Spooky Games 6: Hellseeker

Spooky Games 6 has ended! Scroll down past the big list for my final thoughts on this month of horrors!

Thousands of spooky games haunt the pages of Steam’s store, and the time has come once again for us to gather and turn our grim gaze upon them. I have in my possession a list of 31 horrific, terrifying, or otherwise spooky titles, and just as I have done for the past five years, I shall review them over the course of October. One game a day, one review per game. Such is our way, for we have such sights to show you.

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New reviews will be posted here every day at 8am PDT, barring unnatural circumstances. Many have already been streamed on our Twitch channel, with more coming every Wednesday at 9pm PDT. And there may yet be more horror to be had, as we continue exploring the original Spooky Games series and revisit titles like Amnesia and Lone Survivor on stream. If you’re here for more than just words about horror, make sure to tune in.

Oh, and I should mention that two of this month’s games have been selected by our readers. Every month over on our Patreon page we run nominations and votes to allow readers like you to pick games for me to review. For Spooktober we’ll be covering A Place for the Unwilling and The Light Keeps Us Safe. You do not need to be a Patron to nominate or vote, but if you’d like to contribute even just a dollar every month, that money goes towards getting games like these to review.

Now, then… Enough talk! The true horror begins tomorrow at 8am!

 

1. Apsulov: End of Gods

2. Conarium

3. TAMASHII

4. Apparition

5. Secrets of the Maw (DLC)

6. Bad Dream: Coma

7. They Breathe

8. The Final Station

9. Love, Sam

10. Pacify

11. Return of the Obra Dinn

12. Silver Chains

13. Bad Dream: Fever

14. DISTRAINT 2

15. Pamali: Indonesian Folklore Horror

16. Tormentum – Dark Sorrow

17. The Light Keeps Us Safe

18. Kalaban

19. Verde Station

20. Evil

21. Stygian: Reign of the Old Ones

22. Watch This!

23. The Darkside Detective

24. REDO!

25. Lost in Vivo

26. Chernobylite

27. Lust for Darkness

28. Scanner Sombre

29. The Padre

30. The Town of Light

31. Sunless Skies

 

We’ve arrived at the end of our long, spooky journey, but what do we have to show for it? Here’s how all the games we’ve covered this month stack up.

The Top Three

There were three games this month that proved to be absolutely exceptional in what they set out to do, enough so that I think anyone would be happy giving them a shot. Return of the Obra Dinn is well-known for its incredible puzzle mechanics and fantastic story woven straight through them, but Apsulov is no less deserving of praise for bringing fresh new themes to traditional indie horror, along with some fun gameplay mechanics. And Verde Station does so much with its compact design that everyone should give this one-hour free game a chance.

The Good Creeps

We had a wide variety of genres to pick from for good games this year, even under the horror umbrella. For walking-sim-style spooks there was Conarium, Love, Sam, Lost in Vivo, and The Town of Light. Point-and-clicks were represented by DISTRAINT 2, Tormentum, The Darkside Detective, and The Padre. For side-scrollers and platformers, we had TAMASHII, the Secrets of the Maw DLC for the also-solid Little Nightmares, They Breathe, The Final Station, and REDO! Finally, we even had a grand RPG in the form of Stygian: Reign of the Old Ones which I’m still playing, it’s quite engrossing.

The Conditional Creeps

There’s always going to be horror titles that are tough to recommend, not because they’re outright bad but because they miss the mark in some way. Most of them this time are because they’re yet incomplete, like Pamali and Chernobylite, or because they feel incomplete, like The Light Keeps Us Safe and Scanner Sombre. Bad Dream: Coma is just a point-and-click that doesn’t quite engage as much as it should, and honestly Sunless Skies is going to be a good game for most interested parties but just didn’t do it for me.

The Bad Creeps

A lot of the horror genre is just plain bad, either because developers don’t know what they’re doing or want to do something immensely inadvisable. Apparition, Pacify, Silver Chains, and Kalaban fall on the former side, being games that wouldn’t really be bad if they were more competently made. The others were just bad ideas from the start, with Bad Dream: Fever losing what little worked about Coma, Watch This! being a dumb Russian meme game, and Lust for Darkness deciding the scariest thing about eldritch pleasure demons is their dildo collection.

The Worst Possible Creep Imaginable

It’s been actual years since I’ve reviewed a game this bad, but Evil is everything wrong with indie horror compressed into an ugly no-effort Unreal Engine package. Literally nothing in this game works the way it should, from the scripting, scares, and story to the level design, lighting, and basic interaction. I don’t want to discourage anyone from creating but this is clearly someone’s very first attempt at making a game, and it should have stayed on their hard drive as an object lesson for future projects instead of ending up on a storefront for actual money.

So there it is, all spooks sorted and accounted for! I’d like to thank everyone for coming out and joining me for another romp through the occasionally wonderful and always terrifying world of indie horror. Hopefully you found some new titles to tickle your fight-or-flight instincts, or at least a review or two that was entertaining to read. If you’d like to support my work you can always contribute to our Patreon which helps fund this website and a lot of the games I cover, or subscribe to our Twitch channel if you enjoy watching these titles played live. As always, whether you’re a supporter, reader, or just happened to wander by, I’m glad you’re here and I hope you enjoy what you’ve found.

Happy Halloween, and stay spooky out there!