Tag: horror games

Il Mistero di Felina

~ Kathryn ~ Leave a comment

Il Mistero di Felina
https://spesknight.itch.io/felina

Il Mistero di Felina (The Mystery of Felina) is a free-to-play 2D narrative horror game that takes about twenty minutes to finish. The story follows Lara Lorenzi, a travel influencer who’s been invited to the small island of Felina to participate in a festival that celebrates the island’s cats.

Unfortunately for Lara, there is weirdness afoot. The island’s sheep have been dying, and there seems to be blood on the walls of the local church. In the downstairs tavern of the inn where Lara spends the night, a group of older men have gathered in a somber toast to their friend, who will be “leaving the island” soon. The young man who invited Lara to the island is awkward and sweaty, and he seems to be uncomfortably nervous about something.

Meanwhile, Lara’s been getting strange comments online, presumably about a nasty bit of drama with a fellow influencer. Though she’s picking up bad vibes from the island, Lara is in dire need of positive content, and she can’t afford to waste the opportunity.

As Lara, the player walks around the small town, enjoys the scenery, and advances the story through conversation. There’s also an optional but fun smartphone menu that allows the player to take pictures and upload them for Lara’s followers to enjoy.

You’ll almost certainly want to take pictures, because the art in this game is wonderful. The architecture is shabby yet quaint, while the interiors are filled with interesting details. The people on the island are all colorful characters, and the festival decorations are very cute yet deeply sinister.

I also appreciate the character animations. The way Lara walks around the island is well-observed, especially in relation to her character design. Later, when Lara crouches while wearing a costume in order to pass herself off as a child, her walking animation is even more artistic. There are a number of cats roaming around the island, and it’s a treat to stand still for a moment and observe their behaviors.

Il Mistero di Felina echoes with hints of classic gothic folk horror like The Wicker Man and The Shadow Over Innsmouth, and it also recalls more contemporary spooky stories like Oxenfree, Night in the Woods, and… Neko Atsume. Still, this unnerving little game is uniquely its own thing, and I would have gladly spent more time on Felina basking in the Mediterranean sunlight while picking apart the dysfunctional personalities of the island’s residents.  

The game has a convenient autosave function, but you can easily play Il Mistero di Felina in one sitting. The story is enjoyably campy but also legitimately creepy, with excellent pacing and a tidy conservation of detail. I’m a fan of the unique aesthetic, whose bright colors work brilliantly to enhance the horror. I love every indie horror game I play, but this one is something special.

I can’t resist closing this without at least one cat pun, so here you go: Il Mistero di Felina is a purrfectly spooky cautionary tale that knows exactly how to sink its claws into contemporary anxieties.

Misao

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Misao is a short 16-bit indie survival horror game originally released in 2011 and then published on Steam (here) as a remastered edition in 2024. The game is set in a high school that’s been transported to a demonic realm by the vengeful spirit of the eponymous Misao, a beautiful but quiet girl who mysteriously disappeared three months prior to the opening of the story. 

You play as a girl (or optionally as a boy, in the HD version) named Aki who suddenly hears Misao’s voice in the middle of class, asking someone to “find me.” The classroom is cloaked in darkness, an earthquake hits, and the school begins to fall apart in the aftershocks. As Aki explores the mostly abandoned building, she learns that four of her classmates were bullying Misao with the compliance of their homeroom teacher. Despite the intensity of the bullying, Misao didn’t kill herself – but someone else did.

The gameplay consists of navigating the school while collecting six objects necessary to piece together Misao’s story. There’s no set order to acquiring these items, meaning that the game starts off as somewhat confounding but gradually comes to make more sense. Once you get your bearings, what you need to do becomes fairly self-evident, but a walkthrough is recommended for players (such as myself) who might find themselves overwhelmed at first. There are several excellent guides posted to Steam, but I recommend (this one) on account of its helpful division into sections.

Like Mad Father (reviewed here), which was also published by Miscreant’s Room, Misao is essentially a haunted house simulator in which your player-character can die in dozens of delightfully gruesome ways. Thanks to a handy quicksave function, there’s no penalty for dying, and the player is encouraged to get into all sorts of trouble for the sole purpose of seeing what will happen. Aside from two short chase sequences, very little skill is needed to survive, just a bit of trial and error.

What I love about Misao is how much fun this game has with the tropes and imagery of a haunted high school. The laboratory is staffed by a mad scientist who has a chainsaw and will take advantage of any excuse to use it. The hamburgers in the cafeteria are made of unspeakable meat, and the seating area in front of the open kitchen is filthy with blood and entrails. The toilets haven’t been cleaned for a very long time, nor has the secret zombie cave under the school. The Shinto shrine in the courtyard is beautiful, but the rituals performed there are anything but.

Misao’s story mixes high school bullying and friendship drama with a mystery surrounding a twisted serial killer, and everyone gets exactly what they deserve. Still, for players who think high school kids shouldn’t be condemned to eternal damnation, Aki can rescue her classmates from their personal hells in a short epilogue. A few of the characters Aki encounters are native to the demon realm, and they’re all having the time of their lives. My favorite is the student librarian, who’s fully aware of the bloodshed surrounding her but just wants to make friends. She is a treasure.

If you’re not a completionist, Misao takes about two hours to finish, allowing the story to make an impact without testing the player’s patience through needless puzzles or gameplay challenges. The haunted high school setting is creatively rendered and a lot of fun to explore, even if the open-world structure is a bit overwhelming at the beginning.

The deaths are all creative and disturbing, but the retro graphics allow the game to feel campy instead of creepy, so much so that Misao sometimes feels more like a comedy than a horror story. I grew to feel a begrudging sort of affection for the characters, but I can’t deny that I had a huge smile on my face as I watched them get picked off – and really, good for Misao. I support her.

Dorotea

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Dorotea
https://pasquiindustry.itch.io/Dorotea

Dorotea is a spooky ten-minute narrative adventure game made in Game Boy Studio and set in the medieval castle town of Conversano in southeast Italy.

You play as Dorotea, a researcher who has been hired by a local museum to catalog the books, manuscripts, and art objects in a neglected storage room housing a collection dating from the 1600s. Upon opening and passing through a strange door at the back of the room, Dorotea finds herself transported to the medieval era, when the museum was still a convent.

Thankfully, Dorotea is intercepted by a nun before she can land herself in trouble, but she’s not entirely out of danger. The lord of the castle on the hill isn’t a good person, and there also seem to be monsters of a more literal sort in the vicinity.

Dorotea features a suspenseful (but no-penalty) chase sequence, but its horror is largely atmospheric. The game’s uncanny pixel-art insert illustrations contribute to the feeling of something being terribly amiss, as do the ghosts and monsters, but the game also explores the anxiety generated by the prospect of being trapped in the past. As much as we might like to romanticize the medieval period, the culture shock experienced by most people – especially women – would likely be atrocious.

Putting its supernatural elements aside, Dorotea dwells in what might be called “archive horror,” or the morbid claustrophobia of a closed room filled with the relics of people long dead. There’s the dankness of the space itself, as well as the fear of the door swinging closed behind you, trapping you inside with nothing but dust. Then there’s the very real possibility that, in all the detritus of the past, you might find something deeply disturbing that you wish you hadn’t seen – or that someone very much wanted to hide. With its retro graphics and creepy pixel illustrations, Dorotea is a fantastic vehicle for conveying a sense of unease.

Dorotea is a short game, but it nevertheless manages to pull off a gut punch of a twist ending while indulging in a few interesting experiments with the ludic medium. The game was created for Italocurso Game Jam 2025, which is themed on folk horror specific to regional cultures in Italy. The 33 entries include a number of games offered in English, and all of them look amazing.

Dreaming Mary

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Dreaming Mary (available via the RPG Maker forums here) is a 2D narrative adventure game developed in RPG Maker by Dreaming Games. The opening of the game is super cute, but its pastel pink exterior hides a terrible secret. 

You play as the eponymous Mary, who begins the game in the bedroom of her dream world. She emerges into a lovely hallway with three rooms: a garden modeled on a Greek temple, an aristocratic library with floor-to-ceiling shelves, and a swank but cozy jazz bar. Each room is home to an anthropomorphic animal, each of whom wants to play a simple game. The friendly bunny needs advice on how to arrange her statues, while the flirty fox wants to play a round of hide-and-seek. The gentle owl asks a few questions about the books on his shelves.  

At the end of the corridor is a beautiful tree guarded by a burly boar. If Mary wishes to progress further into the dream, this is her gateway, but she’ll need to collect the blessing of each animal first.

If you play through the game normally, you’ll arrive at a sweet but somewhat ambiguous ending after around 15-20 minutes. If you follow a walkthrough – I recommend this one – to discover the game’s secrets and see the full story, you’ll find your way to a far darker but more satisfying ending in around 30-35 minutes.

According to the developer’s notes, Dreaming Mary was inspired by the 2011 magical girl anime Madoka Magica, which similarly begins as a cute slice-of-life story before evolving into something much more complicated. Mary’s dream is as lushly pink and pastel as Madoka’s fantasies of becoming a magical girl, which makes the hidden nightmare segments all the more shocking.

Should Mary actually figure out how to wake up… That’s when the story becomes truly grim.

To give a fair warning, many of the puzzle solutions don’t make much sense, and I’m not sure how possible it would be to get the game’s true ending without a walkthrough. Still, it’s worth the extra effort, because the contrast between the sunny opening of the game and its sinister conclusion is something special.  

Dreaming Mary was released in 2014. It seems the devs have gone quiet since then, which is a shame. While Dreaming Mary isn’t perfect, it’s promising, and I would have loved to see this prototype expanded into a more polished game. Still, Dreaming Mary stands well enough on its own as a short but intriguing indie horror story in the surreal lineage of Yume Nikki.

Vartio

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Vartio
https://store.steampowered.com/app/3639120/Vartio/

Vartio, a short and atmospheric horror game about walking through the woods at night, was developed by Pepperbox Studios and released on Steam in August 2025.

You play as a medieval soldier sent to an isolated fortress in the middle of a dense forest. As soon as you arrive, the guard captain explains your duty: you must patrol the woods by moonlight. Your job, as the player, is to follow a first-person circular path through the trees. You’ll complete three loops that result in a playtime of around 20 minutes. 

Though Vartio has a bit of a twist ending, there’s nothing explicitly scary in the game. Aside from an owl flying in your direction toward the beginning of the second loop, there’s nothing resembling a jump scare. The graphics are well-designed but primitive and repetitive, and nothing much happens, truth be told. There’s no pathfinding or puzzle-solving; you just follow the road. You can leave the trail to explore a bit if you like, but there’s not much you can see in the darkness.

Precisely because the walk through the woods is so boring, it’s likely that your imagination will begin to work overtime as you navigate the sounds of the forest. The first loop is fairly normal. During the second loop, however, you become more sensitive to any break from the regular noises. And the third loop… Well, it’s a surprise.

Vartio is creepy, but it’s also oddly relaxing, like ambient lo-fi beats for forest goths. If you’re a fan of atmospheric horror that gives you space to make up a story as you go along, Vartio is an intriguing combination of retro graphics and precision sound design that allows you to immerse yourself in the spookiness of a starlit sea of trees.

Retro Horror Games on Sidequest

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My annual roundup of free-to-play retro horror games on Itch.io is now on Sidequest. There’s a gritty mix of fresh blood and decayed favorites in this year’s creepypixel harvest, from the recent haunted forest simulator Bloodbark to the Tumblr-favorite Flesh, Blood, & Concrete to the first game created by Deltarune artist Temmie Chang, Escaped Chasm.

You can check out the post here:
https://sidequest.zone/2025/10/15/retro-horror-games-on-itchio/

And there’s also my lists from October 2024 and October 2023, which are somehow even more liminal and retro.

I’m overjoyed to have commissioned a banner illustration from the shining Teller-of-Tragedies, who shares gorgeous and immersive dreamcore pixel art on Tumblr (here) and on Instagram (here).

Escaped Chasm

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Escaped Chasm
https://tuyoki.itch.io/escaped-chasm

Escaped Chasm is a 25-minute dark fantasy adventure game created in RPG Maker with a mix of retro Game Boy graphics and anime-style cutscenes. Originally released in 2019, it’s the first stand-alone project of Temmie Chang, a longtime collaborator of Toby Fox who contributed character designs and graphics to Undertale and Deltarune.

You play as a young teenage “Lonely Girl” who doesn’t leave the house and lives vicariously through her dreams and art. Her parents appear to have gone missing, and she doesn’t know what to do. To make matters worse, she’s tired all the time, and a strange man has started appearing in her house.

Something is seriously wrong, and the Lonely Girl has four days to figure it out and escape. If leaving the house isn’t an option, where can she go? And how can she find the courage to leave?

Escaped Chasm is free to download, and the zip file contains an illustrated guide to the game’s four endings. I get the feeling that most players will probably see the good ending simply by playing the game naturally, but it’s nice to have grimdark alternatives. After unlocking the good ending, the player is able to enter and explore a bonus “developer’s room” that I love with all my heart. It’s fascinating to read Chang’s thoughts about making the game while checking out extra material that fills out a few gaps in the story.

Both Toby Fox and Temmie Chang were fans of and contributors to Homestuck, and it’s possible to see its influence on Escaped Chasm. It’s difficult to summarize Homestuck, but the webcomic begins as a story about four young teenagers who can’t leave their houses because they’re the last remaining survivors of a universe that’s unraveling around them. I get the sense that the Lonely Girl in Escaped Chasm is based on one of the four teenagers in Homestuck, Jade Harley, and it’s probably not a coincidence that she’s found herself in a remarkably similar situation.

Escaped Chasm is like a bridge between Homestuck and Deltarune in its theme of “using art and imagination to escape into another world,” but it’s also very much its own thing. I love Chang’s illustration style and narrative voice, and I admire how she pushes the boundaries of the medium to create a palpable sense of liminality and dread – and of catharsis and joy. Escaped Chasm is atmospheric horror with a (potentially) happy ending, and it’s idiosyncratic and self-indulgent in interesting ways that elevate it above the level of mere pastiche.

Escaped Chasm is a short test project made in preparation for Dweller’s Empty Path (on Itch.io here), a more extensive Game Boy style narrative adventure game. I really enjoyed Escaped Chasm, and I’m looking forward to jumping into Dweller’s Empty Path.

Symbiosis

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Symbiosis
https://spicaze.itch.io/symbiosis

Symbiosis is a free-to-play RPG Maker horror game about a murderous mad scientist living in a house in the woods with an adorable child. The story has two endings, and it takes about 25 minutes to play through the game once.

You play as Magnolia, a geneticist who left her university post after a mysterious fire broke out in her lab when her research came under public scrutiny. She now lives in isolation with Mint, a curious and precociously intelligent young boy whom she’s raising as her son. According to local rumors, Magnolia is a witch. It doesn’t help that hikers have a tendency to disappear in the forest surrounding her property.

The game begins as Magnolia carves up the corpse of someone she caught sneaking into her house. She’s interrupted by Mint, who can’t sleep and wants a bedtime story. Unfortunately, there are three more intruders in the house, and Mint won’t stay in his room. Your job as the player is to turn the remaining intruders into corpses – for science! – while ensuring that Mint remains out of harm’s way. 

Magnolia’s house isn’t too terribly large, but it’s big enough to have all sorts of nooks and crannies to poke around, as well as various journals and research notes to find. The player can use these clues to figure out who Magnolia is and where Mint came from, although you’ll have to make your own decision regarding Magnolia’s feelings toward Mint and what the fate of the pair will be. The game’s creator has posted a guide for the two endings (here), and this short devlog also contains their thoughts on the story and characters.

What sets Symbiosis apart from the crowd of RPG Maker horror games is the creator’s gleeful willingness to allow Magnolia to be messy and problematic. She initially seems to be a complete sociopath, and her bad behavior is a joy to watch. As you witness her interactions with Mint unfold, however, her character becomes more complicated. Why Magnolia feels affection for Mint is open to interpretation, but I think it’s fair to say that her attachment is genuine.

The way I interpret this relationship is that it’s an analogy for the process of artistic creation (or scientific discovery, as the case may be). In order to create something meaningful, an artist has to be unpleasant, selfish, and more than a little antisocial. Gradually the art comes to take on a life of its own, and it’s up to the artist to decide whether to let it go or to keep it firmly in the orbit of their own dysfunctional personality.

Lest you think I’m spoiling the story, fear not – there’s all sorts of nasty business in Magnolia’s past for the player to discover. This woman is a legitimately horrible person, and her crimes are fantastic fun.

Symbiosis tells a short but grisly story through simple narrative adventure gameplay intercut with stylishly illustrated cutscenes, and I enjoyed it enough to go back and see both endings. I definitely recommend this game to fans of gothic horror, demonic women, and questionable scientific ethics.

Bloodbark

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Bloodbark
https://sirtartarus.itch.io/bloodbark

Bloodbark is a forest horror game based on the art of Eduardo Valdés-Hevia that’s free to download and takes about half an hour to play. You play as a lumberjack camping out in a small cabin next to a state park where a new type of tree has been discovered. Although these trees look like normal birches on the outside, their wood is bright red and fetches a high price. The lumberjack’s job is simple – he needs to find the special trees on his employer’s fenced-in property, cut them down, and return the timber to his cabin.

Still, given how much blood is involved… Are you really sure that it’s trees you’re chopping?

The gameplay of Bloodbark is limited to wandering around (with tank controls) and striking various objects with your axe. As you walk, your character’s thoughts automatically appear on the screen as text overlay. The lumberjack is somewhat unwell at the beginning of the game, and he becomes progressively more unhinged as the days pass. Fun times!

The standard route of progression through Bloodbark is fairly well signposted and easy to follow. If you like, however, you can wander to your heart’s content, and the game features a number of achievements and collectibles. Though it won’t have any effect in most circumstances, you can also hack at anything you like. My favorite surprise in the game is a large cocoon suspended from a pole on a dock at the lake. If you manage to find it and get it open, you’re in for an odd little treat.

Although the twist to the story is nothing you wouldn’t expect, the writing leaves a number of interesting questions open to the player’s interpretation. I am not unsympathetic to the lumberjack, who has reasonable doubts about the job he’s been paid to do, and I’m just as annoyed as he is by the car alarms and other annoyances from the neighboring state park. I also think it’s telling that the lumberjack won’t cut down any tree he’s not paid for, no matter how hard the player tries.

My only issue with Bloodbark is that it conveys “darkness” by turning the visual contrast down to zero. Unless you play the game in a sealed room with no external light, the screen appears to be almost solid black. Depending on the quality of your monitor, the parts of the game that take place at night can range from needlessly annoying to impossible to see. It’s a shame, but I’m afraid that this flaw in the game’s visual design may make it inaccessible to many players.

Thankfully, when you can see the game’s graphics, they’re quite lovely. I’m a fan of this sort of lo-fi crispiness to begin with, and I think it creates an interesting contrast with the visual style of many of the secrets you can encounter. To give an example, interacting with three roadside crosses will trigger the brief appearance of a Biblically accurate angel, and the fluidity of this manifestation is a sight to behold against the pixelated mountains and treetops.

If you’re unable to play Bloodbark yourself due to accessibility issues, I’d recommend (this video), which has no voiceover and allows you to watch a streamlined yet still thorough run of the game. Whether you’re watching the game or playing it yourself, Bloodbark is an oddly relaxing game about losing your sanity in the woods, and I’d recommend it to anyone who enjoys the themes and imagery of horror but is happy to dispense with the tension and jumpscares.

Whispering Willows

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Whispering Willows (on Steam here) is a 2D adventure game set in a haunted mansion. There’s no combat, and the game takes about three hours to finish. It’s a small indie game made in 2014, and it’s not perfect. Still, I enjoyed the time I spent in Willows Mansion, and I’d recommend giving this game a shot if you’re into spooky gothic stories.

You play as Elena Elkhorn, a teenage girl whose father works as the groundskeeper at the derelict and abandoned Willows Mansion. Elena’s father doesn’t return one night, and she has a bad feeling about the mansion. Hoping to bring her father home, Elena sneaks onto the property and immediately falls headlong into an underground crypt. There she meets the ghost of her ancestor, who teaches her how to use the power of her magical pendant to leave her body to go spiritwalking. In a cursed mansion filled with phantoms, this is an extremely useful ability to have.  

Before I jump into the many things I love about this game, let me be upfront about its flaws:

– There’s not much actual gameplay.
– The hand-drawn cutscene art is unpolished.
– The writing is good but a bit uneven.
– The background music is limited.
– Your character walks very slowly.
– There’s no map to help you navigate.

Essentially, this is a small indie game that indeed looks and feels like a small indie game. I’m not complaining about the rough edges of Whispering Willows; I just want to make it clear that it’s a game made ten years ago on a tiny budget earned from a Kickstarter campaign. Still, I found its simplicity and amateurish aspects charming, and it has many strong points.

To begin with, the map is surprisingly large, and there’s a lot of space to navigate. You’ll explore the mansion’s crypt, its garden, and various outbuildings; but mainly you’re going to be walking around the house itself. The mansion is impossibly large and includes all the standard gothic flourishes: locked doors, grisly kitchens, moldy bathrooms, crooked paintings, peeling wallpaper, taxidermied hunting trophies, creepy dolls, and all the secret passageways you could ever want.

Of course there are all manner of notes lying around, and these notes collectively tell a suitably gothic story about the very wealthy but very evil man who built the mansion. This story never quite comes together in terms of plot or themes, and the character motivations are ridiculous. Still, all the individual bits and pieces are gothic catnip, from a lover kept in a secret room to a murdered best friend to a servant driven mad by what he’s seen.

This all takes place in California during the Wild West days, meaning that the land occupied by the mansion had to be taken from someone. It turns out that it was forcibly wrested from Elena’s own ancestors. Alongside his more intimate crimes, then, the mansion’s owner became the mayor of a frontier town by means of enacting war and genocide on First Nations people.

We tend to think of gothic mansions as being located in Europe, or perhaps New England. There are definitely nineteenth-century mansions in California, though (like the Carson Mansion), and they’re built on land soaked in blood.

Importantly, the First Nations people in Whispering Willows aren’t all ghosts. Elena and her father are very much alive, and they’re not tempted by the faded pseudo-grandeur of the former colonists. At the end of the game, it’s extremely satisfying to see Elena essentially say “fuck all this” as she walks away from the mansion with her father.  

This is an interesting perspective on classic gothic story tropes that I love to see. And honestly, Whispering Willows isn’t such a bad game. The puzzles are easy, but the lack of difficulty is a selling point for me. Also, the gameplay mechanic of Elena spiritwalking to interact with the numinous aspects of the environment is used in clever ways, and it’s a lot of fun.  

Aside from Elena’s slow walking speed, my only real complaint is that this game would benefit immensely from a map. Even though navigation isn’t particularly complicated, I got lost a few times and had to resort to a walkthrough (this one here) a few times, which wouldn’t have been necessary if the player could just pull up a subscreen.

Whispering Willows definitely feels like an indie game, but it’s got a delightfully grisly story and an excellent sense of atmosphere, and it’s worth checking out if you’re interested in Wild West Gothic from an indigenous perspective.

As a side note, this was apparently the game that launched Akupara Games, a publisher that specializes in quirky indie games with a strong sense of style and setting. Two of my favorite titles they’ve helped get off the ground are Rain World and Mutazione, and it’s cool to know that this was where they started.