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RightClickSaveAs
Mar 1, 2001

Tiny animals under glass... Smaller than sand...


For $1.20 Scanner Sombre is an absolute steal if you're into that kind of game. The devs make good stuff, I don't think this one ever sold that well, which is a shame because it's a really neat concept. The game is absolutely beautiful and uniquely presented. Definitely missed horror opportunities but it's really more of an exploration/mystery game.

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sigher
Apr 22, 2008

My guiding Moonlight...



I finished up Scanner Sombre today and I love the art style, not bad for under $2.

Dreadwroth2
Feb 28, 2019

by Cyrano4747
We can't stop here, this is penisbat country!
For anyone who has Dying Light, looks like theres a L4Dead event going on.

Dreadwroth2 fucked around with this message at 13:21 on Oct 29, 2019

Spudd
Nov 27, 2007

Protect children from "Safe Schools" social engineering. Shame!

I kinda wish I could do Halloween event stuff whenever I wanted so many games are doing Halloween events this year but they're all timed so it'd be impossible to play them all.

Too Shy Guy
Jun 14, 2003


I have destroyed more of your kind than I can count.



These last three games I have for Spooktober are all a bit off-beat, with today's being the joker of the group.

:ohno: SPOOKY GAMES 6: Hellseeker :ohno:

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



The true strength of the indie gaming scene is the power to take risks. Major releases from major publishers tend to chart along the same course in terms of themes and mechanics, but indies can do whatever they want to produce the game of their dreams. The Padre, for example, combines classic Alone in the Dark-style adventuring with some absolutely goofy humor and an incredibly unique art style. The result is a game you won’t see the likes of anywhere else, and despite the drawbacks of its indie roots it’s one that you’re bound to have a good time with.

Father Santino is the church’s most powerful weapon in the war against sin and evil. A grizzled priest handy with both a rosary and a Ruger alike, he has been summoned to a mysterious mansion to investigate the equally mysterious disappearance of a prominent cardinal. No doubt evil is afoot in this accursed abode, but what the padre doesn’t know is how close to home this evil can hit. Tempted into misdeeds by grim circumstances, our holy hero must struggle to save not only the cardinal but himself, and rid this maleficent manor of that darkness that plagues it.

Alone in the Dark is going to be the obvious inspiration for this one, a point-and-click adventure playing out one haunted hallway at a time. You control the titular padre with left click, clicking on ground to move, items to pick up, and curiosities to examine. Rooms and hallways are always smallish dioramas to explore from fixed camera angles, hearkening back hard to the early 3D adventures of yesteryear. The puzzles and interactions themselves don’t ever reach the confusion of those classics but there are clever and confounding challenges alike, with a few puzzles I breezed past without fully knowing why and a few others that gave me trouble because the solution was so finicky.

I won’t lie, there’s a layer of indie jank here that’s going to be hard for some folks to get past. The most obvious place this comes up is in combat, where shambling creatures will rush up on Santino, and you’ll have to dispatch them with either melee attacks or gunfire. Controls for both are fairly intuitive; hold left mouse to charge up melee swings and release to strike, and hold right mouse to aim and wait as your aim focuses on the enemy. The execution, however, is a bit of a mess with enemies easily able to close distance and stun you out of attacks, and some swings and shots seemingly missing for no reason. I haven’t run into ammo scarcity issues yet but I could see it leading to frustration if a lot of shots go inexplicably wide.

Another thing The Padre likes to do in its indie revelry is kill you for random reasons. There are several puzzles in the game where making the wrong choice or doing something out of sequence just ends with you dead. The first ghost I had to deal with in the game has a very unclear method of dispatching, and their attack instantly kills you if you don’t know what to do. There’s even a joke item in the game that kills you if you use it, and now that I’ve said it you’ll probably know which one, and it might not even be the only one. This is coupled with a system of what seems to be limited revivals, though the death count is extremely generous and there are many ways to reset it. Still, death in The Padre feels like something that wasn’t very well thought-out and doesn’t add much to the experience.

If you can look past these issues, though, the game itself is a real gem thanks to its presentation. I never would have picked high-resolution voxels for any game but it gives The Padre a very unique look, and seems to work with the modernized-retro feel they seem to want. The voice acting and writing deserve very special mention too, because Santino’s voice is absolutely incredible in its gravel and timber, and it’s used to deliver all kinds of silly one-liners, references, and wry observations. Honestly the game is worth experiencing just for his performance, strange game design choices be damned. It’s not as polished or structured as more mainstream adventures, but The Padre has all the heart and humor needed to stand out as a fine indie title.

Cardiovorax
Jun 5, 2011

I mean, if you're a successful actress and you go out of the house in a skirt and without underwear, knowing that paparazzi are just waiting for opportunities like this and that it has happened many times before, then there's really nobody you can blame for it but yourself.
The Padre is a game that I keep recommending to people here and yes, it is that good and funny.

Too Shy Guy
Jun 14, 2003


I have destroyed more of your kind than I can count.



Glad to know it's not just me, then! I always have to wonder with games like that, because given the right circumstances I can overlook a lot of jank.

Today's game is a good one, but only if you're up for tackling very real traumas instead of spooky monsters.

:ohno: SPOOKY GAMES 6: Hellseeker :ohno:

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



A great weakness of the horror genre in gaming is the use of spooky asylums and mental illness as a crutch for the setting. It’s all too easy to pull from the sordid history of sanitariums for an easy backdrop to a game, the real-world equivalent of building it around another haunted house or murderous ghost. All too rare are the titles that take a more grounded, respectful look at the horrors of mental health treatment throughout history, and The Town of Light is a pretty good example of why that is. In creating a game that derives its scares from the very real abuses and mistreatment of patients, the developers have unleashed a horror that strikes at the heartstrings for how believable it all is.

In 1938, a young girl in Italy is institutionalized at a sanitarium for unwell women. Far from healing her, the experiences she suffers at that place only heap new traumas atop of old. These tragic events unfold for you as you explore the ruins of the hospital in the present, retracing the girl’s steps through these accursed halls. As you uncover documents and photographs of her time there, a picture of horrific conditions and treatment begins to form, and through that you must forge a path for her to put these demons to rest. The journey will take you beyond the walls of the sanitarium, and indeed the confines of the present, as you learn more and more about the life of this poor, poor woman.

There are no jumpscares, no monsters, and no supernatural elements to The Town of Light. This is a story grounded in history, taken from the records and reports of sordid dealings within the mental health professions of the past. Wandering the asylum will introduce you to antiquated procedures, callous supervision, and shocking betrayals of trust that have happened countless times to actual patients in the past. Along with that, the game does its best to express the girl’s mental state through flashbacks, dialog, and visual effects as these traumas are revisited in the present. It’s a very different experience from the vast majority of indie horror out there, and it’s at once very effective and deeply effecting, in ways you might not welcome from a video game.

Make no mistake, the events that unfold here include physical, mental, and sexual abuse. You’re going to be dealing with rape, neglect, barbarous medical procedures, and more if you want to get through this game. I normally rail against the inclusion of rape in video games because it is almost never treated maturely but it is here, forming a central and very real origin point for the traumas dealt with in the story. Even without sensationalist presentation these story beats are hard to get through emotionally, and make the majority of the game a string of tragedies to overcome. It’s hard to call this a “fun” video game, in much the same way films like Schindler’s List or Requiem for a Dream are not “fun” movies, though they are still important parts of the medium.

Extending from this is the gameplay itself, which offers very little outside of exploring the sanitarium and its surroundings. There’s no inventory and no puzzles to speak of, and your character is always very clear about what you need to do and where you need to go to reach the next part of the story. This is a pure walking simulator, and I use that term without a hint of prejudice, because that’s what this is and it does it as well as any of them. You’ll find plenty of notes and photographs which flesh out the setting and history, so there’s good reason to take detours and comb through rooms carefully. And it’s clear the areas were modeled on real-world structures, so there’s a sense of space and logic to them that you don’t always get in indie horror games.

Really the only question that stands between you and The Town of Light is, are you up for this? It’s one of the few psychological horror games that’s going to hit you in your real-world sensibilities, and it’s going to hit hard with all the weight of historical abuses and traumas. Not everyone’s going to want to sit down to that for an evening of gaming, and that’s fine. If you are, it’s an expertly-made experience with immersive graphics, solid sound design, and a clear flow to both story and progression. My only technical gripe is that it only saves at the beginning of chapters, but chapters are only five to ten minutes long so you’re never too far from a save. This is a bitter pill to swallow, but it’s one of the few games to treat its themes with respect they deserve, and for that it deserves to be experienced if you’ve got the stomach for it.

Glagha
Oct 13, 2008

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA
AAAAAAaaAAAaaAAaAA
AAAAAAAaAAAAAaaAAA
AAAA
AaAAaaA
AAaaAAAAaaaAAAAAAA
AaaAaaAAAaaaaaAA

Anyone have recommendations on good lovecraftian horror games? Like, not specifically mythos related or anything, but just games that deal in cosmic horror type stuff. Strong preference for an emphasis on cults and forbidden knowledge and unknowable things and the like.

Pseudohog
Apr 4, 2007

Glagha posted:

Anyone have recommendations on good lovecraftian horror games? Like, not specifically mythos related or anything, but just games that deal in cosmic horror type stuff. Strong preference for an emphasis on cults and forbidden knowledge and unknowable things and the like.

The writing and lore of Cultist Simulator is pretty good and deals with that kind of thing, the only issue is whether you enjoy the plate-spinning card mechanics.
Personally I bounced hard off the gameplay and just ended up reading an LP to get the lore and flavour.

Bogart
Apr 12, 2010

by VideoGames
And also if you enjoy giving money to a serial abuser. :v:

Glagha
Oct 13, 2008

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA
AAAAAAaaAAAaaAAaAA
AAAAAAAaAAAAAaaAAA
AAAA
AaAAaaA
AAaaAAAAaaaAAAAAAA
AaaAaaAAAaaaaaAA

I already played the poo poo out of cultist simulator before all that came out which really dampened my urge to keep playing it, but I already paid for the DLC so :shrug:. But yeah that's exactly the sort of tone I was looking for.

Too Shy Guy
Jun 14, 2003


I have destroyed more of your kind than I can count.



The Last Door is the absolute pinnacle of cosmic horror in gaming for me. It builds its own mythos and tells a story about a shadowy cult from both inside and out, and takes the story just far enough over its two seasons that you can get a real sense of the forces at work.

dogstile
May 1, 2012

fucking clocks
how do they work?
Cultist simulator is just not that good of a game, i found but that was mostly because it was doing just that. Spinning plates. Wasn't particularly engaging imo

mysterious frankie
Jan 11, 2009

This displeases Dev- ..van. Shut up.

dogstile posted:

Cultist simulator is just not that good of a game, i found but that was mostly because it was doing just that. Spinning plates. Wasn't particularly engaging imo

This. I tried several times to get into it and bounced hard off of the mechanics. The lore could be brilliant but it’s a timer based game with a game space that quickly gets cluttered and also the affected writing style becomes grating quickly.

Ineffiable
Feb 16, 2008

Some say that his politics are terrifying, and that he once punched a horse to the ground...


Outlast 2 will be a Playstation plus title for November so we might have some peopl come in having just played it.

Skyscraper
Oct 1, 2004

Hurry Up, We're Dreaming



mysterious frankie posted:

This. I tried several times to get into it and bounced hard off of the mechanics. The lore could be brilliant but it’s a timer based game with a game space that quickly gets cluttered and also the affected writing style becomes grating quickly.

I'm not a smart person and this post will not do anything to convince anyone otherwise but I honestly liked the mechanics of Endgame: Singularity way more and would've been pleased if Cultist Sim had aped it just a bit.

Morpheus
Apr 18, 2008

My favourite little monsters

Too Shy Guy posted:

The Last Door is the absolute pinnacle of cosmic horror in gaming for me. It builds its own mythos and tells a story about a shadowy cult from both inside and out, and takes the story just far enough over its two seasons that you can get a real sense of the forces at work.

Yeah, going to second this. Wasn't really expecting too much coming into it, but the game builds upon itself over and over again, introducing this sense of dread where there are forces beyond your understanding at work. Though the first season is relatively mundane, it still goes into some unreal stuff that really brings into question the nature of what you're pursuing, before diving into it in the second season, but not in a 'time to shoot cthulhu with my shotgun' way.

al-azad
May 28, 2009



I want to recommend Now You See, a Texas Chainsaw Massacre rear end point and click adventure game. Reminds me a lot of those old Flash escape room horror games you'd find on Newgrounds. Its minimalistic design and lack of player friendly features like a hint system result in a lot of pixel hunts and obtuse puzzles but I haven't found it too taxing as a casual adventure/hidden object game player. Pretty, some fun scares, and decently well designed by a two person team I believe. Recommended if you liked Scratches.

Cardiovorax
Jun 5, 2011

I mean, if you're a successful actress and you go out of the house in a skirt and without underwear, knowing that paparazzi are just waiting for opportunities like this and that it has happened many times before, then there's really nobody you can blame for it but yourself.
A demo for Carrion was just released. It's an alpha, but there's about half an hour of playable game already.

The Saddest Rhino
Apr 29, 2009

Put it all together.
Solve the world.
One conversation at a time.



looks like the PSPlus free games for Nov 2019 includes Outlast 2 if you want to read some really torrid letters of women wanting to gently caress satan

Danger - Octopus!
Apr 20, 2008


Nap Ghost

Glagha posted:

Anyone have recommendations on good lovecraftian horror games? Like, not specifically mythos related or anything, but just games that deal in cosmic horror type stuff. Strong preference for an emphasis on cults and forbidden knowledge and unknowable things and the like.

The Shrouded Isle

Dreadwroth2
Feb 28, 2019

by Cyrano4747
Sea Salt has you playing as literally Dagon, directing your horde of unearthly horrors to exact revenge on a town that stopped feeding you sacrifices. Also, you get to summon crabs.

Too Shy Guy
Jun 14, 2003


I have destroyed more of your kind than I can count.



Here it is, the final game of Spooktober, on this, the spookerest of days. And it's a really good one, but one that I've struggled to enjoy.

:ohno: SPOOKY GAMES 6: Hellseeker :ohno:

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



Sunless Sea was an inspiring game in many ways, but one of those chief inspirations seemed to be frustration. For all it did to immerse players in a dark, threatening world of intense storytelling, it also pushed back with ponderous gameplay between stories and brutal roguelike mechanics. Sunless Skies was a chance not just to build out the Fallen London setting further, but also build an experience more inviting for players to get lost in the antediluvian madness found there. And they succeeded, at least on the first count. Sunless Skies is indeed a huge step forward from the gameplay of Sunless Sea, but I can’t help but feel that something in the heart of it was left behind.

In a possible future for the subterranean burg of London, the fully-functional Dawn Machine allows the city to transcend its terrestrial bonds and join the stars in the sky. Drifting among the mysterious features of the unexplored heavens, Londoners begin spreading out to seek their riches. They discover a way to mine hours, actual units of time, from the cosmos, empowering the risen Victorian Empire to spread even further. But all is not well in the vast void of space, with stars dying and tensions rising between the empire and the far-flung settlers. In the distant High Wilderness, a botched expedition leaves the captain of your locomotive dying, her mysterious cargo in your possession, and the ship yours to command. From this auspicious beginning you must forge your own destiny, siding with factions in a coming war and exploring the reaches of known space for secrets that mortals were surely never meant to know.

Sunless Skies plays much the same way Sea did, setting you up with a basic locomotive (spaceships here are train engines, just roll with it) and enough supplies to get back to the main port for the region. The High Wilderness is a vast disc of space to explore, filled with human outposts, curious settlements, resource deposits, ruins of older things, and frankly inexplicable phenomena. While tooling around the cosmos you can send out scouts to search for points of interest, giving you some direction in the sea of stars. You’ll run afoul of hostile captains and worse out here, but the combat is much improved with more active weapons, the ability to dodge your vessel left or right, and a heat mechanic to manage your shooting and maneuvering with. It feels much more active and more like a game than Sunless Sea ever did, which is good for gameplay but is a knife that cuts both ways, as we’ll discuss later.

Ports are where most of the stories will unfold, whether in human settlements taking on jobs or surveying an untouched ruin of indeterminate origin. In these places you get a menu of story options, from browsing the shops and speaking with locals to taking part in dark rituals and communing with the stars. Stories will offer you choices based on your character’s stats and the likelihood of succeeding in them, and many of the options you encounter early on will be gated behind steep challenges. Fortunately there are plenty of simple jobs to take on at first, travelling afar and writing port reports, ferrying passengers around, and so on. There’s a trading angle here that was mostly absent from Sunless Sea, where ports will produce specific goods and others will issue lucrative contracts for filling them, so building up your cash reserves is a far more straightforward process here than before. It’s also easier to stay flush in fuel and supplies in Sunless Skies, thanks both to availability of items and much more generous timers for both while out and about.

On all these points, Sunless Skies is a clear improvement over Sunless Sea. Moving around the map is faster and more engaging, gaining resources is easier, and figuring out what to do is less of a mystery. But just an hour into this one, I could feel it losing its grip on me. There’s something lost in the evolution, perhaps several somethings, and part of what’s lost is what kept me invested in Sunless Sea despite the gameplay flaws. The setting feels like a big factor in this, trading the murky, solemn deeps of the subterranean seas for bright, star-filled expanses. Despite existing in the same universe of cosmic, unfathomable horrors, Sunless Skies lacks the same tension of motoring through an archipelago of spider silk or sailing above the bodies of massive, sunken figures. The black seas are scary in a way the shimmering void isn’t, and it shouldn’t be this way because space can be even scarier. But you don’t get that sense of isolation, that sense of being one step away from death by drowning or hard vacuum, and it’s in part because of the gameplay improvements that make traveling the stars so much more welcoming.

I hate to admit it, but the slow pace and shortages of Sunless Sea actually did a lot to bolster its atmosphere. I felt alone and threatened in my little boat in ways that I never do in my shimmering space locomotive. The mechanics are only part of the story, though, and I’m confident that sensation of impending doom could have been preserved with the improved gameplay of Sunless Skies. But then you have the starry backdrops, the featureless expanses of asteroids and land masses, and the short trips between ports that make the High Wilderness feel so much less alien than the vast underground oceans. And though I’ve only experienced a portion of the stories in the game, none of them seem to match the ominous portends and cosmic ramifications as the tales spun in Sunless Sea. The writing overall feels more concise and less challenging, which again might be concessions for a better gameplay experience but take a lot out of the atmosphere and setting that’s so elemental to Fallen London.

Would I still recommend Sunless Skies? Absolutely, because these issues I raise feel much more like personal preferences that aren’t going to dissuade folks looking for a creepy romp across the stars that plays well. It’s one of those corner cases where I think I actually prefer the inferior game because of the specific trappings that appeal to me, but I can still recognize what the superior game gets right. I only want to temper expectations for anyone who approaches the Fallen London games from the same angle I do. But for everyone else, this one looks great, sounds amazing, and does a wonderful job of making long treks through the void more engaging than long trips at sea.


I'll be back in a few hours with a proper wrap-up for the month.

unpacked robinhood
Feb 18, 2013

by Fluffdaddy
Here's Soma for free. I can't tell if it's a worldwide offer

Kokoro Wish
Jul 23, 2007

Post? What post? Oh wow.
I had nothing to do with THAT.

Too Shy Guy posted:

Here it is, the final game of Spooktober, on this, the spookerest of days. And it's a really good one, but one that I've struggled to enjoy.

31. Sunless Skies


Here's another review for people still interested:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KazOQBDQhRg

Too Shy Guy
Jun 14, 2003


I have destroyed more of your kind than I can count.



:ohno: SPOOKY GAMES 6: Hellseeker: HELLSOUGHT :ohno:

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

Return of the Obra Dinn
Apsulov: End of Gods
Verde Station

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

Conarium
TAMASHII
Secrets of the Maw (DLC)
They Breathe
The Final Station
Love, Sam
DISTRAINT 2
Tormentum - Dark Sorrow
Stygian: Reign of the Old Ones
The Darkside Detective
REDO!
Lost in Vivo
The Padre
The Town of Light

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

Bad Dream: Coma
Pamali: Indonesian Folklore Horror
The Light Keeps Us Safe
Chernobylite
Scanner Sombre
Sunless Skies

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

Apparition
Pacify
Silver Chains
Bad Dream: Fever
Kalaban
Watch This!
Lust for Darkness

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

Evil

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 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 really liked these reviews, I have a website with a truly embarrassing number of them for you to peruse. As always, I’m glad you’re here and I hope you enjoy what you’ve found.

Happy Halloween, and stay spooky out there!

unpacked robinhood
Feb 18, 2013

by Fluffdaddy
Thank you for all the posts too shy guy

Knight
Dec 23, 2000

SPACE-A-HOLIC
Taco Defender
Thanks, Too Shy Guy. Looking forward to next year's spooky reviews

Pseudohog
Apr 4, 2007
Another good selection of reviews, sterling work Too Shy Guy! I played through Verde Station the other week, definitely a good use of a couple of hours.
Although it keeps reminding me that we're still waiting for Routine...

Blockhouse
Sep 7, 2014

You Win!
https://store.steampowered.com/app/1179080/FAITH_The_Unholy_Trinity/

Faith Chapter III announced, coming out on Steam in a collection with I and II, and there's a demo for it as well

Yardbomb
Jul 11, 2011

What's with the eh... bretonnian dance, sir?

Blockhouse posted:

https://store.steampowered.com/app/1179080/FAITH_The_Unholy_Trinity/

Faith Chapter III announced, coming out on Steam in a collection with I and II, and there's a demo for it as well

That rules, the Faith games have been really cool.

Morpheus
Apr 18, 2008

My favourite little monsters
Played Verde Station and some of Scanner Sombre with friends tonight. Really interesting games. Was not expecting the stuff in Verde Station, was quite surprised by the game as a whole. Scanner Sombre is cool, too, there's something I find oddly relaxing about painting the walls...didn't finish it though, only a quarter of the way through. There are parts that are....less relaxing.

Discendo Vox
Mar 21, 2013

This does not make sense when, again, aggregate indicia also indicate improvements. The belief that things are worse is false. It remains false.
many thanks, Too Shy Guy!

Dissapointed Owl
Jan 30, 2008

You wrote me a letter,
and this is how it went:
I appreciate the effort, Too Shy Guy.

Danknificent
Nov 20, 2015

Jinkies! Looks like we've got a mystery on our hands.
Yes, thank you Too Shy Guy

Meallan
Feb 3, 2017
Coming in to also thank Shy Guy. I ended up trying some games from your list, and liked what I tried, so I always appreciate your 31 days of horror games series.

Piss Witch
Oct 23, 2005

As always it's a high point of this thread, Too Shy Guy.

Also picked up Apsulov because of your posts and having a ruddy good time with it.

Bogart
Apr 12, 2010

by VideoGames
My dark secret is that I backed Lust for Darkness. It looked cool at the time. :negative:

CharlestonJew
Jul 7, 2011

Illegal Hen

Bogart posted:

My dark secret is that I backed Lust for Darkness. It looked cool at the time. :negative:

was there a backer reward tier for naming the lust dimension

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CharlestonJew
Jul 7, 2011

Illegal Hen
$300 backer reward: get a 3D model of your dick put into the game as a dildo

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