TechStuff Plays Spooky Games

on some games. Some of them are really well known. In fact, most of them are well known. A few of them are a little more obscure. And it's all about bringing out the season of spookiness and interactive ways. And we'll be looking back at some classic titles, not just stuff that's come out recently. It will be a mix. One thing I want to acknowledge early on is that there has been an incredible boom in horror games from

the indie developers sphere. Sure we've all heard about, you know, Silent Hill and Resident Evil games and that sort of thing, but there's some really great independent titles out there, some that take a very bare bones approach to game design and yet are no less effective than Triple A titles that are in the horror space, and I think it's a good idea to give that that scene a shout out to that end. Part of what inspired me to do this episode is Sean McLaughlin, who's better known as

Jack Septic. I not not that he needs a shout out from me, because he is way more of a superstar than I will ever be, but more to the point, he will often play horror games on his YouTube channel, and he tends to have a really positive take on the titles he lazy. He's really good at picking out the things and games that he thinks happen to be really effective or interesting, even for games that might at

first gland seems fairly primitive and simplistic. So shout out to that guy, because this content is really entertaining and like I said, largely positive, so I really like his stuff. The horror genre is, of course enormous, and it covers a wide range of games and game styles, from action oriented first person shooters to slower paced mysteries and everything in between. So one of the things I'm really going to do is eliminate a bunch of stuff with one

fell swoop. I'm mostly interested in talking about games that create a sense of unease or dread, you know, stuff that actually initiates the fear response as you play the game. So games like Splatter House, which have an enormous amount of violence and gore, don't really make the cut because those types of games are more about blood and guts and more about disgust than creating a sense of dread.

And I'm also not really counting jump scares because while jump scares can be effective in startling you, afterward you usually just kind of shake it off and you don't really think about it ever again. Right, So, if you see a movie that's guy Ala jump scares in it, you might, you know, scream as you watch the film for the first time, but you're not really going to

be thinking about that very much afterward. Whereas if you see a movie that really disturbs you and stays with you, that's the sort of stuff you talk about later on, maybe years later. Really effective horror stays with you long afterwards. So I'm going to focus on games that I feel had enough style and presentation to achieve that, which thankfully makes this list a lot shorter than it would be otherwise.

But even so, covering every horror game that manages to make the player feel uneasy would require multiple podcast episodes, even if we just restricted the discussion to games that I have personally played, let alone games in the space. So this is more of a highlights episode of some important and influential titles. So if your favorite spooky game doesn't make an appearance, I'm not omitting it on purpose. It's just that I'm not allowed to release a twelve

hour long episode. And I invite everybody who has a favorite scary game to let me know about it, send me a message on Twitter, text stuff, hsw All right, let's get into it, shall we. To start off, let's chat about some of the very, very very early games in the horror genre that I don't think anyone would ever find scary. I don't think anyone thought it was scary when they came out, but they do help create some of the common features that would be found in

future horror games. One of the earliest came out back in two for the Sinclair z X eighty one home computer system, one that's not widely known here in the United States. This game was called three D Monster Maze. It was designed by J. K. Gray and Malcolm Evans, and the game puts the player in a simple, low resolution three D maze. It's from a first person perspective as you navigate a maze. There is only one exit in the maze and the mazes layout is random from

play through to play through. And to complicate matters, the maze is also home to a Tarrannosaurus rex, which is intent upon making you it's lunch, so your job is to navigate the maze and avoid the t rex. As you moved through the maze, you will see one of several messages that indicate what the t rex is doing at that moment. So, for example, the message rex lies in wait is the best message you could see. It just means that the tarnostaurce rex is dormant. It's not

actively hunting you. If you see a message that says footsteps approaching, that's not so great. It means the t rex is not too far away. It is possibly coming at you, but it is way worse if you happen to see a message that starts with run, as it means the t rex is actively pursuing you. Now you can outrun the t Rex. You actually move faster than it does. However, if you hit a dead end in

the maze, it's curtains for you. The graphics are really simple, but you could argue that the urgency of the messages makes all the difference, creating the stress needed to push the game into you know, that's slightly creepy territory. It's not scary outright, but it creates that sense of urgency and it reinforces that, which in turn gets a response from the player. The Atari twenty six hundred console had a few horror titles, though I think using the word

horror is a stretch. One of these was Haunted House, a game in which you play as are of eyeballs floating around an extremely simple series of rooms, trying to find and then escape with and earn while avoiding a ghost. It's not at all scary. The ghost is just a little cartoon ghost that comes after you. There are a couple of other cartoon monsters you can encounter, but it does stress that your only recourse when encountering the ghost was to run. You couldn't fight the ghost really, uh.

You could pick up items that would let you survive for a second before the ghost could get you. But really it was about avoiding and escaping the ghost, and that would become a staple of horror games and years to come, the idea that you can't necessarily confront the enemy's head on. And I actually owned this game. I didn't remember that I had owned it. When I was looking at titles, I was like, I should look into this, and as I looked into it, I thought, oh, wait

a minute, that's what that was. I had that game. Also on the Atari twenty sire were several games that would be tie ins with existing horror movie franchises or just horror movies in general, and that marks the beginning of a long history of video games and film and sometimes TV that I would call it checkered. There are a lot of games out there that tie into these franchises that just are not very good. So this was really an effort to tap into horror movie junkies and

get them to buy these games. The primitive graphics and sound of a twent games weren't likely to give anyone a hint of the Heebie GPS, however, so your mileage may very A company called Wizard Video Games actually made a couple of these. One was a tie in with the Texas Chainsaw Massacre, sometimes referred to as the the precursor to the modern slasher film, and another one cashed in on Halloween, the John Carpenter horror movie. Both games were a bit more violent and graphic than standard at

games at the time. In some cases, you could argue all more than a bit graphic, but the low resolution graphics on screen didn't exactly translate to real chills. Like that, you were seeing the depiction of violence on screen, but it wasn't at all realistic. It was very blocky and low rez. You might even look at games like these as part of the trend that contributed to the video

game market crashing right around that time. Even so, while the technology wasn't really sophisticated enough to elicit scares, it was obvious the game developers saw opportunity in the horror space. Now, from the early nineteen eighties, we can skip over a lot.

We had the big video game crash of Night three Slash, which was so big that it spilled over a bit into the computer game world, though really it was primarily the console market that was devastated the most Nintendo would bring that back with the introduction of the Famicom A gave the Nintendo Entertainment System UH. That system was famous for bringing back console gaming, introducing the world to stuff like Super Mario Brothers and more, but it also introduced

some horror games. One game you could find on the NES as well as PC systems was Maniac Mansion from Lucas Arts. It published in nine now. This was a point and click adventure style game in which the player could control a couple of different characters as they tried to rescue a woman who had been captured by a mad scientist. The game had a lot of zany humor in it, which was a hallmark of Lucas Arts games.

They also made stuff like the Monkey Island series. But the game also had some tense moments that featured perma death. So you would play as a protagonist who could bring two friends along. You had a selection of six potential friends. You could take two of them with you. However, if those friends should croak they stayed dead. They there would actually be a little tombstone with the character's name out front, so the choice of characters would determine how the game

would play out. And you couldn't just win the game with one set of friends then play through it the exact same way using different sets of friends. It actually would change the game. The game also featured multiple endings, so there were several interesting ideas here that would find their way into future horror games. Though I would argue that Maniac Mentioned itself is not really a scary game.

It's just that it helped cement certain game features that would be later used to great effect in horror games of the future, like the Atari twidd The NES also had several horror movie tie in titles. You know. They had Bram Stoker's Dracula. There was a Nightmare in Elm Street game. There was a Friday the Thirteenth game which gave us Purple Jason Jason Vorhees the antagonist in the Friday of the Thirteenth movies, at least after the first one.

First first film was his mother, Mama Vorhees. But again, the low resolution graphics of the NES and the eight bit era never really struck me as particularly effective when it came to creating scares. There was a Japanese game called Sweet Home that managed to be pretty darn creepy and allegedly. I mean it would actually serve as inspiration for a future game franchise that I'll chat about a little later. But I never really got to play Sweet Home myself. I've seen video of it, but I've never

played it. It was never officially released outside of Japan. You could track down an import of it and with an adapter play it, but you know, you had to go through a lot of effort in order to get your hands on a copy outside of Japan. The ne Nes also saw the first entry of the Castlevania series

of games. Now, while Castlevania was more of a horror themed platformer and would become one half of the games that would create the Metro metroid Vania genre of platformers, Metroid being the other one, and the Castlevania series would eventually spawn some titles the gamers said, we're legitimately unsettling. Now. I've only played a little bit of Castlevania games, so I can't really comment on this from a personal perspective.

To me, it was just sort of a horror themed platform or not something that I found particularly scary, But I've had limited experience with it. This era around the Nintendo Entertainment System nineteen eighties era would see game developers come up with ideas that would be incorporated into more sophisticated games a few years later down the road. And while there were a few titles that might have had some interesting moments in them, for the most part they

were still pretty tame. But those gameplay elements would really become important later on. While graphics and sound design would do a lot to set the atmosphere for a game, it would be those gameplay elements that can turn something that's just you know, gruesome or shocking into an experience that is more powerful than that. So let's jump ahead a couple more years in a company called info Grames

would help launch a new genre. The game that did this was called Alone in the Dark, which would spawn a series of games. Now. The Guinness Book of World Records names Alone in the Dark as the first three D survival horror game. So in the game, you explore a mansion this would become a common theme in horror games, and you try to solve puzzles while you avoid or

defeat supernatural enemies like ghosts and monsters. And I think it might be a good idea to talk about some of the hallmarks of the survival horror genre or sub genre, and what makes those games tike So As the name suggests, the survival horror genre largely leans on the player trying to keep their character alive for the duration of the game despite numerous threats, and the horror part plays in this too obvious lee and that the threats tend to

be scary and unsettling and often supernatural in nature. And a lot of games the player controls the character or entity that gets more powerful as the game progresses. You know, other other subgenres, this is very typical. Right you play the game, your character gets more capable, more powerful, gets more equipment or more abilities. They might level up, they might receive upgrades, and fighting enemies is a common game feature for lots of other subgenres, but this is not

the case with survival horror games in general. Typically, in survival horror games, it is far more common to stress the need for stealth and agility rather than combat. Many survival horror games have no combat systems at all, which require the player to try and out maneuver or avoid enemies.

You might spend more time hiding in a locker or a closet or sweet squeezing through like a tight spot, and music and sound effects can really help to create tense moments, increasing the sense of urgency as you try to evade the beings that wish to do you harm. By removing the ability to fight back against your opponents, these games also remove the player's sense of comfort and complacency. You can't count on your lead gaming skills to pull off a quick headshot or get you out of a

tight spot like that. Danger may lurk around any corner, and so you're on high alert whenever the game is in motion, as a different type of emotional experience than playing something like Doom, which you know falls into the horror game genre but clearly does not qualify as a survival horror game. Some survival horror games do allow you to fight back at least a little bit, but these games may have other mechanics built in so that fighting

back isn't necessarily the best option. Survival horror games might be incredibly stingy with stuff like ammunition and health kits, for example, so every shot counts and it's much better to not get hit rather than have to figure out how do you deal with the fact that you've been injured.

And these same games may make enemies particularly difficult to take down, so you have both limited ammunition and if you do choose to engage with an enemy, you may have to shoot it multiple times just to make sure it's not gonna keep coming after you. Another frequent game mechanic is giving items durability ratings, so using items decreases their durability, and eventually they need to be repaired or they just playing break and you've got to get a

new one. By metering out stuff like weapons and tools and health kits and AMMO, the game forces players to make tough and often quick decisions while trying to survive. Some games that fall into the survival horror genre play with us a little bit more than others. There are the Resident Evil games that we'll talk about more later, especially the later Resident Evil games up to about part seven, where you start finding more weapons and AMMO and options,

and these games become a lot more action oriented. They turned into more of a shooter game rather than a survival horror game. Now, to be clear, there's nothing wrong with that. You know, an action horror game is a legitimate type of genre. Doom is definitely an action horror first person shooter, and there are doom titles that are fantastic,

but it is a different kind of experience. Alone in the Dark had pre rendered backgrounds, but the character you controlled was a three dimensional figure made up of polygons. So this was right around the age that that computer characters were emerging from being these little two dimensional sketches into more three dimensional characters. One nice thing about the game is that you could choose to play either as male or female. Now this was in the early nineties.

This was a big step, although of course there was still a lack of representation for non binary type characters. Either way. The character needs to escape a mansion another common thread, and must defeat enemies and or solve puzzles in order to do so. Part of the game is actually linear, that means you have to go through a specific sequence to progress through the game, but other parts of the game are nonlinear, where you can tackle different

challenges in whatever order you prefer. Some of the elements would find their ways into other types of horror games as well, and Alone in the Dark would become an important foundational title for the horror game genre. When we come back, we'll look at some more influential horror themed games and some real standouts in the subgenre. But first,

let's take a quick break. In Virgin Interactive Entertainment published a game called The Seventh Guest, a horror themed mystery in which you solve various puzzles laid out within a mansion, of course, and this game also featured clips of f

m V a k a full motion video. So the PC world at the time was going through a revolution as CD ROM drives became available for the first time and made it possible for software developers to create more sophisticated games that wouldn't just fit on a floppy disk or they would require way too many floppy disks. So within the game you would get these little video sequences

of actual live action video played in the game. Actors in costume would appear occasionally as sort of ghostly visions to deliver lines in a way that reminds me of some of the worst community theater I have ever seen. I loved it, but yeah, if you have never played The Seventh Guest, go to YouTube, do a search for it. Watch some of those FMV sequences. They are ad and gloriously so there are actually videos of the full game

up on YouTube. If you don't have the patients to solve all those puzzles yourself, and I have to be honest here, at least a couple of the puzzles in the game are pretty lame. Some of them are fun and challenging, others aren't not good. The plot combines elements of weird fantasy, murder mysteries, and supernatural horror. In a sequel titled The Eleventh Hour published, but that didn't quite fair as well as its predecessor among both the critics

and the public. Also in Sierra released Fantasmagoria, a horror game that looked at the FMV that was in The Seventh Guest and The Eleventh Hour and said, but what if we did that more. Fantasmagoria has a couple of dozen characters, all played by different actors, has tons of full motion video. It required seven CDs to hold all the datum, which was excess at the time. The game has some pretty grizzly imagery, even in the intro of the game, which has not one but two waking up

from a nightmare sequences back to back spoiler alert. The style of game is a point and click adventure game, but instead of controlling like a little animated polygonal figure, your choices guided an actress named Victoria Morsel who was playing a protagonist named Adrienne Delaney. So if you clicked on a door, Victoria as Adrienne would walk to the

door and try to open it. So I imagine it must have taken a very long time to capture all the different variations of actions that could potentially play out in the game. As for the plot of the game, Adrienne is a novelist who along with her husband Don, has purchased an old mansion since the theme yet and the mansion's previous owner was a stage magician with a dark lee passed involving multiple marriages and the mysterious death

of his wives. Adrianne encounters various supernatural puzzles and different kind of supernatural happenings in the house as the story plays out. It ultimately leads to a showdown with a demon, as these things are wont to do. The game was a pretty big hit, and it was a definite step up on the production side from games like The Seventh Guest, though a lot of reviews criticized that the puzzles in

Phantasmagoria were a little too simple. One of the reasons I wanted to bring up this trio of games, in particular Seventh Guests, Eleventh Hour and Phantasmagoria is because they were almost an overcorrection of some of the issues I had with earlier horror games. Right, the earliest horror games were so simplistic, and the primitive graphics and the really you know, low fi sound design acted as detriments to the effect of the game. They weren't going to make

you feel scared, really, they weren't really unsettling. The era of the CD ROM gave game developers the ability to use actual video of real human beings in their games, so there was no need to create realistic graphics if you can replace graphics with actual video. But video is

inherently limited, especially for interactive purposes. You can't shoot every possible variation of an action that a player might think about while they're playing a game, so by necessity, a lot of stuff a player might try would need to result in a kind of message like I can't do that or that doesn't work, because otherwise you would need a nearly limitless amount of time to shoot video, and

that's just not practical. So what was needed were games that could be atmospheric and have that level of production value along with effective gameplay. And these were pieces that were slow he starting to come together. I argue that fm V games can be very entertaining, they can be good games, but it's very hard to make effective gameplay with them because you can't control live video the way

you can a they generated video game character. Another point and click game that came out in was an expansion on a story that had been written by Harlan Nelson in the nineteen sixties, and it shares the same title as that story, I have no Mouth and I must scream now. In this story, the antagonist is not a vengeful spirit, it's not a demon. It's a malicious artificial

intelligent construct. The game features five characters, each of whom has a narrative within the game, and players are free to make ethical or unethical choices as they play, and making more ethical choices increases the odds that you'll be able to defeat the AI at the end. But if you want to be a total jerk face, you totally can be. And also not all the choices are obvious some of them are more dilemmas, and a lot of

the scenarios that the player faces are beyond grim. That's really heavy, dark stuff, and it puts the player in a position to deal with tough subject matter, which is putting it lightly so before warned if you want to try that game out. In we got the first of the Resident Evil games, which was originally called bio Hazard Um, which would come back later in the series. It was

originally developed for the Sony PlayStation. Resident Evil grew out of one of the earlier games that I mentioned, Sweet Home, the one that was a Japanese exclusive, and it follows a special Task Force officer. The player could have their choice of either playing Jill Valentine or Chris Redfield. The officer, whichever one they choose, is attempting to track down members of an earlier investigation team while also fighting off monsters you know, like zombies and stuff. The gameplay is a

third person perspective game with a static camera angle. The camera angle would change as you would move from scene to scene, so it might be you know, kind of up and to the side in one room and you move to another room and suddenly the orientation of the cameras totally different, which also changes the way your character controls.

It made controlling the character a little clunky. They're also limited resources in the game, so managing those resources like ammunition and healing items becomes an important part of the player's strategy, and there are puzzles to solve as the game progresses. And while Alone in the Dark would introduce the elements of survival horror back in, I think it's safe to say that Resident Evil was the game that defined the characteristics of survival horror in nineteen. Resident Evil

would spawn numerous sequels. By the time you get to Resident Evil four, which is, you know, actually the sixth game in the series, I think I might even be missing one or two. There are a lot of games in the Resident Evil series, not all of them have

numbers on them. But by that time, the games were becoming a little more action oriented and the game's sold well, but the critical reaction was mixed, with a lot of critics saying the games that kind of abandoned suspense and fear in favor of shoot him up action gameplay elements. So by the time we get to two thousand seventeen, five years after Resident Evil six, had come out, we got Resident Evil seven, and boy howdy did they jump back into the horror elements of the series for that one.

The game is scaled down, it's it's in a again kind of like in a big house environment. For the most part, it's played from a first person perspective, which was very different from earlier Resident Evil games, and it is incredibly horrific. Only is there some really brutal graphic

violence in that game. The threat to your character survival is one that persists throughout the gameplay, and it drives the action of the game, and it creates that sense of tension and suspense and fear that makes it such a an intense experience. In the game, you play as Ethan Winters and he's looking for his wife in a big, old, creepy house, because of course that's what happens. But I don't mean to reduce this down to well worn horror tropes.

The game is largely effective and for those who played it with the PS four VR headset, it could get really scary, throwing you into the action. Resideval isn't the only franchise to have had a huge impact on the horror genre of games, however, the Konami series. Silent Hill, which launched in is another really important one. Like Residenteval,

Silent Hill uses a third person perspe active. The game also made clever use of fog effects to limit visibility, not just to create an oppressive, claustrophobic atmosphere, but also to compensate for the relatively limited processing power of consoles at the time. They couldn't render graphics out as far as the eye could see, so using fog meant you couldn't see all the stuff around you, so your view was limited, and that made it easier for the consoles

to process all those graphics. In the game, players control a character called Harry Mason as he tries to find his daughter who is lost in a town called Silent Hill. That town also inconveniently has a whole bunch of monsters in it to make things more intense. Harry isn't exactly an athlete, so sprinting wears him out pretty quickly. He's not an expert with weapons, so he's not a very good fighter. The lore of this game series gets pretty bonkers.

It's actually really challenging to explain. But like Resident Eval, the Silent Hill series would cement certain tropes within the survival horror genre. The game features numerous sequels and one very special entry that will get to towards the end of this episode. That's just a teaser for what's to come. But before we get to that, we have some other

important games to talk about. One of those was Eternal Darkness Sanity's Requiem, which came out back in two thousand two for the Nintendo GameCube and was developed by a

company called Silicon Nights. Now. When it comes to the Nintendo consoles in general, the GameCube tends to fall into a category along with the we you as a system that doesn't get a whole lot of love, but this particular title was one that definitely got a lot of attention, largely for its creative manipulation of the player and the

variation between different playthroughs of the game. Eternal Darkness is a horror game that has multiple potential endings based on your choices, and if you complete the game whichever ending you pursue, you know through your choices that one becomes unavailable to you in future playthroughs unless you finish all the other potential endings of the game, so it forces you to try different stuff. I don't think I had seen a game that had a similar ambition before Eternal Darkness.

I'm sure there are others out there, but I don't know about them. As for gameplay, it's another third person perspective horror themed puzzle game, but the player doesn't control

just a single protagonist. There's actually twelve characters that the player will control at different points within the game, and characters are in different locations and also different moments in history, So you jump around from character to character as you complete chapters in this game, and thus you go from location to location and time period to time period depending on who you're playing, and each character has their own

individual narrative finish. On top of all of this, you've got the sanity meter, something that would end up being a big thing in games to come. So as your character encounters spooky stuff in the game, the sanity meter starts to go down, and as it does so odd things start to happen within the game. And Eternal Darkness wouldn't just have weird things happen to your character. Some of that weird stuff got really met up. For example, you might be playing the game and suddenly, as your

sanity dips. You see an indicator on your TV screen that says the volume on your television is being turned down. But here's the thing, it wasn't really going down at all. The game was just creating a graphic that makes it look like the volume is going down. So it would be one of those things were like, why is that happening?

What's what's affecting the television? If you were to turn the volume up on your TV, it would boost the volume up to a much louder level so that when the audio of the game comes back in full four or so, it would be extra loud. Or maybe the game would suddenly boot you into the menu at a critical moment, or cause your controls to reverse so now left is right and right is left, or it would block your vision just as an enemy was closing in on you, or make everything upside down in the room.

So playing the game in the dark was quite the experience, as you would have moments wondering if you had imagined something weird in the game or if it was really happening and the game was messing with you. On top of all that, the game featured forces that were kind of love crafty and in nature HP Lovecraft's work, which is fitting because many of lovecraft stories revolve around characters

losing their sanity when they're confronted by otherworldly horrors. This is one of those games that I played back when I had a GameCube, though I don't think I ever actually finished the game. It was a little too sprawling, and the multiple storylines made it a little challenging to follow what was going on with the lot, and also I wasn't really good at it. Controlling characters from a third person perspective with cameras that are not fully controllable

is challenging to me. But I definitely appreciated how this game was thinking outside the box and even outside the console in an effort to make gamers uneasy as they played the game. The game got overwhelmingly positive critical reception, and it frequently makes the list of best scary games even today. And this was a game that came out in two thousand two. Now. Originally the team had planned on making a sequel, but various setbacks derailed that until

in the Silicon Nights development company filed for bankruptcy. Some of the company members would go on to create a new company called Precursor Games. They continued the effort to try and bring an Eternal Darkness sequel out, including a couple of failed crowdfunding campaigns. The first of those campaigns was cut short for some truly awful dark reasons. I'm not going to go into it here because the story is out there online if you really want to learn more.

But it's it's terrible. It's a horrible story, and real world horror isn't fun the way video game horror is, so I'm leaving it alone. But the long and short of it is that to date, there has been no sequel to Eternal Darkness. We'll have to hold out hope. When we come back, I'll chat about some other notable games, including a recent one that I really dig But first

let's take another quick break. The mid two thousands saw more of an emphasis on action horror and first person shooters and the more atmospheric psychological stuff that I would like to talk about now. There worth a couple of exceptions, but a lot of the focus was really on twitch skills and jump scares. You know, just not my bag man. One exception to this was a game called Call of Cathulu dar Corners of the Earth. While Eternal Darkness was

inspired by Lovecraftian weird fiction. Call of Cathul Whu is a direct reference to Lovecraft's work. Cathul Who is a Lovecraftian creation. The game is a first person shooter stealth horror game. Like survival horror games, resources are few and far between, and in many cases the player would find out that trying to avoid a confrontation and hide is

a much better option than going in guns blazing. Like Eternal Darkness, encountering supernatural creatures and witnessing supernatural events decreases the player character's sanity, which leads to the game producing weird sounds and graphics or changing the controls slightly, and it's a pretty disconcerting thing to experience. On top of that, this game is grim y'all, but a pretty effective horror experience. And this game came out for the Xbox in two

thousand five and for Windows the following year. Now we're going to skip ahead a few years. For the next push forward, I want to talk about the game Amnesia The Dark Descent. Console gamers might think of this as a game that debuted in that would be for the PS four fans, or maybe even eighteen for people who played on Xbox One, but the game originally came out way back in twenty ten for Windows. In this game, you play as a character who has you know, amnesia.

He remembers his name. It happens to be Daniel, but dang if he can't remember, why the heck He's in the middle of a spooky old castle that's filled with monsters. Daniel is also scared of the dark, so of course the castle is mostly in the dark, and so being in the dark affects Daniel's sanity, tapping back into that mechanic we saw with Eternal Darkness and Call of Cthulhu. As a result, the game starts messing with you as

you're Santa the Dips. Daniel also isn't a fighter, so your options fall into evade or avoid enemies, so it really turns us into a stealth horror game with the added complication that you can't be in the dark too

long or you start to lose your sanity. The need to be stealthy forces players to really rely on what they can see and hear within the games, so they have to really start to pay attention to what's going on, and the graphics and the sound design both leverage this to create an immersive, unsettling experience, and it makes Amnesia and early example of a subgenre of horror games that become really popular over the following years. This sort of

psychological horror that that really affects the player. Other games that would follow a similar path would include Soma, Outlast, Layers of Fear, Visage, and tons more. One game experience that that kind of follows that path is the Silent Hill tie end that I mentioned earlier that I kind of teased, and I'm of course talking about PT, which

stands for Playable Teaser. This wasn't really a fully fledged game, so much as a hint at the sort of thing that gamers were supposed to expect in what ended up being an unfinished and unreleased game in the Silent Hills series. This one was to be called Silent Hills, and the game was a collaboration between game developer Hideo Kajima and his production company Kajima Productions and U, and also the film director Guillermo del Toro. This was released back in

August two thousand four team for the PlayStation four. Now, the story around the game is arguably just as fascinating as the game experiences itself. So first let's talk about

the game. PT is played from a first person perspective, and as the game starts, the player character awake, ends on a concrete floor in a bar room, and the only thing in the room is a single door leading out, and when you open that door, you see a hallway that has a ninety degree turn at the right at the very end of the hallway, the hall continues past a door on the right, which is closed at the beginning, and then a little further on you have a foyer

where you've got the front door of the home on your left side. You can also have a view up to the upper level of the house, but you can't get to it, and then there's another door at the end of the hallway down a couple of steps. So going through the door at the end puts you right back at the beginning of the hallway, revealing that the player is caught in some sort of space time loop. But things change as you go through the loop and

interact with stuff. Sometimes the door on that right side, which had been closed on that first run through, will be slightly open. Sometimes you'll see writing on the walls. Sometimes other creepy stuff happens, and so on. As you walk through this hall, various spooky things happen. A radio plays a news report about a grizzly series of murders that you can't help but worry that you are involved

with somehow. You will hear the sounds of a baby crying from the bathroom that's that door on the right that was closed at the beginning. You might hear sounds of a woman's sobbing. You better hope you don't see her. You might see some pretty disturbing stuff as you walk through the hallways. It's really a challenging and mysterious experience, and you're trying to put things together. You don't have

the full picture, so it's really really complex. If you are successful in completing the sequences, you eventually arrive at a screen that reveals that the game is actually a playable teaser for Silent Hills, and the puzzles were tricky enough that people weren't entirely sure what it was that triggered that end the screen. So if this is the first you've heard about PET, I recommend checking out video

is on YouTube of the game. The walkthroughs are really interesting, particularly for those that have gamers who captured their own reactions via webcam. Those reactions are priceless. But what if you wanted to play the game yourself. Well, that's where things get a little tricky. Remember when I said the

Silent Hill game was unfinished and unreleased. Well, Konami, the company that published PT in the Silent Hill series, made the decision to cancel the game and subsequently removed PT from the PlayStation Network in the spring of t which means that if you had not installed the game to your PS four before that point, you were out of luck.

There's a whole story about Konami in general and the falling out between Konami and Hideo Kajima, but that's gonna have to wait for its own episode because it gets crazy dramatic. The removal of PT lead to a lot of fans hurling criticisms, which is a polite weight to put it towards Konami. Some people attempted to make cash off the whole thing by offering up PlayStation four consoles that still had PT installed on them and tried to

make it available to the highest bidder. A few enterprising developers tried to recreate the experience in various engines, though from what I've seen, most of those have since gone away, possibly due to Konami threatening legal action because the company still owns the intellectual property of the game series. And that is a huge shame because if you take a look at lists of the best horror video or computer games, PT constantly ranks really high on those lists, sometimes it's

number one. It was able to tap into something primal in the minds of gamers, and the repetitive gameplay actually would crank up the tension and anxiety as you were actively looking for things that might have changed since your last loop, and Lisa the Ghost could be a real terror. Her attacks on the player were the jumpiest of jump scares. But I would argue it was the tone and presentation of the game that really makes it special. Oh and when one other thing I'll say about PT, it's a

fairly short gaming experience. It is a teaser after all. Now, granted, if you can't figure out the puzzles, it'll take you a while to get through the experience, but it wasn't designed to be some sort of epic game, and I think that's part of what made it so special. Now, This might be just a bit of commentary from yours truly, but I find that some of the really big games that are out there start to show signs of padding

after a while. The truly huge, big open world games that I love, like the Red Dead Redemption series or Skyrim, it's hard to argue that they don't have a lot of fat that could be trimmed away to make a more streamlined and arguably effective experience. Not that these games are bad. I love these games, but they're so big that I mean, it's for me to even complete them. There's it, just it gets overwhelming. More is not always

better anyway, Long Live pt Now. There are so many games I wasn't able to get to in this episode, games that tap into that that that reptile part of our brains and triggers that fear response. I didn't get to chat about games like Five Nights and Freddy's, which forces you to try and pay attention to more things than you can possibly manage it a single time, and

then ends up punishing you with jump scares. Now, the jump scares themselves are just these quick bursts of being startled, but the games are actually really good at cranking up tension as you're trying your best to maintain multiple systems

at once. There are also multiplayer games, including asynchronous games like Dead by Daylight, in which one player takes on the role of essentially like an unstoppable monster or a killer, including a few that are drawn from pop culture sources like John Carr, Printers Halloween, and then the other players are playing normal people who are just trying to escape

an environment with their lives intact. There's a similar game that is more specific to the Friday than their Teeth series that does this, with one player taking on the role of Jason Vorhees and the others being the various camp counselors trying to escape Crystal Lake. There are also some multiplayer co op games that fall into the horror genre.

One recent one is Phasmaphobia, which is an early access at the Moment, and in that game, players take on the role of ghost hunters, who, using their equipment, must figure out what kind of ghost or spirit is haunting a particular location, so players have to wander around and gather evidence in order to narrow down the list of possible ghosts it could be, while also gathering additional evidence

and completing additional tasks. If they do so successfully, they're rewarded with money, which they can then spend on additional pieces of equipment, which will make future ghost hunting expeditions more effective. They can communicate with each other in game with proximity chat, meaning you can hear people who are close to you. You can also use a radio chat so you can speak even across the map, and that also allows players to interact with the ghosts in the game.

You can go to a ghost into action or communicate to them through stuff like spirit boxes or Luigi boards. It's a really cool idea, and the sound design of the game is great. It creates a really creepy experience. I actually think that the game is scariest when you can't see the ghost at all. You just hear something and you can tell it's getting closer. The ghost design, the actual graphic design, those are really creepy too, but just hearing it and not knowing where it is is

way scarier for me. Now. As for a ghost hunting out here in the real world, I feel very differently about that. I think in a video game, ghost hunting is a really cool, fun concept, but out here, well, Friday's classic episode will go into more detail about how I feel about ghost hunting I r L, so make sure you check that out on Friday. Also, if you have a favorite horror game, whether it's a big title or an independent one, something that you think is particularly

scary or effective, give me a shout on Twitter. The handle for the show is text Stuff h s W. If you just want to shout at me, my handle is at John Strickland and I'll talk to you again really soon. Text Stuff is an I Heart Radio production. For more podcasts from my Heart Radio, visit the i Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.