You get your stereotypical jocks, nerds, mean girls and the obvious Final Girl (with, of course, exceptions that subvert the roles). So here’s the thing with slasher movies there’s very little time to build up most of the characters. And that strength comes in the form of its cast of characters. The fact Until Dawn is structured around a very well-established horror medium is its greatest strength. So it’s tropey from the get-go, then, but don’t let this put you off. Then, jump to the present day where the aftermath and effects of said tragedy are very much present. It starts with your typical horror prologue, one year before the story is set, where a great tragedy befalls a group of hapless teenagers. It’s a bit like Goddard and Whedon’s Cabin in the Woods, albeit somewhat less meta in its execution, and more in the way it works and how the player experiences it. Until Dawn is a typical ‘teens in a cabin’ slasher story until it isn’t. Most of the games I want to look at are excellent examples of the genre, and come highly recommended. And an exploration-based narrative game which uses an oft-cited but surprisingly rarely used setting as its basis. A dark and miserable tale about death and the afterlife that uses tech in interesting ways. A lonely, isolated zombie apocalypse that hammers home the desperation of survival. A Lovecraftian horror that twists and subverts HP’s already-twisted creations. We have an incredibly tight, characterful slasher story. The list I’ve compiled here is an interesting one all of the games use established horror tropes or fictional canons to create their scares, and all of them do it exceptionally well. What is there is often fantastic, and in 2015 alone there have been a number of mainstream, well-known horror games which have blown me away. But in some ways, I think horror fans have it great right now. The number of weird one-offs have dropped off, and while plenty exist in the indie scene on PC/Mac/Linux, they’re often of questionable quality. So yes, it’s easy to get despondent about the genre if you’re a long-time fan or follower. But at least we’re getting a spiritual successor to Clock Tower.
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And Silent Hill… well, let’s not reopen that wound. The last Forbidden Siren game we had was around the launch of the PS3. The latter is really, really bad by the way.
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#Must play horror games series#
Especially on console, we don’t get that many weird and wonderful horror series any more, the dangerously unsettling atmospheres of your Clock Towers and Haunting Grounds, to the bizarre oddities of things like Michigan: Report from Hell or Ghost Vibration.
#Must play horror games ps2#
It’s easy to bring up horror games and think the genre isn’t quite as good as in its heyday, the classic PS2 era. As far back as I can remember, I’ve adored the pursuit of being scared, of trying to find things that absolutely terrify me in an otherwise safe, comfortable space. I mean, I make horror games for starters.