Terrifying games to play this Halloween
With his jangling nerves settled for a brief moment, Murray Robertson puts the console aside and gives us his thoughts on which new games may well keep you awake long into the night
With so many games embracing the horror genre, it’s no surprise to see a glut of them being released around Halloween. This year, we finally get the ultimate seasonal crossover with Halloween: The Game. It follows in the bloody footsteps of similar film-to-game adaptations such as The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, Evil Dead and Friday The 13th. Those games are/were all asymmetrical survival horrors in the vein of genre king Dead By Daylight. In each case (typically), one player assumes the role of a supernatural villain while the remaining participants must use their wits to hide and eventually escape. This winning format has unfortunately been burdened by a curse: while The Texas Chain Saw Massacre continues to attract moderate crowds, the other two games are no longer available to buy (in the case of Friday The 13th, the multiplayer is defunct due to licensing issues with the film’s creators). Dead By Daylight, meanwhile, continues to thrive.
Hoping to dodge that fate, Halloween: The Game was smartly released ahead of time in order to build a sizeable player base before the hype inevitably fades after 31 October. In its multiplayer mode (always the focus of these games), one person takes on the role of Michael Myers while the others assume the identities of a group of teenagers (including Jamie Lee Curtis’ Laurie Strode). The game neatly adopts the dark, autumnal 1978 atmosphere of the fictional Illinois town of Haddonfield, using the film’s iconography and writer/director/composer John Carpenter’s unsettling synth score to make it feel like a proper homage.
Another classic horror franchise comes to consoles in the guise of Clive Barker’s Hellraiser: Revival, a bloody first-person survival horror written in collaboration with the author and inspired by the first two films. Townfall is the latest entry in the long-running Silent Hill franchise, this time cutely set in a fictional Scottish town based on St Monans in Fife. Control Resonant is an action roleplaying sequel to 2019’s Control which, despite its brutalist sci-fi styling, is just as much an out-and-out horror. And Castlevania: Belmont’s Curse is the 26th release in the colourful, stylised gothic horror series.
Also hoping to carve out a piece of the Halloween action is End Of Abyss, an atmospheric third-person mystery set in an abandoned underground facility populated by ‘twisted horrors’, while Tenebris Somnia is a wonderfully odd combination of point-and-click pixel-art adventure and full-motion video. Its striking collision of styles from opposite ends of the graphical spectrum makes for one of the more intriguing propositions this Halloween. And it would be churlish not to mention one of this year’s greatest games, horror or otherwise. Released in February, Resident Evil Requiem is a graphically stunning, terrifying and atmospheric game featuring two playable protagonists: one focused on horror, the other on action. Its opening hours provide some of the most heart-racing moments in recent years.