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Summer has finally gone home for the year, and spooky season has thankfully returned once more to take its place. After months of ridiculous heat, a bit of spine-chilling horror is exactly what’s needed to move into the new season, and nothing inspires a cold shiver quite like existential dread does.
Sure,Dead Space-stylebody horror will make one look away with disgust andFNAF-stylesurprises will throw one out of their chair, but both are otherwise fleeting experiences that work up sweat more than anything else. Games that work their way into the players head and stay there, inspiring all sorts of terrible musings, those are the ones that truly make for a properly cold Halloween season. Does that sound right? If so, then these games will make the year’s best season that much better.
Fatal Frame: Mask of the Lunar Eclipse
While not as out and out scary as some of the more notable horror games out there like theOutlast,the Fatal Frame series has always gotten one thing right: its atmosphere. The locations its players are asked to explore almost don’t need the ghosts with just how…wrong they feel. Fatal Frame: Mask of the Lunar Eclipse is no exception to this despite being a remaster of Japan-only Wii exclusive.
This one puts players on Rogetsu Island and asks them to investigate its haunted locations to get to the bottom of a terrible event from its and the main characters' past. One look at its shrines, forest paths and abandoned places is enough to get one to question whether learning the truth is worth it, and their ghastly apparitions do a great job of convincing one that just going home is perhaps the best option sometimes.
More than that,Fatal Frame: Mask of the Lunar Eclipseand the rest of the series confronts its players with a particularly sad and hopeless depiction of the after life. The version of the world shown in these games offers no real rest to the departed and seems to show that the dead often get rooted to either their grave or the site of their demise. They’re turned into spirits defined by their greatest regrets and drawn to the living for want of what they no longer have: life.
Some spirits have the “fortune” of becoming other sorts of (often malevolent) entities, but most have only fleeting moments of lucidity in the presence of a living loved one to look forward to. In short,Fatal Frameshows us a version of death that is in every way a curse, one that all of the living will eventually share in. It’s no wonder these games' overall tone is somber and dreadful, and players can get caught up in it if they’re not careful. Definitely the kind of game to play during the warm light of day rather than the cold dead of night.
On the surface, Stasis seems to be a simple story of John Maracheck, a man who has found himself trapped alone on a failing space ship, “The Groomlake,” and must escape it with his family before it deteriorates entirely. Along the way he discovers the gross excesses of the Cayne Corporation and must deal with the results of its hellish experiments.
In most other games, John would be an entirely good guy and the corporation cartoonishly evil, but Stasis doesn’t quite make it that cut and dry. Instead of a mustache-twirlingly evil company made up of wholly evil people, players instead are shown something much closer to real life. John for his part is force to make terrible (arguably evil) choices in order to keep himself alive and capable of saving his family, but the focus here is on Cayne Corp.
Much of the research on the Groomlake is aimed at creating some sort of benefit for mankind, with things like greater longevity, resistance to disease, wonder drugs and stronger bodies counted among the areas of research. There’s an ongoing attempt to make super-soldiers too, but that seems to be more of a pet project for the ship’s lead scientist.
Through reports and recordings left behind by the crew, players learn that many of the staff either really believed that they were doing something good for humanity and could reluctantly excuse the human rights abuses that fueled their achievements, or they weren’t part of the division doing the evil things and had only heard terrible rumors (but never growing concerned enough to call someone though).
Nothing is truly justified, of course, but seeing that there was actual (albiet mostly bad) reasoning besides just money behind each step into the evil abyss is disconcerting. It reminds one of similar excesses perpetrated modern corporations and certain governments over the years. So many of the same justifications they use are also used in by Cayne Corp. employees, to the point that one wonders if we too won’t end up in a world with such a facility out away from public view somewhere. Stasis is a fantastical sci-fi game in the end, but the horror of its world (and how it could logically come about) hits hard all the same.
Eternal Darkness: Sanity’s Requiem
Eternal Darkness: Sanity’s Requiem has long been hailed as a true classic of the horror genre, with the reasons why being well-documented. Its most famous feature, Sanity Effects, are what put it on the map early on. Basically, as one’s current player character is exposed to more and more horrible and mind-bending things, their grip on reality starts to loosen.
This is represented by effects both visual aural, with the game routinely confronting players with spinning rooms, flickering lights, indecipherable whispers, enemies flittering in and out of existence and so on. It’ll even try to hit players where they live by faking things like game crashes and corrupted saves. It’s an ingenious feature that does a good job of keeping one off-balance. The real terror of Eternal Darkness, however, comes from the ideas driving its story more than anything else.
See, Eternal Darkness: Sanity’s Requiem follows the Lovecraftian model, positing that the relatively safe and logical world in which we all live is really just a part of the picture, a thin veneer over the real, horrible truth of reality. That it has long been manipulated by powerful, unknowable entities existing outside our realm as they battle each other for supremacy. That they, through their agents and other monstrosities, caused countless murders, some of the worst events in human history an all sorts of other evil acts to grow their power and ultimately eliminate their rival entities.
In Eternal Darkness' version of the world, there’s no such thing as safety, and horrible monstrosities are all around us, lurking just outside of our perception. Worse than that, their struggles too may ultimately be pointless in the end, rendering our reality as little more than a joke without a punchline in the grand scheme of things. Other games likeCall of CthuluandBloodbornehave explored similar themes since, but Eternal Darkness: Sanity’s Requiem still holds its own thanks just how much it commits to this idea.
Like Eternal Darkness: Sanity’s Requiem, there are a lot of gameplay reasons to like Signalis. Comparisons can be readily made to both the PS1-eraResident Evilgames andSilent Hillthanks to features like limited inventory and resources, fixed camera angles and cryptic puzzles. Indeed if one likes either source of inspiration, then they’ll likely enjoy Signalis, even though it comes with some of the old clunkiness games of the era were infamous for. Its relatively short runtime, music and layered presentation all also help to support repeated playthroughs. That said, though, it’s the ideas at play in Signalis that keep it lingering in one’s mind.
Where Fatal Frame and Eternal Darkness offer disquieting takes on the real world,Signalisfocuses more on dreams and how they can impact reality. Much like an actual dream, Signalis starts off in a setting that seems real. It’s a different kind of place than normal, and a terrible one at that, but it all seems to follow the kind of logic that a “real” place should. Rooms have obvious functions, enemies “die,” there’s documentation for the location (the S-23 Sierpinsky mining facility in this case) that cements it in the game’s universe. In other words, it’s as believable and normal as any place from one’s dreams would be.
As events proceed, though, that consistency begins to degrade. Enemies don’t stay dead, walls are covered with fleshy growths, doors lead to impossible places, and places that either shouldn’t exist at all or at least be there are nonetheless manifested.
As Elster, players are confronted with the very real possibility that this place they’ve been struggling through may not, in fact, be wholly real; that it might instead, at least in part, be someone else’s waking nightmare. One in which both escape and resolution may be outside Elster’s power to achieve. After all, she too may only be a part of the greater nightmare. There’s no way to be sure. though, making the situation all the more terrible.
Dreams can be terrifying things on their own, and the thought that they could intrude on reality is arguably even more so. The thing is, though, dreams already do have that power to some degree. They can affect everything from mood to demeanor to even the course of one’s life depending on how powerful they are. Who’s to say that their influence can’t be even greater, and how confident can we really be in our ability to spot it? After all, most of us can’t recognize our dreams for what they are while we’re in the midst of them.
Compared to the rest of the games here,SOMAis almost entirely focused on the ideas its trying to explore. While there are terrible ocean monstrosities roaming some of the PATHOS facility’s chambers, players are for the most part left to ponder the unfolding events and the their implications. The short version of SOMA’s setup is that players awaken as “Simon” in the PATHOS-II deep ocean research facility.
One would be tempted to think he’s one of the scientists working there, but no. This place that’s completely foreign to him, and the reason why he’s there is unknown. As he discovers more about his situation and those of the facility’s staff members, though, the reason behind his presence there quickly becomes the least of his concerns.
Of particular interest to SOMA is the nature of consciousness and “being.” What exactly makes you “you?” Maybe it’s your body. If so, then what happens if “you” are transferred to another one, and what if that body isn’t strictly human? Are you still “you?” Maybe it’s one’s experiences and memories that make them who they are, then. Okay, but what if those memories and experiences only exist as data on a hard drive? Is there a person living on that hard drive or is it just a collection of data? What if “you” are copied to another body? Is that copy also “you?”
One is tempted to call all of these questions too fantastical to be worth considering, but are they really? As AI advances, as our online selves come to represent us more and more, and as technologies like Neuralink continue to develop, the day when these sorts of ideas move from philosphical to actual may not be all that far off, whether we want it to or not.
Horror games occupy something of a unique space within the entertainment sphere. The feelings and considerations they inspire don’t necessarily feel “good,” but then that’s the point isn’t it? Horror games take the player out of their comfort zone and confronts them with things that they’d normally rather not confront.
They’re a chance for us to more directly face the sorts of things that inspire dread, be it a supernatural force, a monstrous enemy, a potential future or even just our own lack of understanding as human beings. It is, all of it, something from outside our normal day to day, and October is (for one reason or another) the best time of year to explore it!
