News by Matt S. The Taiwanese developer behind the rather excellent Detention are back with Devotion, which is being billed as an “atmospheric first-person horror game set in 1980’s Taiwan”. In other words, much as Detention was both a love letter to their homeland and culture and expose on the…
Read MoreNews by Matt S. Back in 2015, a game called Monstrum was released on PC. A survival horror game that sets players the goal of escaping an abandoned cargo ship, this one’s point of difference was that it was procedurally generated, with randomised level design that meant no two playthroughs…
Read MoreReview 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…
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