Some of the Skybox talent pool’s favorite horror games
After a bit of a hiatus, we’ve brought Nation of Curation back from the dead. We’ve done so in order to celebrate Halloween this year with a little collaborative effort. After gathering a crew of Skybox contributors who agreed to contribute on short notice, each writer was asked to yap a bit about their favorite horror game, or something they’ve been playing recently, or simply something interesting that came to mind. We’re keeping it casual this year. No tricks, just treats. Check it out.
We Happy Few
It takes a lot to scare me or fill me with dread (gotta love desensitization). We Happy Few brings in not just dread, but psychological horror that goes beyond jump scares and a disturbing sense of humor. We Happy Few takes horror, hilarity, and tense psychological moments and wraps it all up into one game. Wearing a mask in this world is supposed to be a way to forget, cope, and control everyone around you. In this game, you need to wear a mask to survive.
The concept of taking a happy pill to make all of life’s problems more tolerable is what makes We Happy Few step out of the typical tropes we’re used to in horror games, and pull from reality. When you think you know where the story is going, think again. It is still a survival game, so managing thirst, hunger, even wearing the right type of clothing all adds to your chances of making it through alive. – Arielle Danan
Village in the Shade
On paper, Village in the Shade sounds weak. Oh boy, a farming sim that’s spooky? I haven’t seen fifty Steam listings of that same gimmick already. But this one’s from NIS, and even better, from the folks behind bangers like Void Terrarium and Yomawari. The sicko stuff, not the Prinny stuff. I don’t hate Prinnies, but that’s besides the point.
Village in the Shade isn’t just a farming game with monsters, although it is certainly a fun, cozy farming game that confronts you with creepy, murderous Yokai if you go out at night. It’s a story firmly rooted in rural horror, about the sacrifices people make in the name of sustaining a community, voluntarily or otherwise.
Sure, the monsters are scary. But the real horror comes from the rules. The traditions, the expectations, the enforcement mechanisms, the labor, the pressure, the debts, the leaders, the followers, the costs. Village in the Shade uses The Cozy of It All against you. You should give it a try. – Lucas White
Koudelka
There were a staggering number of incredible RPGs on the original PlayStation, but one that’s always stood out to me is Sacnoth’s Koudelka. Weapons break, ammunition is limited, traversal can be cumbersome, and you can easily get the bad ending if you don’t explore enough. More importantly, the story is exquisite. It’s a tale about lingering regrets and questioning one’s own motives. Despite Koudelka’s supernatural setting, the story is focused on the horrors that humanity inflicts upon itself, but also how we can help those still lingering from them.
Each of the three playable characters has a different reason to be at the cursed Nemeton Monastery in Aberswyth, Wales on Halloween of 1898: Koudelka is trying to find a lost spirit that called out to her, James is looking for a forbidden book of alchemy at the behest of the Vatican, and Edward… well, he’s there to loot the place. Over the course of the adventure, the three uncover the horrors of the monastery’s past, but also find closure in their own lives. In the last act, Koudelka, Edward, and James are very different people than at the start of the game. Koudelka learns that she needs to let people into her life, instead of just spirits. Edward realizes that his sense of adventure was built on a foundation of selfishness. James has to begin questioning his faith, due to overwhelming evidence that the church carried out horrific acts of evil in God’s name. Through the vile hellhole that is Nemeton Monastery, they each come to terms with themselves. – Justin Grandfield
That’s the beauty of Koudelka: it uses the supernatural as a magnifying lens for humanity’s own sins. The restless spirits didn’t appear out of the ether. Monsters didn’t do this. People did. They were acting out of fear of God or authority, but they were still the ones doing the deeds. People were mercilessly killed to appease the church. This is a constant throughout history. We shouldn’t look away, or we risk allowing the violence and death to continue unabated. I’d highly recommend playing Koudelka, because it’s a wonderfully somber adventure that points out the need for self-reflection and change.
Minecraft: The Broken Script
I had a stray thought the other day: If the towels in my bathroom suddenly changed color without me seeing how, would that scare me? It’s a benign enough action. I’m not attached to the moss green towels in my bathroom or anything, but they are my towels. They’re the ones I chose to hang there and for them to suddenly turn crimson red or deep sea blue would probably warrant some deep paranoia.
For me, the horror of a poltergeist isn’t in the notion of the undead, or even the feeling of being watched, it’s in the loss of control. Your home is where you have a say in what goes on, and now you have none because a specter supersedes your ability. The Broken Script is a horror mod for Minecraft that taps into this fear deeply. It’s a slow burn where you play as normal, but every now and again something weird will happen. Blocks you placed will move when you’re not looking, crude structures you didn’t make will appear, and strange noises will haunt the night. There’s a ghost in the machine, and they’re trying to scare you away so you don’t wake the eldritch thing that trapped them.
A hail mary from the spirits is to ban you from your own world, which requires delving into the game files to undo. While in the files you may find a world that’s not yours. It’s from an older version of Minecraft, the one the ghosts played on as kids before they grew into very different adults and their frustration at being unable to go back to simpler times when Minecraft was fun allowed something demonic to rip them apart.
And that’s the true crux of The Broken Script. The terror of a poltergeist and the terror of growing older are the same. It’s the loss of control that turns into bitter toxic nostalgia. One day you had moss green towels in your bathroom, the next day they’re a different color and the time when you had moss green towels was very long ago and the person you were then is never coming back.
And that’s scary as Hell. – Sean Murphy
Arizona Sunshine
Action-horror is usually an oxymoron. It is difficult at best to maintain a properly horrific atmosphere when your character is an unstoppable killing machine. There are exceptions and workarounds, of course; you are in no actual danger at any point in Silent Hill 2, but the game’s atmosphere is so consistently oppressive that you would still feel unnerved and insecure if James was padlocked inside a Gundam. Nothing is an absolute.
Having said that, I’ve found that it’s more common in action-horror for the horror to leak through at unpredictable intervals, some of which may not have been intended by the creators. For my money, those moments are why you show up. They’re the memorable human beats amidst the bloodshed, which can put some meaning and resonance into what might otherwise be a summer festival of gore effects.
Vertigo Games’ Arizona Sunshine is a boldly plotless VR zombie shooter. You play as a nameless, faceless survivor who’s been alone for a long time, post-outbreak. One afternoon, he’s drawn out of his hideout by an emergency radio broadcast that suggests he might not actually be the last human on Earth. Zombie shootouts ensue. It’s about 10 hours of rationing ammunition, juggling guns, New York reloads, and careful headshots. Status quo.
The part that got to me, however, wasn’t any of the tense struggles against near-impossible odds. It’s about halfway through the game, when the nameless protagonist reaches a military evacuation zone. On approach, he dares to hope that he’s about to get rescued. Instead, he enters to find the zone is not only overrun, but it’s been overrun for quite a while. There are no other survivors here. He’s still alone.
For a period after that, he snaps. It doesn’t affect him mechanically, and you can still pop zombie heads just as enthusiastically as before, but your character’s heart isn’t in it. He’s been keeping himself going with bravado and pretense for a long time, and this is the moment when that all breaks down. He’s all alone at the end of the world and there doesn’t seem to be a good reason to persist. At the same time, you’re sent into a dingy set of maintenance tunnels that are strewn with trash and visibly abandoned. The fun train has stopped dead.
This is just a downbeat before Arizona Sunshine’s endgame, and the protagonist eventually pulls himself together. Even so, it’s the part of the game that’s stuck with me the longest after clearing it, which keeps it from being a simple, violent cartoon. As fun as it is to treat the zombie apocalypse like a bloody adult playground, it’s important to remember and highlight that it’s still an apocalypse. – Thomas Wilde
Alan Wake 2
Every monster and every scare in Alan Wake 2 comes from the brain of a mediocre writer trying his hardest to write his way out of hell, and that is genius. Alan Wake (the character) is by all accounts an author for authoring’s sake; a writer doomed to write easy franchise novels while having to come to terms with his own creative shortcomings and delusions of grandeur. By itself, a novel concept, but Alan Wake 2 gives this mediocrity a stage to become real and shows that, middling or no, monsters coming out of the page are monsters nonetheless.
It’s this narrative framing that makes Alan Wake 2’s scares far more than just whatever you’re running from; there are horrible implications that the protagonist Saga has had her past totally rewritten to serve Alan’s single purpose of escape. She spends the entire game trying to solve the mystery behind a murderous cult in Bright Falls, slowly becoming more immersed in the fiction she’s been dragged into. Her life is essentially untethered from reality to serve the needs of one man she doesn’t even know at the cost of her own family and memories. I could talk about the fun use of visuals and audio to mask threats, but these come second to a game that is, at its core, about the experience of creativity.
To that end, Alan being a totally pedestrian writer is a glimmer of hope. In one of the funnier moments from The Lake House expansion, you stumble across a room literally full of automated typewriters that are all working in an attempt to harness the ability to change reality in the same way that Alan can. The parallel is obvious, and demonstrates that true fear is something that comes directly from the human condition. Alan is a pathetic protagonist who I can’t help but love dearly as he writes himself in loops to try and escape something truly horrible. He isn’t perfect, but who is? – Joe Richards
Happy Halloween from Skybox!
Skybox is worker-owned and reader-supported! If you like pieces like this, support us at www.patreon.com/skyboxcritics or ko-fi.com/skyboxcritics and help us elevate games media.
