Six Unknown Horrors for Hallowe’en

By Lewis Denby

That time of year has rolled around again, folks: the fateful evening on which hordes of screaming children descend on our doorsteps, demanding baskets of filthy, sugary sweets, or the right to smash your windows in with a big pile of bricks.

You could be nice to them.  You could stock up and smother them in as many enamel-destroying treats as they can take.  But, of course, we wouldn’t advise it.  What you should do, as prescribed by Dr. Resolution Magazine, is save their poor iccle teeth by disconnecting your doorbell, closing the curtains, and sitting down to play a whole host of spooky videogames.

Still, it wouldn’t do for us to be normal, and to recommend such irrefutable classics as Silent Hill, Resident Evil, Alone in the Dark, System Shock 2, FEAR and suchlike.  Heck no.  We’re a little more esoteric than that.

Fear comes from the unknown.  But we’re all familiar with those games.  So here, fine readers, is a list of the lesser known games you should be getting your terrifying kicks from this Hallowe’en.  They’re brutal, frightening, disturbing… they’re the Unknown Horrors of Hallowe’en 2009.

//Penumbra
A survival-horror-adventure-physics-puzzler genre mashup, Penumbra is a delightfully spooky romp through an abandoned facility in coldest Greenland.

In search of your missing father, you get lost in the snow and take shelter in a mine shaft, only for the whole bloody thing to come tumbling down behind you.

With no option other than to press onwards, you uncover a multitude of dark, twisted tales, a cacophony of screeching, terrifying beasts, and a variety of environmental brain-teasers to overcome.

Developed by independent studio Frictional Games, it’s certainly a little rough around the edges.  It doesn’t look all that hot, the story’s not exactly the most inspired, and occasional typos dot the subtitles.

But its omnipresent, panicky tension, coupled with some particularly clever puzzles, means that everything slots into place to create a frightening episodic release.  With an innovative control mechanism – in which you manipulate objects by using your mouse pointer as a hand, pulling open doors and swinging hammers at beastly baddies – it’s a fair bit unique to boot.  Just don’t bother with the final, tacked-on episode.  It all gets a bit rubbish at that point.

//Pathologic
Pathologic’s become something of a cult classic since its release in 2005.  Its English language release the following year was met with mixed reception, due to its – um – not really being in the English language.  A butchered translation job meant the game was often completely impenetrable, its gameplay seeming increasingly alien the further West it ventured.

Don’t let that put you off.  There’s a reason it won plenty of awards in its native Russia.  A survival horror in the truest sense of the term, Pathologic is all about staying alive in a harsh environment: an isolated town out on the Steppe, forcefully placed under quarantine after a deadly disease sweeps its population.

Playing as one of three healers (the other two appearing as NPCs in your game), you must juggle the town’s collapsing economy, stave off bandits, and investigate the mysterious illness in an obtuse action-RPG-adventure that remains oddly beautiful despite a dated engine.

Its combat is horrible, the game filled with irritating glitches.  But one of the most fascinating and deeply disturbing stories in the history of the medium keeps Pathologic engrossing and exhausting in equal measure.  You’ll probably hate Pathologic at times – but then again, you’re probably supposed to.

//Dear Esther
Dear Esther might not be jump-out-of-your-seat terrifying, but there’s an oppressive atmosphere of discomfort underpinning the whole game.  An abstract Half-Life 2 mod developed as part of a research project, Dear Esther sees your unnamed character exploring a mist-covered island off the coast of Scotland, while an unseen narrator reads excerpts of letters to a woman named Esther.

The story told by these letters often descends into incomprehensible gibberish, but it’s supported by suggestions that their writer had succumbed to madness in the process of penning them.  A fatal crash on an English motorway merges with Biblical stories, complex chemical equations are scrawled onto the surface of the rock, and a ghostly silhouette seems to be following you around wherever you venture.

It’s probably most closely related to the adventure genre, yet there aren’t really any tangible puzzle sequences.  Indeed, you don’t really do anything, except wander around the island and uncover new snippets of the semi-randomised narrative.  But it does contain one huge, overriding set of conundrums that you’ll be itching to solve: who are you?  How did you get to this place?  Does the island, and its eccentric set of characters, even exist at all?

It all builds to a tantalising yet stomach-thumpingly melancholic conclusion that’s left plenty of players utterly speechless.

Splendidly, the amateur creation is set to receive a complete overhaul by professional level designer Robert Briscoe, who has worked on high-profile titles such as Mirror’s Edge.  If the screenshots and videos on his development blog are anything to go by, Dear Esther’s already impressive atmosphere may well skyrocket upon the remake’s release.

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