_7qwXrQ

In any case, I’m looking forward to checking out The Tartarus Key to see if anyone is worth saving.

The Tartarus Key is co??ming to PC, Nintendo Switch, PS4, PS5, Xbox One, and Xbox S??eries X|S on May 31, 2023.

The post ??Lo-fi horror puzzler The Tartarus Key scares up May 31 rel?ease date appeared first on Destructoid.

Qu'est-ce que c'est?

Torture Star Video has announced the next game from Bloodwash duo Black Eyed Priest and Henry Hoare, Sniper Killer. The short-form horror game is due for release on PC sometime in 2023.

The twist in Sniper Killer is that you control both the epony??mous sharpshooter and a detective trying to stop them. While the sniper has the goal of simply delivering high-caliber snacks into the faces of their victims, Detective Comardy is searching for clues and trying to end the killings. Th?e information on it suggests that the detective is a past-his-prime burnout, which I can definitely relate to.

//youtu.be/Q4h117kC1J0

The last game from the duo was Night at the Gates of Hell, which was a fun, tacky zombie shooter. In my review, I noted that “It gives a strong imp??ression that the developer had as much fun creating it as you will have playing it,�which is a sentiment that still sounds accurate to me.

Meanwhile, Bloodwash was a slow-cooker slasher title. I found that one to be extremely inventive in that most of the game was spending time while waiting fo?r your laundry to finish. You could literally just sit and wait. But it was more fun to wander around the shopping plaza, learning about the murders that have been going on.

Being the vict?im ??in short-form lo-fi horror risks getting stale after a few years of iterating on it. However, trying to solve the mystery while alternating as the cause of the mystery sounds absolutely fab to me.

Sniper Killer is coming to PC sometime in 2023.

The post Lo-fi horror Sniper Killer coming from crea??tors?? of Bloodwash appeared first on Destructoid.

I want my Slaw

Video rentals are one of those things that?? I fully accept is antiquated by modern technology, something that I absolutely would not be in??terested in a return of, but I still can’t help but miss. It’s hard to explain, and I’m not entirely sure I have a full handle on it.

The video store aesthetic was enough to get me interested in Rewind or Die. The “Night Shift�prologue was one of the highlights of 2022’s Stay Out of the House, so I was hoping for something similar. What we got ??was so??mething different, but different can be good too.

[caption id="attachment_373420" align="alignnone" width="640"] Screenshot by Destructoid[/caption]

Rewind or Die (PC)
Developer: Comp-3 Interactive
Publisher: Torture Star Video
Release: April 14, 2023
MSRP: TBA

Rewind or Die begins with you getting called in for a late shift at your crummy job. It then goes into detail about how much your life sucks. Not only do you have to assist intolerable customers, but your boss is a dink. Amusingly, the game’s approach to showing this is disturbingly realistic, as it shows?? an employer who gradually whittles away at worker dignity while demanding more from them.?? One that is quick to remind that everyone is replaceable while also griping that good help is hard to find.

As the ??workday goes on, things start getting weirder. It begins by letting you know that recent murder?s have been centered around the video shop and that the victims were all customers. Weird calls start coming in, and things escalate from there.

One thing leads to another, and you find yourself? in the clutches of a sadistic serial killer who wears a pig’s head to conceal their face. At least it’s better than being cornered by a guy who spouts movie trivia.

//youtu.be/bQgOrKAvz0M

'Cause this is thriller

Rewind or Die is a little on the less-experimental end of the lo-fi horror spectrum. While many indie horror developers try some inventive ways to leave you stewing in that atmosphere or make the killer seem like an unstoppable threat, Rewind or Die is more direct. You actually spend very little time in the same environment with the killer, a lot of gameplay is simply completing tasks to proceed. While some of these puzz??les are at least cleverly designed, they can be a bit underwhelming.

It feels rather mechanical, which sometimes works in the context of video games, but I think undermines the horror. You ??move between isolated places to solve puzzles, and at ?times, it feels like you’re forced to follow the dance steps.

The worst example of this is during a portion of the game where it feels like you’re supposed to be sneaking around. I quickly noticed that the slasher (whoâ€?™s named Slaw, and I love it) doesn’t actually exist in the environment. So I just happily puttered around and solved the puzzles to continue. It wasn’t scary, it was moreâ€?peaceful?

[caption id="attachment_373422" align="alignnone" width="640"] Screenshot by Destructoid[/caption]

You should probably just be kind

The upside to this is that Rewind or Die is a bit tighter and less janky than your typical indie horror. The downside is that also means it’s a bit less compelling. I’d go as far as saying it’s even a bit predictable with many of its beats. It’s so easy to read, that I almost knew what it expected of me before it asked me to do it. There’s definitely something to be said about the game’s focus. If you’ve detested the sub-genre's usual rough edges, then Rewind or Die might be a bit more reliable for you.

I’m not saying Rewind or Die is strictly linear, either. It’s just that in comparison to the more immersive sim approach of Stay Out of the House or the dedication to the grounded atmosphere of Bloodwash, it’s a different vector.

I definitely appreciate different approaches to the sub-genre. One of my favorite things about exploring lo-fi indie horror is that, even if it doesn’t always work out, developers try new things all the time. However, Rewind or Die doesn’t feel daring enough. It seems to subscribe too closely to your typical horror game language and doesn’t pull that off too well. It’s not bad. It just isn’t exciting.

[caption id="attachment_373421" align="alignnone" width="640"] Screenshot by Destructoid[/caption]

Stay Cool

It’s not a vector I’m particularly enthusiastic about. That might be down to my own expectations from the lo-fi horror sub-genre, but I also feel that there isn’t a whole lot of personality that shines through Rewind or Die. The narrative doesn’t really? pitch any curveballs, the gameplay doesn’t twist things into interesting pretzels, and there isn’t really anything truly unique that I felt my teeth sink into.

That’s not to say I didn’t like Rewind or Die. It’s just not going to land on any of my must-play lists. I will reiterate that there isn’t anything offensively bad about it. It’s not extremely rough-edged like Christmas Massacre or as raunchy as Night at the Gates of Hell. However, both those games presented uniquely memorable moments, whereas Rewind or Die has a video ??rental shop. Video rental s?hops are terrific, but they’re just not horrific enough to carry an entire game.

_{[This review is based on a retail build of the game provided by the publisher.]}

The post Review: Rewind or Die appeared first on Destructoid.

Sad horror? Misery?

If you’re like me, you ?enjoy your horror best when it’s sad. Video games can’t really scare me anymore, but gosh, they sure can get me ??depressed. Not that it’s difficult. A happy memory can depress me.

Anyway, a portion of Mortal Meal was featured on the Haunted PS1 Demo Disc: Spectral Mall compilation that was released back in 2022. The Haunted PS1 Demo Disc is sort of a nexus for experimental, lo-fi horror, and somehow I’m not on their mailing list. Thankfully, it usually passes my radar eventually.

Mortal Meal is perhaps a direct take on the genre, being largely a walki??????????????????????????ng simulator. It’s also not terribly scary, but?? then, how would I know? It’s more focused on telling a melancholic narrative while weaving in a bit of levity and some fantastic horror imagery.

[caption id="attachment_371420" align="alignnone" width="640"] Image via Goblin Council[/caption]

Sounds gay. I'm in.

You’re dead. A good boy is running around with your disembodied heart, and your ghost rises from that. A big part of Mortal Meal is figuring out wh?o you were and why you??’re dead. To do so, you start off by following the trail of blood back to your corpse.

I’m not really sure how much to give away in terms of the plot. The headline provided to me was a “gay romance story wrapped up in a horror game,�so I can at least say that. Which is nice. Gay romance is rarely approached in the same way as, say, lesbian romance, so it’s nice to see the orientation approached in the way of Mortal Meal. The?? gay part isn’t as central as ?the romance. It’s just romance with two dudes, is what I’m saying.

Where Mortal Meal succeeds best is presenting a mystery. Muc?h of the game is figuring out first who you are, who this other guy is, and what all this has to do with your death.

//youtu.be/rln2QZiv_Zg

Reuse of Assets

Mortal Meal makes great use of its lo-fi aesthetic. The world frequently shifts into a more surreal, nightmarish version of itself. Not only does this add some light gameplay that moves a bit outside the walking simulator framework, but it shows off some great �and I can’t believe I’m saying this �reuse of assets. Look, the asset pipeline is usually a bottleneck for indie games, and seeing one that can make cool-looking levels by reusing existing assets in interesting ways; it’s kind of exciting to me for some reason. It feels like the soul of small development. You always hear stories about how, like, the deku stick texture in Ocarina of Time is Link’s hair texture stretched out, and that’s just neat.

But the nightmarish transformations the world takes are also pretty cool. One part th??at stuck out to me was the full moon turning into an eyeball that glances around. Spooky. You’re also frequently pursued by a monster that eats ghosts. It has this patchwork texture over a skeleton on it, and that’s lo-fi gold right there.

Mortal Meal does stumble a bit with the pacing. The mystery gets solved quite a ways before the end, and the rest is a little flat. You’re given three objectives to get throug?h at the end, and one of them is breaking into a grocery store. It gives you a series of five puzzles �about three puzzles too many �and then the spirit attacks you. Then the next two objectives are mainly accomplished by going and getting something.

I??t do??es, however, have a moment where you cook soup, and I’m not kidding when I say that’s fantastic.

[caption id="attachment_371424" align="alignnone" width="640"] Image via Goblin Council[/caption]

Soup's on

Another unfortunate downside to Mortal Meal is that? it’s $14. That’s not a huge number, but the game clocks in at about an hour long. There are other comparable lo-fi horror games that are longer and cost around the same amount. Maybe a few dollars isn’t worth getting upset about, but it’s worth noting.

On the other hand, Mortal Meal has weird addi??tional replay value through unlockable modifiers that are speckled throughout the world. Again, worth keeping in mind.

Cost aside, however, Mortal Meal is a worthwhile little experience. It’s most successful when it comes to aesthetics, but its narrative and gameplay are perfectly ?serviceable. I think Goblin Council is a developer th??at could benefit from a budget because even with this relatively small production, they’ve shown off considerable chops.

The post Mortal Meal is a melancholic slice of Haunted PS1 appeared first on Destructoid.

What kind of monster doesn't rewind?

Puppet Combo’s publishing label, Torture Star Video, has announced they’ll be releasing Comp-3 Interactive’s game, Rewind or Die, on April 14, 2023.

This seems like something I need to play. Rewind or Die has you p?laying as a video rental store worker who finds themselves stalked by a slasher. You’ll work your shift on your own as your co-workers flaked out on you. However, as a slave to an uncaring society, you just need to keep your head down while receiving threatening phone calls.

[embed]//youtu.be/bQgOrKAvz0M[/embed]

I think this is exactly my favorite kind of horror game. The core experience of Stay Out of the House was fantastic, but one of its highlights was its prologue, where you work a gas station night shift, just waiting for the shoe to drop. I also commonly thump the drum of Happy’s Humble Burger Farm, where you serve customers at a fast food joint. Casting the player in a relatable experience is just such a great way to draw them into the game world. Plus, like anyone?? who grew up in the �0s, I have a lot of love for video rental places.

Rewind or Die will launch on April 14 on PC. If you’d like a taste of Comp-3 Interactive’s previous work, you can find them on itch.io.

The post Lo-fi horror ga??me Rewind or Die is done asking nicely April 14 appeared first on Destructoid.

They later become the Doom Illuminati

The retro-inspired shooter genre is really in high gear. Following in the wake of the big-budget revival of Doom in 2016 and the indie hot flash of Dusk in 2018, there are now a tonne of ??indie games vying for recognition in the genre. It’s a bit overwhelming, to be honest. It’s a favorite genre of mine, but it seems hard to separate the wheat from the chaff. My current approa?ch is to just dump milk over all of them and dig in.

Dread Templar is in the bowl. Having entered Early Access back in August ??2021, it’s finally time for it to get its 1.0 and get kicked out the door. I wasn’t quite sure what would make it stand out back in its initial test period, and now I’m even less sure.

[caption id="attachment_359682" align="alignnone" width="640"] Screenshot by Destructoid[/caption]

Dread Templar (PC)
Developer: T19 Games
Publisher: Fulqrum Publishing
Released: January 26, 2023
MSRP: $19.99

Dread Templar is the story of the eponymous protagon?ist, who gains unholy powers to f?ight the armies of the unholy. Or something. In typical retro-inspired fashion, there isn’t a very prevalent narrative. That’s probably a good thing, since the narrated cutscenes between episodes are kind of better off ignored.

The gameplay is pretty similar to Quake, though the movement and physics remind me more of Turok: Dinosaur Hunter. It’s fast and punchy, featuring a larger arsenal of weapons than your typical pre-3D accelerated shooter. It also doesn’t throw hordes of enemies at you in a way that Doom 2 does, but rather gives you tougher baddies to chew on. That’s? kind of disappointing, and really reminds me of the drawbacks that came with moving to polygons.

One place that Dread Templar dis?tinguishes itself from its inspiration is in its upgrade system. You can unlock slots for the upgrades you find in each of your weapon categories, which allow you to expand damage, firing rate, and ammo, as well as some othe?r tweaks. You obtain these upgrades through finding secrets and clearing side areas. The upgrade system is gravy, as is the variety offered by the side areas. The secrets, however, are somewhat maddening.

[embed]//youtu.be/Zka-HOFMetY[/embed]

Rewarded for wall-humping

To be fair, I’m not sure that secret areas were very well handled by most FPS games of the era. A lot of them came down to humping the walls and trying to jam yourself into small spaces. Dread Templar is no different. Sure, some of the walls look suspicious, but it’s easy to convince yourself that all the walls look suspicious. So you wind up grinding you??rself against the wallpaper, hoping that some of it will peel off.

At the very least, Dread Templar rewards you for all your wall-humping. The upgrades you collect are a little more interesting than the ammo and health you’d typically come across in Doom or Duke Nukem 3D. However, that also makes it more vexing, sin?ce with a press of a button, you get to see how many are still left in a level. That’s maddening because it makes you feel like you can’t leave a level until you’ve licked all the paint off the walls and picked up every little thing. It becomes onerous, and eventually, you’ll just need to compromise and learn to live without them. It’ll eat at you, though.

[caption id="attachment_359688" align="alignnone" width="640"] Screenshot by Destructoid[/caption]

Double-barrel: Check

There are five episodes and 25 levels to Dread Templar, and the levels are rather lengthy. Throughout the epi??sodes, there’s a decent amount of variety, both in terms o?f visuals and challenges. Most introduce new threats, but unfortunately, some of them seem to be mostly palette swaps.

While some of your foes are completely braindead, charging directly at you in a way that was common for the era, there are others that are much more interestingly designed. My favorite was a monster who shoots up a cloud of smoke when you engage it. It then hides in that cloud, moving about somewhat unpredictably, leaving ?you to target it based on brief glimpses. Or just fire wildly into the cloud; that can work too.

There are maybe too few enemies for Dread Templar’s lengthy runtime, but the way more gets ad?ded throughout helps to alleviate this. There’s also a smattering of bosses spread around for good measure. These are largely just a matter of circle-str??afing while dodging as many attacks as you can, but there’s an appreciable grandeur to them.

[caption id="attachment_359681" align="alignnone" width="640"] Screenshot by Destructoid[/caption]

Foreboding clouds

The levels themselves are slightly uneven, but they at least have a variety to them that makes some more memorable than others. They all tend to take place in twisted fantasy places, which I person?ally feel was a weakness of early-3D shooters. Demons are bad, yeah, but they’re just hanging out in gloomy corridors. They’re much cooler when they’re hanging around an arcade in a movie theatre. But then, isn’t everybody?

There’s also the soundtrack, which starts off as some decent heavy metal, and then just becomes�background music. I’m not the biggest fan of?? heavy metal, but it works from an aesthetic standpoint in video games. However, while it stood out in the beginning, the later tracks d?on’t scratch the same itch. They’re far away from being unpleasant, but they don’t feel as integral to the experience.

[caption id="attachment_359684" align="alignnone" width="640"] Screenshot by Destructoid[/caption]

Far away from being unpleasant

Dread Templar could generally be described entirely as “far away from being unpleasant.�From beginnin??g to end, it’s a reasonably well-designed experience, and it never gets to be too much of a slog. It just never really finds a unique identity. There’s no real hook that makes it stand out or will keep you coming back.

Competent is definitely not the worst descriptor a game can attain, but I’d be happier if Dread Templar had found a way to truly distinguish itself. When I find myself with that retro-shooter itch, I can’t see myself coming back to this one. It takes more than good gunplay to make an experience memorable, but there isn’t much more to Dread Templar than that.

_{[This review is based on a retail build of the game purchased by the reviewer.]}

The post Review: Dread Templar appeared first on Destructoid.

Nice place you've got here

Is Hallowe’en done yet? Each year I have the goal of playing as many horror games as possible in October, and usually, I get sidetracked, and it doesn’t happen. This year, I both succeeded and started early. And now, I’m sick of them. I don't want any more monsters or grungy aesthetics. I’m tired of some dude with a knife getting in my way while I try to slot crests in their respective crest-holes.

I’m so tired of keys. I don't even lock my door anymore?... Okay, maybe on?e more.

Part of this initial flood of horror titles has been through Puppet Combo’s publisher label, Torture Star Video. Stay Out of the House is pure Puppet Combo. Guy’s been working on this one for a wh??ile, and it’s finally here. So, at least if I’m forcing myself to swallow one more morsel into my critically full gullet, it promises to be a tasty one.

Stay Out of the House (PC)
Developer: Puppet Combo
Publisher: Puppet Combo
Released: October 13, 2022
MSRP: $14.99

Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: your car broke down (sort of), and the nearest refuge you find is a creepy house. Maybe they’ll let you use their phone, just go right on in. Oops! There’s a bad man with a hammer. Maybe you should stay a while, but not to??o long because The Butcher obviously has plans for you.

I feel like I did this so recently with Deadly Night, which was a Torture Star Video published title. Really, the games run pretty parallel. The difference is, while Deadly Night felt relatively routine, Stay Out of the House feels like it?s majestic final form. It feels kind of like what previous titles in the slasher genre have been leading up to. It’s the whole cake, when ??before we were just licking the spoon.

Of course, it’s definitely still a slasher title.

[embed]//youtu.be/Vy0p3PrTFsU[/embed]

This time around, you’re locked in a house with the Butcher and Grandma. Avoiding them is a matter of sticking to the shadows and staying quiet while you try to pull at the threads and unravel their grotesque tapestry. That’s the routine part. Like in Deadly Night, you’re left to find a means of escape.

However, on top of that are numerous other layers. Stay Out of the House lifts from the nebulous immersive sim genre. It plays a bit like a tighter, more intricate version of Nun Massacre in which you explore the?? house, pick up items, and figure out what you’re supposed to rub them against. Put in the effort, and you can open up shortcuts and new routes. Just don’t get sp?otted.

There are also various traps throughout the house. There are security ?cameras that will spot you and ??sound the alarm, Grandmother scooting up and down the stairs in her wheelchair, and if you piss off the Butcher enough, he’ll put down some bear traps.

You have three days to escape, which technically means you have three lives. If the Butcher knocks you out, y??ou wake up back in captivity the next day. He’ll also upgrade the apparatus, placing more cameras and traps around.

Slaying the elderly

It’s the small victories that make Stay Out of the House worthwhile. Every time you manage to snip a?? wire and unscrew a vent, it feels like a victory. Progress comes steadily as you work at different small puzzles throughout. It feels rewarding to scour th?e house, trying to outsmart grandma and the Butcher.

Actually, Grandma is a huge pain. She moves quickly and constantly shifts to different spots around the house. She’s got comparatively bad vision and hearing, but when she does spot you, she starts screaming, drawing the Butcher to wherever she is. That might just sound like a m??obile security camera, but she always had a habit of showing up at the worst times and parking herself there.

E??ventually, I got fed up and stabbed her face-off. I cannot stress how satisfying it was to stab Grandma. Kudos to Pup?pet Combo for his ability to make slaying the elderly so cathartic.

The graveyard shift

Stay Out of the House also does a good job of telling its story. It’s not necessarily a very standout plot, but the way it flows is pretty well done. It’s techni??cally broken into four chapters, with the first part acting as a prologue. While most of the action is secluded in the last two chapters, the different paces they offer flow together well while still offering variety. Starting with Night Shift was a good choice, as it lays down a baseline of?? suspense before you start crawling through vents.

I also enjoyed the addition of other victims in the third chapter. You have the ability to release them from their prisons and lead them to safet?y. Y’know, if you want to. If not, the Butcher eventually goes out and kills one of them, dragging them in and chopping them up. It’s a really nice touch that adds some tangible stakes to the plot, even if it’s m??ore fun to watch them get killed.

All this is wrapped in a lo-fi aesthetic that can be tweaked to your liking. Whether you want it to look like a PS1 game with shifting textures or a rental VHS abomin??ation with unreadable text, the world is your low-poly oyster.

Mr. Puppet Combo has told me that the least favorite of his own games are the more conventional ones, and this fits into that category. I absolutely respect that perspective, but it's hard to deny that he has a talent for the conventional. Stay Out of the House is a tight experience with a lot of moving parts. Too many, perhaps, as he and his team have been patching it since release, and while it seems that a lot of the critical bugs have? been fixed, I hit a few weirdities, but nothing that frustrated me.

This may be my favorite of the Puppet Combo game. I love the weird experiments, but it’s also nice to see the results applied to a cohesive and polished design. More marketable? Maybe, but it’s hard to look at this wonderfully nuanced game and not have a deep appreciation for the craftsmanship. That’s what Stay Out of the House is: a solid end result that doesn’t stray too far from th??????????????????????????e jank and seediness of the Puppet Combo brand. It’s a well-carved victim. An expertly stabbed Grandm?a.

_{[This review is based on a retail build of the game provided by the publisher.]}

The post Review: Stay Out of the House appeared first on Destructoid.

Is your refrigerator running? Then you’d better run faster!

Ho??rror is a fun little genre. It’s like drama, but it tries to open up your bowels. And we, as humans, are afraid of so many things. Some things we’ve come up with on our own terrify us. Sometimes we’ve decided that things intended to cause joy instead cause fear. It’s great! You don’t even need something tangible, life itself is one long horrifying experience!

The Fridge is Red is a bit of a departure from the usual grotesque slasher horror I’ve been indulging in lately. It’s psychological beyond just, “look out, that cat has got a knife!�It’s downright surreal, nailing wh??at dreams would probably be like if I could dream about something aside from noodles. Unfortunately, while it happens to be consistently arresting with its visuals, it comes up short with just about everything else it attempts.

The Fridge is Red (PC)
Developer: 5WORD Team
Publisher: tinyBuild
Released: September 27, 2022
MSRP: $14.99

You play as some guy menaced by a f??ridge. Not directly. It’s one of those passive-aggressive fridges that seem to show up in visions. And while this crimson monolith is omnipresent, that’s about it. It might ?eat people. Who knows?

The plot throws down its cards a bit too early. The Fridge is Red is about grief. Whether or not you’re living out this grief or merely reliving it is sort of left to interpretation. That’s cool and all, but The Fridge is Red simultane??ously gives you too few p?ieces of the puzzle and too many.

The most frustrating part of its storytelling is ho?w, when you conclude one of the game’s six chapters, it then replays them in a way that demonstrates how the events actually h?appened. So, while it’s vague about a lot of things, it also brazenly shows you what it’s symbolizing. I don’t know why. I like to think I’m just not getting something, but I’m pretty sure I’ve got the whole picture minus some questionable spots.

[embed]//youtu.be/IoDT-8p1D4I[/embed]

That’s cool, I guess. My fridge is white.

Where The Fridge is Red really succeeds is in its visual style. Yes, it’s a low-poly affair overlaid with a VHS filter, and that’s not particularly novel any?more. However, its use of lighting and purposeful obstruction o??f details are used pretty well. Furthermore, it also does well at being convincingly surreal. It comes close to being rather comical in quite a few cases, which only adds to this fever dream haze you’re stuck in.

I never found it to be all that scary, but there were plenty of moments that felt screenshot worthy. If nothing else, The Fridge is Red does some great atmosphere. The lonely gas station feels like an island in the darkness. The hospital feels sterile and impersonal. Then it gets intentionally con?fusing.

It really loves Lost Woods-style puzzles, where you have to follow directions?? extra hard? to succeed. It’s effective, but it gets rather tiresome quickly.

Something stinks in the fridge today

Actually, the puzzles are tiresome in general. It really leans on the horrors of mundanity. At one point, you literally stand in line for a few minutes, just wai??ting for the ability to advance. I get why they chose to do it, but then later, you’re driving long, empty roads in the snow.

The Fridge is Red wants you to get lost. Four? of its six chapters have you navigate some sort of maze. It’s also incredibly vague about what you should be doing. I’m a big enough girl that I don’t need it to hold my hand, but a little direction would have been nice occasionally. The snowy road chapter was the worst for it. Each path eventually leads back to the gas station, but only a specific route leads to where you need to go. At first, this is easy enough. The gas station attendant tells you where to go. Then nothing.

For the la??st stretch of the chapter, I was told “go here�as an objective, and then just started driving down the various roads until I hit the one it wanted me on. It takes a long time to get back to the ga??s station each time, the scenery is intentionally repetitive, and there isn’t even a radio. I was excited to get to that chapter and then was relieved to finish it.

I get all my best advice from appliances

The Fridge is Red feels like a lot of scenes that look really good in a trailer built around a game that isn’t interesting to play. Its puzzle design just involves finding a bunch of stuff to rub on other stuff, which is exactly what adventure games are, but they usually don’t feel like such a chore. In its attempts to tie in the horrors of mundanity, The Fridge is Red manages to make itself just feel mundane.

You can see greatness from the heights that The Fridge is Red reaches, but most of the time, you’re mired in its lows. At ??times, it feels like the central obstacle in the game is just trying to figure out what it wants from you. What order, what direction, and what interpretation you need to arrive at. There’s definitely vision here that wants to be delivered, but it needs to be paired with consideration for the expe?rience.

_{[This review is based on a retail build of the game provided by the publisher.]}

The post Review: The Fridge is Red appeared first on Destructoid.

Praise the lord and pass the ammunition

Like any genre, lo-fi horror carries with it the possibility of growing stale. You can only be locked in a house with a killer so many times before it’s routine. It’s not always that way, however. There are lots of alternatives. Night at the Gates of Hell makes a big detour for th??e genre by empowering you with a gun. The zombi??es are slow, and ammo is limited. Aim for the head.

It certainly helps that it marks the return of the duo that created Bloodwash, which still stands as one of my favorite examples of the genre. Jordan King and Henry Hoare have returned with some extra ammunition, this time giving us all the zombies we can handle. It’s a rather stark departure from Bloodwash’s thick and heavy suspens??e, but it’s substantial proof t?hat these two know the recipe to the secret sauce.

Night at the Gates of Hell (PC)
Developer: Black Eyed Priest, Henry Hoare
Publisher: Torture Star Video
Released: September 15, 2022
MSRP: $11.99

Night at the Gates of Hell is so turgid with sleaze that someone gets their low-poly tits out? within the first five minutes. They get bitten off shortly after that. It’s hard to miss the B movie goofiness that pervades the game; it certainly embraces it. You play as David, w?ho has found himself in a bit of a zombie outbreak. It sure seems like the end of times, but David isn’t going to get dragged to hell without a fight.

The zombies are typically slow and rarely attack in groups, which is somewhat rare for horror in general. What’s more, they’re grotesquely rendered. I’m not just talking about the necrotic details like peeled-back lips and sunken eyes. Their low-poly exterior and unnatural movements give them an extremely unsettling quality. They also tend to b??e strangely proportioned, giving the entire game a surreal feel. It’s like being assaulted by pointy meat dolls. There are apparently 85 zombie models in the entire game, which seems excessive, but also adds noticeable flavor. It’s not like you’re going to get personal with a particular zombie, but it makes the world feel a bit more alive. Or perhaps like it was once alive.

You need to score a headshot to take down a zombie, which isn’t a tall order if you keep cal??m, but means you can’t just go popping off shots. You can look down the sights, but you can’t move while doing?? so. Ammo is also limited, and reloading takes time. Still, as long as you can hit your target, combat is the best option.

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Chest pains

If you’re not that great at lining up your sights on a brain, you can load up on knives. These trigger whenever a zombie grabs you, resulting in an instant kill. It’s sort of like the Resident Evil remake on Gamecube, but with a hilarious anim?ation attached. The zombie gets right up in your face, but the knife kind of just floats into view and politely stabs its way into their head. It gets the job done, and you get a view of the zombie, but the fact that this is the bare minimum way of depicting a knife going into someone, it’s almost comical.

Not that Night at the Gates of Hell takes itself very seriously. There’s a story, but it’s rather tenuous. It doesn’t go all out in creating an atmosphere of dread like Bloodwash did, but rather supports itself on the gory visuals. The characters you bump into are a diverse bunch of weirdos, with fan favorite Stan from Bloodwash making a celebrated reappearance. The characters are memorable, but more for being amusing rather than deep. That same thing could be said about Night at the Gates of Hell.

Stan's our man

The whole experience is level-based. This, unfortunately, eliminates a feeling of continued survival, but it does help all the scenes stand as their own. There’s a surprising amount of variety to be found, as well. While most of Night at the Gates of Hell has you skulking through darkened corri??dors, it has a healthy habit of flipping the script.

As is standard with Puppet Combo adjacent games (this one published under Ben Cucuzza’s label, Torture Star Video), there are a number of filters to better replicate the �0s. I started off with it looking like a VHS rental but had to turn it down to just VHS. Even then, I often missed small details in the environm??ent, but I will allow myself to suffer for the sake of an authentic experience. Or most anything, really.

It’s not the longest game, but it makes the most of its runtime. It also includes some smaller prototypes from the developers�back catalog thrown in as extras. I’m most excited about The Booty Creek Cheek Freak being included because it’s just fun to say.

Aim for the head

While I’m still more fond of Bloodwash for its inventive narrative flourishes, Night at the Gates of Hell is a good time for its?? modest artistic vision. Some of the elements within feel more like they happened as happy accidents rather than deliberate attempts at a unique experience. But really, that just feels more true to the B Horror experience.

Night at the Gates of Hell is not the deepest or most creative horror game in the pack, but it is undeniably entertaini?ng. It gives a strong impression that the developer had as much fun creating it as you will have playing it. Its campy and unsettling tone belies a game that just aims to please, and it is rather accurate when it comes to hitting that target.

_{[This review is based on a retail build of the game provided by the publisher.]}

The post Review: Night at the Gates of Hell appeared first on Destructoid.

Oh, crap. I'm in a house again

I’m always down for some sleazy horror. Okay, maybe not the film kind, since I’m not much of a movie buff, but this new trend of short-form slasher games with VHS filters and PS1 graphics I’m all about. Deadly Night by Cubyte Games is that. It is definitely that.

Deadly Night (PC)
Developer: Cubyte Games
Publisher: Torture Star Video
Released: September 2, 2022
MSRP: $9.99

Deadly Night follows Carol after she’s dropped off at a motel. I’m sure it isn’t difficult to guess that she’s in for a bad time. What is interesting is that you have some control over what kind of bad time you have. Regardless of what you choose, though, Ca??rol eventually winds up in the basement of a creepy house. It’s one of those horror stories. The creepy house story. And?, of course, there’s a killer there. You know what you signed up for.

While there are technically four scenes to survive through, the house is clearly the main event. In it, you have to navigate the gloom and v?arious rooms to find a way to escape. To evade the killer as he stalks the halls, you can hide under beds and in closets. It’s maybe not the most novel of narratives, but I actually don’t have a positive way of ending this sentence.?? I feel that things can only go downhill from here if I keep going.

[embed]//youtu.be/l4pU0PCHpH4[/embed]

Many people come here to have sex

To be fair to Deadly Night, it pulls off its subject matter rather well. The house is well designed, even if its layout is a bit unnatural. You can always h??ear the killer as he is stomping around, but there is no sound difference in whether he’s above, below, or on the same floor as you. There’s a single chokepoint in the stairwell, so trying to guess whether he’s near it or not ??is a big part of the game.

Deadly Night also wisely takes advantage of this fact, providing moments where your actions alert the killer, as well as one moment where you have to travel quickly to your obj??ective. There are times when you just can’t afford to w?ait until you know he’s off the stairs; you need to pick your moment and follow through, which can be tense and difficult.

Evading the killer isn’t all that challenging unless he wedges you into a corner. Typically, you just need to break the line of sight and get back into the closet like your parents are coming to visit. He’ll then just stand outside, breathing on the door until the varnish peels off. It’s not at all uncommon in these sorts of hidey games, but I found it hilarious nonetheless. He’ll get his masked face directly up to it and then just stand there for a while like he forgot what he was? doing.

Paint pots

The other scenes in the game are mainly to tell the story, which isn’t all that great. Take that as you will because Deadly Night makes it known it’s supposed to be a tribute to schlocky slasher flicks. However, there seem to be a lot of missed opportunities in exploring the characters. The backstory is established, but there are a lot of glar??ing blank??s that just get glossed over.

It’s perhaps not necessary to have a tight, cohesive plot when the obvious goal is to simply terrify. However, games like Bloodwash and Nun Massacre do a better job of establishing these things, whereas it almost seems unfinished in Deadly Night. The fact that two of the scenes don’t even involve the slasher gameplay and seem to exist entirel??y for storytelling makes it a little odd that there isnâ€??™t more development.

For that matter, it feels like some shortcuts were taken when it comes to designing the gameplay. There’s a fridge, for example, that won’t open because of “pressure.�And you have to wait until it equalizes before it can be opened. Anyone with a deep freezer can tell you this i?s an actual issue,? it just feels kind of like cheating when you can’t open it until a set gameplay milestone is passed. Likewise, there are parts where you can’t interact with something until you’ve interacted with something else. An example of this is where you can’t pick up a stick until you examine a log and are told you need something for leverage.

Looks like it still works

For that matter, Deadly Night has aspirations towards replayability, but it’s not executed to the fullest extent. However, most of the deviations happen in the first chapter. Things get rearranged when you’re in the house, but I feel that playing it more than the two times I did would still be a bit much. While you might find the alarm clock in?? a different spot, the puzzle is the same, and I can only think of one way things can be done differently in that chapter, and it’s mostly just there to judge whether you get the good or bad ending.

The first chapter has more deviation to the point where I mostly skipped the entire thing on my first playthrough. There was later a comment made by Carol that referenced something that didn’t happen because I skipped it. Deadly Night is at least kind enough to tell you what you missed out? on, so you know wha?t to look for when you revisit.

More PS1-era nipples next time

Summing up my thoughts on Deadly Night is a bit difficult since I’m a fan of the short-form horror genre and want to encourage it to be explored further by more people. And the truth is, Deadly Night delivered on most of what I expected; it just didn’t impress as well as Bloodwash did. The mechanics weren’t as inventive as Humble’s Happy Burger Farm. The sleaze doesn't mesh as wel??l as it does in Puppet Combo’s own self-published work.

Deadly Night is not the best example of what the genre is capable of while at the same time being a demonstration of what it is: short experiences that take you to a simpler time in horror. It’s a worn rental store VHS encapsulated in an interactive experience. It’s lo-fi brain candy for the horror enthusiast. It knows exactly what it is, which allows ?it to get away with murder.

_{[This review is based on a retail build of the game provided by the publisher.]}

The post Review: Deadly Night appeared first on Destructoid.

Low-poly, highly scary

If you’re into low-poly, PS1-style games like I am, today’s Puppet Combo Direct stream was a dream. It’s a smorgasbord of games coming our way, both from the Godfather of lo-fi hor??ror, Ben Cocuzza, and by way of his publishing label, Torture Star Video. All the titles look fantastic, ??but let’s go from the tip to the top.

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Stay Out of the House this July

It’s been listed on Steam for a hog’s age, but Stay Out of the House will finally be in the wider public’s hands in July. Part survival horror and part “stealth immersive sim,�Stay Out of the House places you in the clutches of a deranged serial kille?r. You’ll need to keep out of sight and find a way to escape his house.

Rather than a straight slasher game, Stay Out of the House has you avoid traps and “The Butcher’s�??family as you try to escape. Sounds like classic Puppet Combo, but fortunately, we only have a month to wait to find out what tricks h?e can throw at us.

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Night at the Gates of Hell comes to us from the creator of Bloodwash

For something completely different, Jordan King, the creator of Bloodwash, is bringing us the survival horror, Night at the Gates of Hell. With this gory little game, Jordan is challenging himself to present a classic Resident Evil experience?? in the first person with slow and menacing zombies. You play as David, who is att??empting to escape the zombie infestation going on in his city and to find out the truth behind them.

Featuring lo-fi visuals, lots of gruesome imagery, and a �0s disco soundtrack, Nights at the Gates of Hell is a love letter to Italian zombie flicks. There’s no solid r?elease date for this one, but we can start looking for it around?? third quarter, 2022.

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A completed Power Drill Massacre is coming to Steam

Power Drill Massacre is something of a legendary title among Puppet Combo fans. It was originally released in 2015 in an incomplete state, but while it has sat like that all this time, what was presented captured the attention?? of fans. It’s actually the first title by him that I played myself, and it definitely is a great representation of his style of slasher horror.

You play as a hapless car crash victim who goes looking for help in exactly the wrong place. She finds herself hunted by the Driller Killer wh??o�I probably don’t need to explain h??is M.O.

The finished game has been expanded with new areas, expanded gameplay, and quality of life improvements. There are als??o new playable characters, multiple endings, and new camera styles. Exciting stuff for anyone who experienced the? original version. It'll also be launching on Steam for the first time. We’ll be waiting until Q4 2022 to see the rest of the Driller Killer’s tale.

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Sleazy survival horror Deadly Night is coming in August

Billed as “the sleaziest low-poly slasher ever created,�Deadly Night comes to us from Cubite Games, developers of NIGHT GUARD and La Compana. Deadly Night has hitchhiker Carol check into a motel that she may never ??check out of. Hopefully, the ice machine works.

A trailer shows off some ??gruesome scenes and images of the killer that ??will be tracking you down. I am absolutely a sucker for gloomy parking lot aesthetic for some reason. That’s all it needed to show me and I am down. Looks like I’ll be down this August when it releases on Steam through Torture Star Video.

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Horror favorite Bloodwash is coming to consoles

Speaking of gloomy parking lot aesthetic, one of my favorite horror titles from last year is coming to console. Bloodwash is the story of Sara, who absolutely has to get laundry done, and the only 24-hour laundromat is on the outskirts of town. Girl, we’ve all been there. U??nfortunately for her, the terrifyingly named Womb Ripper has been on the prowl, a??nd she’s looking awfully pregnant.

It’s a pretty unique title that has you build the tension yourself by wasting time in a strip mall, learning of the horrible things that have gone on there. Bloodwash is a terrific example of the inventiveness f??ound in the lo-fi horror sub-genre, so if you’re console-bound, definitely consider taking a look this summer.

It’s a nice slate of games to look forward to throughout the year. Unfortunately, I want them now. If my ceaseless gushing hasn’t? tipped you off, I’m a big fan of the sub-genre and of Puppet Combo in particular. I’m feeling deficient in lo-fi, cheap scares, so I’ll be keeping an ey?e on all these upcoming titles.

The post A full Power Drill Massacre and mo??re are coming this year from Puppet Combo appeared first on Destructoid.

I won't hurt you unless you cheat

I’ve been reviewing a lot of short-form horror games recentl?y, and that can only mean one thing: a lot of short-form horror games have been getting released. I like them becau?se they’re quick, inventive treats. Developers have become reasonably good at providing thrills and boners through the interactive medium, but someone’s fears are a constantly moving target. It’s fun to watch all the ways people think to hit that.

Janitor Bleeds tweaked my interest valve for a couple of reasons: it’s set in an arcade, and unraveling its mysteries requires you to play an old arcade cabinet. The “Janitor�in its name I had initially expected to be alluding to some grumpy old caretaker who haunts the place. Unfortunately, there is no such tortured soul shrieking about how hard it is to get nacho cheese? out of the? carpeting.

Janitor Bleeds (PC)
Developer: Korpus
Publisher: Bonus Stage Publishing
Released: April 7, 2022
MSRP: $12.99

Your car is wrecked, and I don’t know how you managed to pull that one off. You hit a light post on the side of the gentlest curve imaginable. How did you miss that? Let me rephrase: how did you hit that? You were checking your phone again, weren’t you? Who’s been texting you? Is it that harlot from the office again? My mother was r?ight about y?ou.

You wind up in an abandoned arcade. After a bit of explor??ation, you find a cabinet stashed away called “Janitor�and inadvertently release a strange entity upon the darkened screens. You would think your job would simply be to leave or call for help, but I guess you want to explore the arcade. That might be fun if something wasn’t trying to kill you.

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Janitor Bleeds is a linear experience. While you eventually open the entire arcade to explore, there’s a pretty strict sequence for things. Along the way, you continually encounter the mysterious Janitor game and use it to unlock the way forward. This is done through a variety of reality-bending puzzles. As you continue, you’re pursued by the en?tity. It’s a slasher horror set-up, but this one is hard to look at and casts an eerie light everywhere it goes. The thing is kind of imposing at first, but not the most credible threat.

It’s used sparingly at first, hinting at impending danger before it starts giving chase in earnest. It mostly shows up during specific sequences to add tension while you try to solve a puzzle. Then it wanders around ineffectively until it’s needed agai??n. Even when you do get in deep ??with it, the entity really isn’t very effective. It tends to have difficulty navigating the environments, which just made me feel sorry for it.

Adding to this, the titular Janitor arcade game isn’t skill-based; it’s just for solving simple puzzles. It does its job blending reality and the cabinet, but it misses out on creating tension by making you focus while Janitor Bleeds tries to screw with you. There really isn’t a penalty for backing away from the game to c?heck what a noise was or to hide from the entity.

Gameplay aside, I don’t think Janitor Bleeds is ?effective in building atmosphere, tension, or its narrative. There are notes scattered around that give the backstory of this strange arcade cabinet, but its effect on the arcade is disappointing. Without spoiling anything, greater attention to the backstory would have gone a long way to making the arcade a terrifying place to be.

The stakes aren’t communicated well. When you crash, one end of the road is blocked by a regular pine tree, while the other is pylons and wooden A-frames. The protagonist isn’t stranded; they’re just lazy. You're corralled th??rough the woods, which seems like the stupidest way to look for help.

And once you’re in the arcade, there isn’t much keeping you there. There’s no lost friend or deeper motivation. Nun Massacre had a missing kid. In Bloodwash, it was the only 24/7 laundromat, and you really needed clean clothes. The front entrance to Janitor Bleeds is blocked, but t??he back has a car in the way. There’s this vague implication that “the light�is drawing your character there, but it’s not enough to just say that in an interactive medium. Show, don’t tell.

There isn’t much that Janitor Bleeds really nails, which is the real shame. The concept itself is tantalizing enough, but the scare??s and the narrative needed more consideration. It ne??ither subverts expectations nor does it execute standard horror cliches very well. It’s not a total wash, it just lands so consistently in the middle that it’s hard not to be disappointed. Like many of the games in the derelict arcade, this one is, unfortunately, out of order.

_{[This review is based on a retail build of the game provided by the publisher.]}

The post Review: Janitor Bleeds appeared first on Destructoid.

Lo-fi realms to quest through

Some games have style that imitates life, some adopt animation techniques and cartoon aesthetics, and then some have a look that just knocks you down flat. Dread Delusion looks like the latter.

Dread Delusion is an upcoming open-world RPG developed by Lovely Hellplace and published by Dread XP, the label behind the Dread X Collection lo-fi horror anthologies. The game itself looks like an expanded version of the one found on the "Haunted PS1 Demo? Disc," and yeah, it looks like something a haunted PlayStation would create.

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Dread Delusion has started making the rounds on social media again, likely because a few folks (myself included) have been discovering it now. And later is better than never, because wow, Dread Delusion is really something to behold. It's got all the eerie, retro-horror vibes that have made games like Cruelty Squad stick out.

It feels like the closest parallel to draw to Dread Delusion would be something like The Elder Scrolls II: Daggerfall. In the Steam description, developer Lovely Hellplace says it?'s an open-world RPG focused on player choice, with either a central quest to follow or optional content to uncover through exploration. Of course, those areas that lie off the ??beaten path probably have some creepy monsters, so, adventurer be warned.

A visual aesthetic can get me in the door, but the more I've read about how Dread Delusion is looking to have some RPG systems like magic, trading, and speaking with the local townsf?olk, the more I think this might be one to keep an eye on. There are plenty of fantasy journeys to go on, but I'm digging ones that look as unique and intrig?uing as this.

Dread Delusion is aiming to launch on PC, though no date's been set yet. Keep an eye on it through Steam or Itch, and check out the free demo here.

The post Dread Delusion looks to be ?a retro 3D RPG with a real look to it appeared first on Destructoid.