Review by Ginny W. Horror games are a dime a dozen on Steam, and the ecosystem is positively flooded by studios that think jump-scares and unsettling music are the pinnacle of the genre. I’ve played my share of them over the years, and I’ve always preferred titles that instill fear…
Read MoreReview by Matt S. One of the most common thematic features in the horror genre, in literature and film, is sex. There are several reasons for this. Horror generally taps into the dominant socio-cultural features of society at the time on either a literal or metaphoric level, and certainly the…
Read MoreReview by Matt S. Dontnod’s modus operandi is to put players through difficult moral choices. It was brilliantly executed in the masterful Life is Strange, but then that game was effectively a choose your own adventure. And as we all know, games without “gameplay” are immediately relegated to the hyper-niche.…
Read MoreReview by Matt S. I sympathise with any developer that tackles hell as a topic and setting for their work. Especially the Judeo-Christian concept of hell. See, the problem with hell is that it, by its very nature, needs to be depraved. It needs to be shocking, grotesque and extreme.…
Read MoreNews by Matt S. The PlayStation 4 has no shortage of quality games (a new one, Agony, released just this week). A new trailer has emerged for yet another one that promises to be really, really good. S.O.N will be a PlayStation 4 exclusive (at least, at first), and looks…
Read MoreNews by Matt S. There have been some truly horrible attempts at bringing the noir literary genre to video games, and yet I continue to hold out hope that each new “noir” game really nails it. The next attempt at doing noir in video game form is the psychological horror…
Read MoreNews by Matt S. I like my horror smart. Good horror shouldn’t just be about mindless killing – it should weave psychological stories, tales of morality, address social themes. Even within the slasher or monster horror genre, there’s a vast difference between those that have some kind of intelligent basis…
Read MoreReview by Harvard L. I don’t want to be too hard on Black Painted Games – it’s a four-person team from Ukraine with a love of cats that decided to push a pulpy science-horror sidescroller out into the world: there’s something so lovely and earnest about that. The game in…
Read MoreReview by Lindsay M. It’s quiet in outer space. Deafeningly so. But inside space stations, all becomes bustling again. The whir of machines. Voices traveling down hallways. Doors opening and closing. Beeping computers. Cutlery clanking. So when you enter a large research station to only the sound of the engines,…
Read MoreReview by Harvard L. Radiation Island is a survival game the same way that Dead Island is an RPG – it’s not the finest example of its genre, the execution can be a little less than pristine at times, and yet at its core lies a compelling gameplay loop which…
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