You know, I played 15 hours of Andromeda when it came out and I thought it was fine. (I just stopped because I didn’t have time for such a big game at that time... and also my laptop wasn’t completely up to the task.) Andromeda compares quite favorably to the original Mass Effect, for example, and since later games in…

Backlogged: Light at the End of the Tunnel Edition

I’ve finished the Missing Link DLC for Deux Ex: Human Revolution. 

I finished Knack. There’s elements of a good game in there with the visuals (soft palette, environments) and co-op but with the fighting being the main component (platforming barely comes into it), it needed to be much better than it was to elevate the game from average to good. The most annoying part is that the game…

Salutations~!

I wouldn’t want a group spoiling my spoops, but if that’s the only way you can bring yourself to play the game, I say go for it. RE7 is an excellent game, even more so in VR, and is still great well after it stops being scary. If you’re not inclined toward horror games, I don’t think there’s anything wrong with doing…

I can’t attest to having played the game in VR but I am a huge wimp when it comes to horror games, so I went through a similar anxiety with RE7.

there were moments in that game on the PS1 version that would be randomly generated and utterly unbeatable. My friend and I found a small room filled with acid spitters and had to restart a map and get a new layout in order to advance. Good times. That game should have been remastered yesterday.

Stress is a good way to feed fear. Games like DS, RE4, A:I, I can actually enjoy as other Horror tropes barely register with me. Tension. Fear of the reset. The anguish of thinking I made it and all of a sudden not. That I can feed off of. A:I for example had me white knuckling my controller the whole game.

The sounds of the xenomorphs in the Doom Alien skin was great.

Until Dawn is so awesome. The kids get all the focus, but there are great gameplay touches that go unsung, like the totems that give you clues about what might be coming next, or keeping your controller absolutely still during hiding, or the investigative aspects (newspapers, etc) that help you get a full picture of th…

The music for the first few levels inside the church was worse, made me incredibly tense as a kid. The Tristram theme was almost relaxing after a trip into the dungeons. One thing I’ll never forget: opening a seemingly random door, seeing a bloody floor strewn with the carcasses of villagers, followed by a demonic…

Sir Stewart Wallace as himself never fails to amuse me no matter how many times I see it.

At the risk of overkill, I’d add a 4th Resident Evil game to the list: RE 7. Even the DLC (“21", “The Room”, “Daughters”) gives me chills. The new, photo-realistic game engine sells the entire switch to First Person, and few games gave me a panic attack quite like running and hiding from Jack in that house in…

I feel like Alone in the Dark has aged very poorly, and that Resident Evil 1 (even the original version) did everything AitD attempted far better. It may have started the horror game tropes, but so many games have surpassed it, AitD doesn’t resonate with any fans of the genre anymore. I could be wrong, but the lack of…

Resident Evil 1 REmake? Hell yes. Dead Space 1 and Resident Evil 2? Jump scares at its best and most surprising. Bloodborne? Definitely. Getting captured into the Hypogean Gaol part of Yar’Ghul is one of the scariest parts of any game I remember. I’ll even add Dark Souls 3 to that one, which has a much creepier and…

It’s not a horror game, but the third level of Star Wars: Dark Forces really freaked me out. It took place in Anoat City, and Kyle had to go through the sewers to reach his goal. Of course, the sewer was full of dianogas (dianogi? dianogae?) that would pop up from the murky water and fuck up your shit. You’d get a…

Manhunt is probably the only game I had to stop playing, not just out of genuine dread but to stop my soul from getting sucked into a dark void of apathy and nihilism. I revisit it every Halloween. Still freaks me out to this day.

System Shock 2 scared the bejeezus out of me more than any game I’ve played including many others in that list. Between staying up far later than sane to keep playing (resulting in being mostly useless the next day) and regularly waking the missus up with my pathetic shrieking while playing in the wee hours of the…

Good lord, Alien: Isolation. That game perfectly implemented the slow burn of tension; the first level is just you walking around in the ship learning how the controls work and starting to get scared of the dark corners. Then the second level introduces human enemies - but in contrived, harmless moments where you just…