horrorgameanalysis

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YOU SHOULD PLAY: PATHOLOGIC 2

“Now we come to the time… when deities begin to die.”– Pathologic 2, Ice Pick Lodge 2019Yes, you should play Pathologic 2. Go on. Go! Do it. Right now!Okay fine, wait, there has to be a more dignified and intelligent way to start this article. Okay, here, how about this: Pathologic 2 is a game of such incredible sophistication that the narratives of other, “regular” video games pale in…

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You Should Play: Paratopic

Paratopic (Arbitrary Metric 2018) is a game I recently revisited, and it is even better than I remembered. I think it acts as a fairly landmark title in retrospect, considering the prevalence of PSX-style horror games. But Paratopic stands head and shoulders over a lot of other horror games that have a much simpler structure. In some ways it reminds me of Mouthwashing (Wrong Organ 2024), in that…

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YOU SHOULD PLAY: JUDGMENT

I am facing death. The end of my healthbar is cracked and broken from previous brutal fights, and now my opponents are surrounding me from all sides, and I know that I have already reached my limit. Detective Yagami’s pockets are not as deep as Kiryu’s – thus, I am running low on healing items, and everything seems hopeless. Well, not quite hopeless – I just have to execute this flawlessly.So I…

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YOU SHOULD PLAY: my body — a Wunderkammer

“My dry, stainless, odorless child body had shivered all over and metamorphosed into a stinking, sweating, oozing hulk sprouting hair. I found myself disgusting.” This is just one of the many wonderful, revelatory sentences contained within my body — a Wunderkammer (hereafter referred to as my body). The writing is beautiful in its mundanity, and the way it relishes in sensory detail elevates…

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YOU SHOULD PLAY: FEAR & HUNGER

The following contains some spoilers for Fear & Hunger (Haverinen 2018).I’ve spent a while ranting and raving about just how good Fear & Hunger 2: Termina (Haverinen 2022) is, while mostly neglecting the original game in my writing. I think that’s because Termina is the more interesting and more complex game, in most regards. There’s a feeling of uniqueness to the sequel’s setting, and a…

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PLAYING PROJECT ZERO: FIRST IMPRESSIONS

I’ve never played a Project Zero (otherwise known more commonly as Fatal Frame) game before, and I figured, hey, 2025, why not make a start? So I broke out the old backwards compatible PS3, dusted it off, committed various blood sacrifice rituals in order to get it to work, and divined how long I could push the old machine by sorting through the entrails of my broken DualShock 3 controller (it…

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YOU SHOULD PLAY: IN STARS AND TIME

It is rare for a game to do any one of the following four things:a) it is rare that a game can make me laugh out loud more than onceb) it is rare that a game can make cry more than oncec) it is rare that a game can make me despaird) it is rare that a game can be a mirror to myself.In Stars and Time (insertdisc5 2023) is one of those rare games that does all of these things.In Stars and Time is a…

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You Should Play: Umfend

If there is one maxim that exists about horror games that were made in the wake of Hideo Kojima’s haunted hit P.T. (7780s Studio / Kojima Productions 2014), it is there will be a section about cycling through suburbia, where you are pursued by a ghost from the past. P.T.’s influence on the game world is deserved, of course. It’s a scary game with a novel idea, even if it doesn’t look it now. The…

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Clock Tower 3 is a Bizarrely Enjoyable Mess

The following article spoils Clock Tower 3 (Sunsoft 2003).The old tunnels could be anywhere in the world. Stalagmites gather moisture and water runs fast through old pipes. As you flee from the ax-wielding maniac covered in body paint, you wonder how you ended up here, playing a game that’s twenty-two years old and much less scary than you supposed it would be. Aren’t old things supposed to take…

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You Should Play: Mothered

Mothered is weird, even by the standards of the games that I tend to recommend. It calls itself a “horror roleplaying game” – it is not particularly scary in a traditional sense, and the “roleplaying” is much looser than you might come to expect. But how do you bill a game about playing a broken person?I am fortunately pretty healthy most of the time, but earlier this week I took my first proper…

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You Should Play: Daemonologie

In the furthest, deepest parts of the Scottish Highlands, the hills are a rough, sun-kissed green, and the sea roars with tremulous joy. Sheep cavort like faeries and demons among the ancient rocks, and the wind carries their voices to heaven. But not today.Today, a cart winds its way through a thick black paste, down a small dirt trail, to a village almost forgotten by the world, by time. There…

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You Should Play: Barbotine

Video games are bodily, and they can be viscerally impactful. Our heart can race while playing them. We can get goosebumps. We can even get headaches or aching muscles from playing games for too long. Our eyes dilate, our fingers move, our hands get clammy – all these things and more are results of playing video games. Barbotine is a game all about the body, sometimes indirectly or even…

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2025 Roadmap

One more post to sign the year off with, and another roadmap for the year ahead! To see last year’s roadmap, you can look here. I know that 2024 has been rocky, in that I didn’t manage to live up to all of my expectations.I initially forecasted six video essays, but I was only able to produce two. Admittedly, they were each just over two hours long, but I still felt I should have produced a…

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2024 End of Year Reflection - Game Six

How does one define “life-changing”? How can we track the impact that fiction can have on one’s life? It varies, of course, but I feel like if it inspires you to create something yourself, then it must be pretty damn good. Pathologic inspired me to create this whole enterprise. This game has inspired me to begin development in earnest on my own game next year, to channel my interests in horror…

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2024 End of Year Reflection - Game Five

This next game was one that almost slipped through the cracks. I played it on a whim, not really expecting it to be that good, but I was blown away by how solid an experience it was. It’s not life-changing. It didn’t conjure “I will obsess over this game” vibes like Doki Doki or Silent Hill 2 did (or the last game on my list). But it did make me sit up and go, “okay, now this is a good game”. I…

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2024 End of Year Reflection - Game Four

This next game was one I was waiting for. I anticipated it and dreaded it in equal measure. It had a lot to live up to, of course – to my mind, this was the only big budget game I was really that excited in. All year, I wanted to play it, and otherwise only really had eyes for older games, or smaller games. This was the big one. This was the one to prove whether big horror releases were still for…

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2024 End of Year Reflection - Game Three

I wrote about this next game fairly recently already, but I am swiftly becoming more and more of a fan the longer I think about it. There’s so much to recommend about the narrative experience of this game. Someone asked me whether I’d played it, and I replied that indeed I had, but I don’t think I sold it as well as it deserved. I’m always reluctant to tell people to “just watch a playthrough”…