Tag: indie 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.

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).

Flesh, Blood, & Concrete

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Flesh, Blood, & Concrete
https://waxwing0.itch.io/fbc

Flesh, Blood, & Concrete is a free-to-play RPG Maker adventure game that bills itself as “an apartment building exploration simulator.” During its 45-minute playtime, the game delves into themes of isolation, mental illness, and existential dread within the confines of a decaying apartment complex.

Players take on the role of Lera, a 28yo architect whose car breaks down in the snow. While seeking refuge from the cold, Lera meets a girl named Nika who, inexplicably, is dressed like an anime maid. Nika invites Lera to warm up inside her “house,” a giant abandoned apartment block at the edge of an unnamed town. As Lera, the player is given free rein to explore the building. The deeper inside you get, the stranger the architecture becomes, and it turns out that the “flesh and blood” of the title are not merely symbolic.

Flesh, Blood, & Concrete has no combat or puzzles. Instead, players explore the building and interact with the environment. In essence, your job is to collect items, which you can examine in the game’s small menu screen at your leisure. As you move from floor to floor and poke around all the vacant units, you gradually piece together Lera’s backstory through environmental storytelling and occasional conversations with Nika.

While the game’s pacing might feel a bit slow, the deliberate sense of space between incidents gives the player time to reflect on what exactly is going on with Lera. In my interpretation, Lera’s interactions with Nika hint at her desire to flee from the adult world, and I don’t think it’s a stretch to suggest that the dilapidated building is a manifestation of the intensity of Lera’s depression. At the end of the game, the player is confronted with a symbolic choice (the mechanics of which are explained in the creator’s spoiler-free guide), and what constitutes the “good” ending is open to interpretation.

In keeping with the bleakness of the game’s themes, its pixel art is rendered in muted tones. The corridors are desolate stretches of flickering lights and peeling wallpaper, and the individual apartment interiors start off as charming and cozy but gradually descend deeper into the uncanny. The game’s soundtrack complements its visuals, with a blend of ambient sounds and minimalist synth piano pieces working to create a melancholic mood. Any sense of nostalgic coziness won’t last, however – some of the game’s visuals are sublimely gory. 

As an aside, I recently played the indie narrative adventure game Indika, and I was thinking that I’d love to see more games set in Eastern Europe. Flesh, Blood, & Concrete is a universal story, but the specificity of the game’s Russian setting adds a unique and interesting flavor to its narrative and visuals. I also appreciate that this “apartment exploration simulator” takes the darker aspects of mental illness seriously but still delights in the playfulness of its morbid style of creative expression. It’s one of the more intriguing RPG Maker horror games I’ve encountered, and I’d recommend giving it a shot if you can handle the (literal) viscerality of its imagery.

Vacant

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Vacant
https://doublecrow.itch.io/vacant

Vacant is a free-to-play 2D narrative adventure game that takes about 35 minutes to finish. You play as a camerawoman named Elena who accompanies her friend Priya to a hotel that was abandoned shortly after it was built. Priya runs a ghost hunting video channel, and she wants to make it big by solving the mystery of the unexplained disappearances of Masthill Lodge.

Following a short hike through the woods, Elena and Priya enter the abandoned hotel, which has two floors and a basement. There’s a kitchen and a few staff rooms on the first floor, and the guestrooms are on the second floor. The space is large enough to be fun to explore but small enough to be manageable. All points of interaction are clearly marked, and there are no puzzles. The occasional dialogue choices are fun but don’t seem to affect the story, which is fairly linear.

After you poke around a bit, Elena and Priya have a heart-to-heart talk about why Priya makes these videos despite her firm belief that ghosts don’t exist. Her work is about the craft and the connection with her audience, she says, giving a perfectly reasonable explanation for why so many people enjoy ghost hunting videos.

Regardless, there’s something not quite right about Masthill Lodge. How did 54 people disappear here, exactly? And why has no information about any of them turned up in the ten years since?

The tension comes to a head when a man suddenly appears outside the lodge. “Don’t make a sound,” Priya says, and this is when the strength of the medium comes into play. As the player, you have to move forward, and your choices are limited for the worst possible reasons. I don’t generally get creeped out by horror games, but let me be honest – this one got me.

The writing in Vacant is excellent, and the characters are human and believable. The pixel graphics and sound design contribute to the subtly creepy atmosphere. The pacing is perfect, with a good balance of character drama, humor, mystery, and horror. The ending is fantastic.

There’s no way to save your progress, so you’ll need to sit down and play the whole story in one go. I didn’t mind, as the game is so well crafted that it’s easy to become immersed in the fiction. If you’re a fan of the character writing of Night in the Woods or the magical realism of The Magnus Archives, I’d definitely recommend checking out Vacant.

Blackout

~ Kathryn

Blackout
https://freshgames.itch.io/blackout

Blackout is a Halloween-themed point-and-click adventure game that you can play in your browser or download for free.

You play as a teenage witch who falls from the roof of a house while trying to snatch a feather from a crow. She loses her memory during her tumble to a second-floor balcony, and she’s surprised to find that the house is filled with corpses. The electricity seems to have been cut, and it’s too dark to see anything clearly. Your job as the player is to guide the witch through the haunted house and get the lights on so she can figure out what happened.  

Once the lights are back on, you’re free to explore the house a second time to see what’s actually going on. This is a super fun twist, and it’s what really sells the game for me. The tone completely shifts, and the ending is fantastic. I hope it doesn’t spoil the story to say that it’s just as much comedy as it is horror.  

Even though your character is in the dark, the game’s 16-bit pixel art is bright and colorful. Each room of the house is a pleasure to explore. There are enough points of interest to provide flavor, but the graphics are designed to help the important puzzle pieces stand out. The puzzles are mostly self-explanatory – use the footstool to reach the key on the shelf, etc. – but some are silly and surprising. The writing in this game is just as charming as the art, and I really enjoyed the time I spent in this weird little house.

Blackout probably takes twenty minutes to play if you know what you’re doing. Since there’s not much guidance, I got stuck a few times, and it took me about 45 minutes to finish the game. I’m grateful to ( this ) short video walkthrough on YouTube for helping me figure out the endgame puzzle, which is very clever but only makes sense in retrospect once the lights are back on.

2024 Horror Games Post on Sidequest

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There’s a chill in the air as the twilight lingers and the moon glows bright in the autumn sky. What better time to crouch in front of your computer and scare yourself silly? For intrepid digital ghost hunters, Sidequest presents eight eerie games that are free to play on itch.io and short enough to occupy an intermission between deep dives into creepypasta wikis…

I was thrilled to have an opportunity to write another piece for Sidequest showcasing a curated collection of indie horror games. If you’re interested, you can check out the list here:

💻 https://sidequest.zone/2024/10/01/eight-short-horror-games-on-itchio/

NextDoor

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NextDoor
https://broelbrak.itch.io/nextdoor

NextDoor is a spooky 2D interactive story game based on one of Junji Itō’s short horror manga. It’s free to download or play in your browser, and it takes about ten to fifteen minutes to read.

You play as a college student living in a rundown apartment building. The student is unable to concentrate because of the loud music blaring in the apartment above hers, so she finally snaps and goes to complain. The upstairs tenant is an asshole who refuses to turn down his stereo because his next-door neighbor has never said a word to him about the noise. If you can convince his neighbor to complain, the manchild gripes, perhaps he might listen to what you have to say.

The problem is that the next-door neighbors are decidedly unfriendly. Another tenant in the building says that there’s actually a group of women in that apartment, but they’re very quiet, and no one has ever spoken with them. Perhaps it’s not the best idea to attract their attention…

Despite its limited scope, the environment design of NextDoor is nicely done and more than sufficiently creepy. Ironically, the music is quite good, and the sound design is better. The character animations are a pleasure to watch, especially when the player gets to see more of the mysterious next-door neighbor.

“The Lady Next Door” is from Junji Itō’s collection Mimi’s Tales of Terror, and it’s a fun play on a category of Japanese urban legends that take the form of “here’s some weird shit I saw in a Shōwa-era (built before the 1990s) apartment building.” Itō transforms the tropes of these non sequitur “weird shit I saw” stories into a cautionary tale, and it’s delightfully cathartic to witness the unnecessarily harsh punishment of the transgressor. Because seriously, fuck that guy.

NextDoor’s adaptation of this manga is interesting in that it configures the college student as the transgressor. By association, you the player are the transgressor as well, and it’s fun to push the college student forward into increasingly bad decisions. She doesn’t die, but she most definitely sees some weird shit.

There’s one (very mild) jumpscare in the game, and it’s a cameo from my favorite Junji Itō manga, Junji Ito’s Cat Diary: Yon & Mu. Yon & Mu is exactly what you would expect from a cute autobio pet manga drawn by Junji Itō, and it’s marvelous. It’s always a pleasure to have an unexpected encounter with one of these adorable hellbeasts.