Tag: horror games

Ground Down

~ Kathryn ~ Leave a comment

Ground Down
https://inverts.itch.io/ground-down

Ground Down is a short botanical horror story presented in the form of a Twine game. The player is occasionally offered choices concerning how to proceed, but there’s only one ending. Depending on your choices and your reading speed, I’d say Ground Down takes about ten to twenty minutes to finish.

You play as a young farmer whose grandmother has just passed away, leaving you the farm you’ve grown up on. You also have your grief, a house full of mementos, and debts to pay. On top of that, you’ve started to grind your teeth, but you have neither the time nor the money to visit a dentist.

I should say that, if you’re unusually squeamish about teeth, you might want to give this game a pass.

Personally speaking, I’m a little squeamish about teeth and dental pain in general, but I very much enjoyed this game. I felt some mild discomfort at the beginning, but the way the theme of “teeth as a symbol of agency” comes back at the end of the story is nothing short of brilliant.

The writing of Ground Down is fantastic in general. Each sentence is perfectly constructed, and each word is chosen with care. There’s a Raymond Carver feel of resonant simplicity to the prose, which is a pleasure to read and to reflect on. The gradual build of the narrative tension is subtle but palpable, and the ending is gorgeously cathartic.

The creator describes Ground Down as a “kinetic novel,” and there’s an interesting rhythm to the text, which sometimes speeds up and slows down. The choices you can and can’t make are interesting as well. Although your choices don’t affect the ending, they’ll color your understanding of what happens.

It’s also worth noting that the Century Gothic font is easy to read, and the contrast between the dark gray background and the light gray text is easy on the eyes, especially if you’re playing the game on your phone. The ambient background music, Kevin MacLeod’s “Decline,” is perfect.

Really, everything about Ground Down is perfect. I played the game twice, and I’m looking forward to playing it again soon. The story’s theme of protecting the roots of your identity from the erosion of late-stage capitalism resonated with me, and the imagery is delicious. And, as a fun bonus, you can name and pet your hen!

A Perfectly Normal Cooking Game

~ Kathryn

A Perfectly Normal Cooking Game
https://ribyrnes.itch.io/candypink

A Perfectly Normal Cooking Game is exactly what it says on the label: a cute and pastel-colored pixel game that teaches you how to make marshmallows. You play as a pastry chef who has just been promoted to the kitchen of a company that makes pink heart-shaped confectionery. The recipe includes sugar, corn syrup, water, and a secret ingredient… love!

Just kidding! The secret ingredient definitely isn’t love. Anyone who is squeamish about gore should probably avoid this game.

A Perfectly Normal Cooking Game was made for the Two Minute Horror Jam, with “two minutes” being about how long it takes to finish the game. The experience of playing A Perfectly Normal Cooking Game actually takes about five or six minutes to properly savor, which will probably include you laughing and saying “oh no no no no no no fuck no” to yourself at least once.   

The game also has a secret ending. Along with a lot of people in the comments, I got the secret ending the first time I played the game, as the alternative was too horrible to contemplate.

There’s not much I can write about such a short game without spoiling it, so let me just say that this is a neat little story with perfect presentation that uses its medium well.

Another fun two-minute horror game on Itchio is:

Make Sure It’s Closed
https://corpsepile.itch.io/make-sure-its-closed

Make Sure It’s Closed does a fantastic job of creating a palpable sense of dread in a very short span of time, so much so that I want to recommend this game to any writer who needs an easy and effective reference for what “dread” feels like. I was so impressed that I also played the creator’s game The Open House (free on Itchio here), which is a bit longer and less immediately accessible but still a lot of fun.

The House in Fata Morgana

~ Kathryn ~ Leave a comment

The House in Fata Morgana describes itself as “a gothic suspense tale set in a cursed mansion,” but I would describe this visual novel as 500k+ words of torture porn. It’s so bad. It is so so bad.

The premise of the game is that you wake up in an abandoned mansion with no memories. A creepy maid guides you through the house while telling you the tragic stories of the people who once lived there. It turns out that the maid was present in all eras of history, and that you were too – albeit not in the form you expect. Along the way there are a lot of silly and juvenile anime tropes, as well as a seriously awful mistreatment of transgender issues. And did I mention torture? There’s a lot of torture.

The remainder of this post includes discussion of torture, including sexual assault, so please take care.

One of the reasons I shy away from away from amateur writing communities is because they tend to have at least one person who will go through a manic phase and then won’t shut up about how they wrote 10k words in one night, and how these words are the most brilliant thing that’s ever been written, and how every single one of these words are perfect and should never be edited.

The House in Fata Morgana wrote 10k words in one night, and it shows. The ideas behind the individual character stories and the overarching plot aren’t bad, but the writing is godawful. There was clearly no editing, and the pacing is a miserable mess. Characters repeat themselves endlessly in a way that goes far beyond “demonstrating the theme of a cycle of abuse.” Each of the sub-stories drags on forever before ending in a bloodbath of screams that go “AaAAAAggHHH” and “NnnGGggGG uuuUrrhhh” and “hehehHEHEHehehe” for literally dozens of minutes of the player clicking through meaningless text.

(I don’t mean to suggest that the translation is bad, by the way. It’s actually very polished. Still, I feel horrible that the translator had to wade through this mess, and I hope they got to take a long vacation afterward.)

The art is pretty but extremely limited, and the character designs fail to convey any sort of personality or mood. The game offers almost no horror art, or even any interesting visual imagery. The giant gothic mansion has maybe ten rooms, and they’re all bog-standard stock photos run through different filters. The player is asked to make a few decisions, but they’re few and far between. These choices are binary, with the wrong decision being crystal clear and resulting in an obviously premature end to the game. In other words, there’s no real gameplay to speak of, nor any real payoff for making your way through the text.

About two-thirds of the way through the game, I got to the point where I was holding down the skip button to speed-read through the text as quickly as possible. I gave up at some point during the penultimate chapter. Towards the end, the story’s pace slows down instead of quickens, making the game feel even more tedious as it offers revelations that might have been surprising if the writing weren’t so mind-numbingly boring.

The House in Fata Morgana could have had the potential to be unique and interesting if its writing had been properly edited. At perhaps 250k words, the player would still have been able to spend a significant amount of time in this creepy mansion with these unfortunate characters, and the writer still would have been able to convey the sense of feeling trapped in a web of words. I’m willing to grant a creator sufficient room to explore the world of their story, but I think it’s safe to say that three entire novels’ worth of extra words will try anyone’s patience.  

There’s also the game’s severe mistreatment of transgender issues.

By this point I have enough exposure to Japanese otaku media to understand that the representation of queer identity and sexuality is complicated. For example, is a work of fiction seemingly intended for a straight male audience secretly LGBTQ+ friendly, or is it actually homophobic? And, if it is borderline homophobic, how much energy do you need to expend to reinterpret the plot and characters into something that can be read as queer-positive? Is it worth the trouble?

Even with the benefit of the doubt, however, the second-to-last chapter of The House in Fata Morgana hit me especially hard.

This chapter is about a transgender (and possibly intersex) character quietly coming out as gay and then being tortured by his family. It’s intense, and it lasts for more than an hour of gameplay time. I don’t use the word “problematic” lightly, but the way this torture and misgendering resonates with the rest of the story is deeply upsetting.

Maybe this is all resolved and everyone gets a happy ending, who knows. For me, I’m not sure any ending is worth having to sit through hours of a transgender character being imprisoned and starved and beaten and tortured and being told, in line after line after line of text, that he would be happy if only he weren’t gay.

I feel like this goes beyond “horror” and enters the realm of something else entirely. Either the writer has an intense fetish, or it’s sincere homophobia. I don’t think every piece of media needs to be ideologically pure or written for me specifically, but the way this element of the story casts a different light on the plot of the entire game (for complicated spoiler reasons) is extremely weird and fucked up.

I think most players will eventually run up against the question of “why don’t the characters just get up and leave the house,” and the same frustration applies to The House in Fata Morgana in a meta sense. Namely, you don’t need to be trapped by this poorly-written and poorly-edited and poorly-paced game. You can just quit playing! So that’s what I did.

If you’re wondering whether you should spend $40 to check out The House in Fata Morgana and just play until you get bored, it’s worth keeping in mind that there’s a strong psychosexual element to the story presented by each chapter, with sexual assault and torture being the dominant themes. This is par for the course for gothic horror, but the player’s enjoyment of this game is going to be strongly dependent on how many hundreds of thousands of words of explicit descriptions of non-erotic yet still sexualized torture they’re willing to tolerate. Also, the very first chapter is about incest.

I love horror, and I’m not judging anyone who uses fiction to explore the darker sides of human experience. Still, considering how highly rated The House in Fata Morgana is on Steam, I think it’s important to say that this game definitely isn’t for everyone.

Ender Lilies: Quietus of the Knights

~ Kathryn ~ Leave a comment

Ender Lilies: Quietus of the Knights is a fantasy-themed 2D adventure-platformer with moderate elements of horror and a moderately high level of difficulty. Unlike many modern Metroidvania games, there is nothing retro about the graphics. The backgrounds are gorgeous works of HD digital art filled with stunning details, and the characters and enemies are all beautifully animated. Both the combat and exploration are a lot of fun, and it’s a joy to move through this ruined world.

You play as a young unnamed priestess (referred to by the user interface as Lily) who wakes in the catacombs beneath a cathedral filled with monsters. You’re greeted by an adult knight (initially called “the Umbral Knight” but later revealed to be named Ferin) who accompanies Lily outside, where the landscape is dark and dripping with the water of a poisonous rain. Everything touched by the rain becomes “blighted,” or monstrous and undead. Lily has the ability to purify monsters by removing the blight from their bodies, thereby allowing them to die. Although the game has no quest-givers to explain what’s going on, it’s easy enough to make the assumption that Lily’s job is to find the source of the blight and purify it.   

Lily is a small child who is physically fragile, and she cannot defend herself on her own. Your attacks are therefore performed by the Umbral Knight, who is gradually joined by other spirits. The Umbral Knight performs a basic sword attack, but Lily meets spirits who can perform heavy attacks, ranged attacks, area-of-effect attacks, and so on. You can equip two sets of three spirits at a time and map them onto whatever buttons you wish in order to create different combos and skill sets appropriate to different bosses and exploration challenges. This is much less complicated that it sounds, and the Umbral Knight is strong and versatile enough to carry you through the game.

You can upgrade these spirits using different types of limited resources that you find through exploration. Aside from Lily, everyone in the world of the game is either dead or undead, and there is no “economy” to speak of – only the relics and resources that Lily can scavenge from corpses. Spirits are acquired by defeating boss monsters, many of which are optional and must also be found by exploration. I really love this system of fighting a powered-up version of a regular monster in order to acquire its abilities, especially since the player should already be familiar with these abilities from having faced a number of such creatures in combat.

The optional minibosses are tricky but fun, but the mandatory zone bosses are legitimately challenging. This challenge is mitigated by the game’s leveling system, in which defeating enemies gives Lily experience points that allow her to gain levels. Health and attack upgrades must be acquired elsewhere, but each new level grants Lily ever-so-slightly better defense and a tiny boost to the power of the Umbral Knight. There is always a save point right before a zone boss fight, as well as an enemy-dense screen on the other side of the save point that provides a good opportunity to level up if needed. The only real way to defeat these bosses is to learn their attack patterns while optimizing your own set of attacks, but the zone leading to each boss does a good job of teaching you the skills you need to survive.

You can also find various relics in the world that grant enhanced abilities, such as giving you more healing charges, increasing the amount healed with each charge, increasing your defense, strengthening certain types of attacks, and so on. In addition, you’ll find items that allow you to equip more relics, as well as items that permanently increase your health bar. Some of these items are hidden behind illusory walls, but these “secrets” are never unmarked, and the game teaches you how to read the environment fairly early on. If you pay attention and don’t mind an occasional bit of backtracking – which you’ll need to do anyway to find a path forward through the interconnected zones – you should be able to strengthen Lily just enough to keep going without having to grind for levels.

Ender Lilies is clearly inspired by Dark Souls and Hollow Knight. It’s not easy, but I would say it’s more “challenging” than “punishing.” The combat is a lot of fun, but the true emphasis is on exploration and paying close attention to the environment. Each screen of the game has its own unique design and artwork, meaning that you’ll be inspired to explore just to see what’s around the next corner. In addition, each relic and spirit and upgrade material you find is valuable, as is every zone boss spirit, all of which grant you an additional exploration ability. I found the gameplay loop of Ender Lilies to be extremely satisfying.

Given that everyone in the world of the game is dead, careful exploration also allows you to find bits and pieces of the story in the form of Fallout-style journals and missives that have been left lying around. Like the gameplay, the story is inspired by Dark Souls and Hollow Knight, and the overarching plot is similar – a morally ambiguous king has made a difficult choice involving arcane forces that were poorly understood by hubristic scientist-wizards. Ender Lilies adds a few interesting twists to this formula, especially towards the end, and the abject tragedy of what happened in this kingdom feels earned, narratively speaking.

What I love about the story is that every textual object you find has a distinct narrative voice. It goes without saying that the presentation of information is not linear, and it’s always a fun surprise to find something written by a blighted monster you encountered much earlier in the game. Some of these characters are much more important than others, but the gradual accumulation of their stories leads the player to the dawning realization that, despite the horror of the situation, the kingdom was filled with flawed but deeply human people who were doing the best they could.

It’s easy to dismiss Ender Lilies as “2D anime Dark Souls for casuals” at a glance, but I ended up being genuinely moved by the story and characters. The horror themes are expressed with creativity and style, and Ender Lilies is nothing if not atmospheric. In terms of gameplay, I think Ender Lilies may be a perfect Metroidvania, and the game features various ease-of-life concessions that help make it more accessible without diminishing the thrill or challenge of the gameplay.

And finally, I appreciate how the spirits Lily has purified hang out with you at save points. There’s nothing I love more than the image of a cute girl sitting amongst weathered ruins surrounded by grotesque monsters as rain falls in the background. That’s the good stuff right there.  

Infernax

~ Kathryn ~ Leave a comment

Infernax is an 8-bit 2D Metroidvania style game with platforming elements and dark themes that feed into a morality system. The retro graphics, music, and gameplay remind me of Shovel Knight, save that Infernax is the opposite of Shovel Knight‘s brand of quirky and wholesome family fun. Infernax boasts buckets of blood and plenty of creatively disturbing imagery, but the uniquely upsetting aspect of this game is its sidequests, which force the player to make distinctly unpleasant choices.

You play as Alcedor, a duke who served as a knight in the Holy War and returns to his homeland only to find it overrun with the undead. Your job is to infiltrate the five demon strongholds and thereby break the magical seal on your own castle, which is occupied by the big boss demon. You navigate the 2D overworld with the various skills that you acquire in the five 2D dungeons, and along the way you accumulate experience points and money that you can use to upgrade your abilities and equipment.

Infernax bills itself as having a “tough-as-nails” level of difficulty. I found that it isn’t actually that hard until the final two levels, in which the platforming is a bit too precision-oriented for the game mechanics. If you prefer, you can get around this difficulty by using Game Genie style cheat codes (these ones right here) on a menu that’s available at every save point. Using this system to allow yourself infinite lives and access a double-jump ability can really help you out toward the end of the game, where failure at the platforming segments is unduly punished.

I think it’s important to be realistic and accurate about the difficulty level of a game like this, as not everyone is looking for a super hyper mega challenge. Maybe some people just want to stroll around a horror-themed digital theme park while fighting skeletons and zombies, and that’s cool. Infernax lets you turn the cheat codes on and off at any point you like and doesn’t penalize you for using them, and it offers a decent but not impossible challenge to anyone who wants to play the game straight.

The parts where you might need to use a walkthrough are when Infernax asks you to make a binary choice. This choice is usually between showing mercy to monsters or outright killing them. The key to these choices is presented to the player at the very beginning of the game, when you’re asked to make a decision regarding whether to spare someone who has been possessed by a demon. If you’re a decent person and choose to spare him, he kills several people and forces you to kill him anyway.

In order to get the “ultimate good” ending, the player has to continue to choose to kill monsters. This isn’t always easy. Later in the game, for example, a town under siege has trapped another possessed person in a cage. The townspeople claim that the possessed man has killed people, and that he needs to be put to death. Succumbing to the will of an angry mob with torches in order to enact violence on a seemingly defenseless person in a small cage isn’t great. If you let him go, however, he kills everyone. Should you allow the townspeople to set the possessed man on fire, it takes a long time for him to burn, and he screams and thrashes in pain the entire time.

This violence is somewhat mitigated by the 8-bit pixel graphics, which add a layer of campiness to the grimdark world. What Infernax celebrates isn’t just the visuals and gameplay of 8-bit games, but also their unironic and unapologetic violence. Infernax leans into this goriness by having its overworld enemies constantly attack and kill soldiers right in front of you. You can save some of these people, but most become zombie food. Sometimes you’re forced to kill other humans, which can be bloody business as well. If you like, you can aim for the “ultimate evil” ending and kill other humans by choice. This makes the game more difficult in terms of gameplay but also more interesting from a narrative perspective.

Infernax delights in violence for the sake of violence. It’s not actually that deep, but it’s quite fun. Even as they’ve created a dungeon whose theme is literally “piles of dead babies,” the developers are sensitive to the needs of a diversity of players and allow you to customize the level of difficulty to suit your preferences. In addition, there are multiple guides online that will help you unlock all the various silly bonuses the game has to offer, which include letting you run around with a machine gun and giving you free rein to zip through the overworld on a motorcycle.

If you’re bad at games like I am, Infernax might take about ten to fifteen hours to finish without cheat codes. If you’re good at games – or if you use cheat codes – it can be finished in under five hours, which makes the prospect of exploring multiple morality paths more intriguing. Overall, I spent about twenty hours in ultraviolent medieval zombie demon hell, and I regret nothing.

Blasphemous

~ Kathryn

Blasphemous is an ultraviolent 2D Metroidvania with gorgeous 16-bit pixel art and limited but fluid animation. It describes itself as “fast-paced and punishing,” but it’s not really either of those things. The game’s focus is more on strategic combat than on platforming or quick reflexes, and your character moves at a fairly sedate speed. To me at least, the pace feels perfect, both from moment to moment and from one area of the map to the next. In terms of “punishing,” this is how I’d rate Blasphemous on a scale of “this game wants you to feel pain”:

6 – Guacamelee
7 – Blasphemous
8 – Shovel Knight
9 – Hollow Knight
10 – Rain World

In other words, Blasphemous is moderately punishing, but probably not at a level where you’ll give up at the beginning or rage quit in the middle. Granted, Blasphemous makes no attempt to be accessible, and it’s much easier if you use a walkthrough to access the health upgrades in the early part of the game, which are hidden so well (behind unmarked walls, under floors that only break if you jump on a specific spot from a great height, and so on) that you’d never find them unless you already knew where they were. Thankfully, once you get about two hours into the game, you start to understand how it works and don’t really need a walkthrough unless you’re a completionist.

Blasphemous has everything that I love about the Metroidvania genre, and it was worth my time just for the gameplay. The combat is engaging, the area-specific challenges are interesting, and the way in which the areas all eventually connect to each other is on par with Hollow Knight in terms of clever map design. If you enjoy indulging in a bit of exploration and backtracking, it will take about twenty hours to finish Blasphemous with near-perfect completion.

What really got me into Blasphemous is its atmosphere. Everything is compared to Dark Souls these days, but Blasphemous really is Dark Souls in 2D. The level of violence is incredible, and the game gets creative with its brutality. The architecture is similarly brutal and creative. Each area has its own unique character, and the background graphics are beyond fantastic. As for the story, it’s essentially this: You were dead, but now you’re undead for reasons that are unclear; and something bad happened to the world, but we’re not going to tell you what that was. Each collectible item has its own lore, all of which is disturbing.

I never felt as though Blasphemous is just trying to be awful for the sake of shock value, though. As you might guess from the title, it’s based on Spanish Catholicism, and it takes the themes and imagery of Catholicism to their logical extreme. If you’ve ever made a joke about how Catholicism is all about the fetishization of punishment and the worship of death, this game takes that joke seriously. At the same time, it’s so sincere and culturally specific that it never feels disrespectful. I was actually so impressed and curious about the lore and imagery that I looked up a few of the real-world cultural references online, and now I have a greater appreciation for Catholicism. No joke!

( I should say that this game probably isn’t for genuinely religious people, though. It is very literally blasphemous. It also contains all sorts of casual graphic and textual references to real-world torture and hate crimes committed by the church, which perhaps some people might not want to see. Honestly I can’t believe I played this game on a Nintendo console, what a time we live in. )

My favorite part of Blasphemous is its OST, which suits the tone and atmosphere of the game perfectly. About a third of the tracks suffer from dramatic moody bitch disorder, and I can’t remember where they play in the actual game, but most of the OST is mellow acoustic Spanish guitar. Que las Campanas me Doblen is a good representative track, and I really like Y Yo Fuego Te Daré, which manages to be both chill and epic at the same time. A track called Arpegios en Ocre plays in an area called “The Desecrated Cistern,” and it really makes you feel as though you’re exploring a cavernous underground space with a vaulted ceiling. I think the OST holds up well on its own as lo-fi Flamenco beats to chill to, but it’s also a gorgeous backdrop to the game and its ruined world.

A Time for Giving

~ Kathryn ~ Leave a comment

A Time for Giving by CobGoblin
https://cobgoblin.itch.io/a-time-for-giving

A Time for Giving is a free Game Boy “dark cottagecore” horror game about being a human sacrifice. It takes five to ten minutes to play, and it’s divided into three main areas: your protagonist’s cozy family cabin, an isolated village preparing for its winter festival, and the haunted snow-covered woods. The overworld graphics remind me of the cute rounded style of A Link to the Past, and the character artwork that appears during the dialog screens is delightfully eerie and upsetting. The dialog is well-written and communicates the themes of the game without pulling any punches.

A Time for Giving was created for a winter solstice-themed game jam, and the creator apologizes that there’s no sound because they ran out of time. I’m of the opinion that the lack of music is actually quite lovely, as it creates an environment reminiscent of a silent forest blanketed by snow so heavy that it muffles all sound.

A Time for Giving is very short and very simple, but the writing and visual style are exactly what I want from a handmade Game Boy game. It’s also a perfect combination of nostalgia and “what the fuck did I just play,” which is a major component of what makes these games so fun.

I played A Time for Giving a few times and made varying choices in an attempt to get a different ending, but alas. I wonder if there’s a way for this poor kid to make it out of the forest…?

Waking Nightmare

~ Kathryn ~ Leave a comment

Waking Nightmare by Polyducks
https://polyducks.itch.io/waking-nightmare

Waking Nightmare is a free homebrew Game Boy horror game in which you navigate a short and simple maze. Every dead end presents you with a nightmare scenario and the notification that you’ve woken up, thus restarting the maze. The game moves very quickly, and each dead end is creative and worth the trouble of discovering. The game also marks every dead end that you’ve already seen twice in order to minimize frustration.

When you make it through the maze, you’re presented with a series of dialog choices that determine one of three endings. The maze layout doesn’t change, so it’s easy to finish the game and see all three endings in about fifteen minutes. The maze screens look like something a kid would build on a graphing calculator, and the gritty lo-fi pixel art is great, especially for the three closing screens. Apparently this is all text art, or “textmode” art, which the creator explains on their website (here). This website is just as interesting as the game itself, and I recommend checking it out if you’re interested in internet art history.

I was never a big fan of first-person maze games, but I’m glad I gave Waking Nightmare a chance. It’s visually distinctive, it makes excellent use of its medium, and the music will definitely get stuck in your head.

Opossum Country

~ Kathryn ~ Leave a comment

Opossum Country by Ben Jelter
https://benjelter.itch.io/opossum-country

Opossum Country is a free ten-minute lo-fi horror game about a rural pizza delivery driver who finds himself stranded in an isolated trailer park where something isn’t quite right. If you’re worried that the game is poking fun at the sort of low-income and mentally unbalanced of people who might live in a trailer park, there’s definitely an element of that, but the story goes in a direction that I wasn’t expecting. In the end, the moral of Opossum Country is that you shouldn’t jump to conclusions about a community you don’t understand. I mean, if the game can be said to have a moral. Which it arguably doesn’t. Regardless, the ending is fantastic.

Ben Jelter also made another free ten-minute Game Boy game called The Last Employee, which definitely has a moral: fuck capitalism. This being the case, I’m guessing that Opossum Country was created from a place of deep sympathy for people on the margins of society. This narrative viewpoint is refreshing in its unapologetic portrayal of difference, but Jelter’s sympathy for these characters doesn’t stop the game from being creepy as fuck. The overworld pixel graphics are creative and unsettling, as are the more detailed character portraits.

Opossum Country was made with a program called GB Studio. Not only is it free, but there are also a ton of pay-what-you-want graphics asset packs floating around Itchio, as well as collections of free-to-use chiptunes music that’s compatible with the Game Boy engine. I also found a few pixel art resources for Clip Studio Paint in the form of brushes, templates, and filters. I’m not sure that “just anyone” can make a game as unique and interesting as Opossum Country, but it’s nice to know that there’s nothing stopping you from trying.

A Dark Winter Wander

~ Kathryn ~ Leave a comment

A Dark Winter Wander by Red Skald
https://redskald.itch.io/a-dark-winter-wander

A Dark Winter Wander is a free horror-themed narrative adventure game created with GB Studio, a game creator that replicates the look and feel of retro handheld games. The game’s story is about a girl chasing her sister through a (mostly linear) maze of underground tunnels filled with monsters. Although it’s deliberately unclear what’s going on, I think the protagonist’s sister might have an eating disorder, while she herself is depressed. This isn’t important to the gameplay, but those elements are there from the beginning of the game if you’re sensitive and need to watch out for them.

In any case, you see your sister run off into the woods and decide to go after her. While chasing her, you fall into a hole filled with monsters. You talk to the monsters instead of fighting them, and the game is entirely driven by exploration and dialog. This invites a comparison to Undertale, but all of the monsters in A Dark Winter Wander absolutely wish you harm. The creature designs are great, and the lo-fi sound and graphics contribute to the unsettling atmosphere.

If you don’t follow your sister into the woods, you can actually finish the game in about ten minutes and watch a depressing indie game ending. I did this inadvertently, and it was a downer. I then reset the game, did what it wanted me to do, and played for about an hour. Exploring the monster tunnels is a lot of fun, and you can easily spend more than an hour poking around if you’re interested in seeing everything this game has to offer. The creator has offered free downloads, and I’d recommend downloading a Game Boy emulator so that you can play the game offline and create save states.

The unskippable cut scenes at the beginning of the game feel unnecessarily long, and the writing is a bit clunky at times. I also find the lack of specificity regarding what’s going on with the narrator’s family frustrating. You probably already know if a text-heavy Game Boy horror game that’s a metaphor for depression is for you, so I won’t try to sell it. Still, A Dark Winter Wander is one of the most interesting and engaging GB Studio projects that I’ve found on Itchio, and it’s inspired me to check out more work in this weird little subgenre.