We live in a golden age of video game horror. In 2022, the indie scare increased, and 2023 is about to pick up the pace even more, promising a milestone year (opens in new tab) for big-budget horror. The deluge of disturbing and sometimes downright terrifying setbacks seems unstoppable. But for all their grotesque monstrosities and various displays of trauma hovering over their troubled protagonists, most of these games are instantly classifiable, beholden to a rigid set of tropes and genre conventions.
Despite its unusual perspective and signature melancholic mood, 2022’s breakout indie hit, Signal (opens in new tab)was marketed as a “classic survival horror experience”. The excavation of Hob’s Barrow (opens in new tab), meanwhile, combines a rarely tapped source of inspiration – cinematic folk-horror – with the recognizable trappings of a typical point-and-click adventure game. The shock of the new is tempered with the comfort of the familiar.
This is not necessarily critical. Many memorable games have emerged from this delicate balancing act. But horror thrives on uncertainty, its impact heightened when you’re not quite sure what to expect or how to respond to it. Α glowing enemy weak spot, a clearly designated safe room – these are the kind of commonly accepted conventions that serve to allay players’ fears when faced with the unknown. Little wonder, then, that some of the more disturbing experiences of this recent wave of horror eschew long-held traditions in order to mend precisely that vulnerability, a disoriented uneasiness.
Not that making an unclassifiable horror game inherently precludes you from citing a celebrated classic as an influence. Take last year’s Endoparasitic (opens in new tab)whose debt to Resident Evil is evident in its clumsy inventory and slowly depleting resources, as you make your way through the labs and offices of an evacuated research facility, fighting off bloodthirsty mutants or dodging them as best you can after your ammo runs out.
A single arm attached to your bleeding torso is the only means of locomotion.
Another branch of his lineage is more surprising. You begin your grueling journey after being dismembered by a host of creatures that have infested the asteroid-bound lab. A single arm attached to your bleeding torso is the only means of locomotion, which involves clamping the ground in front of you and clumsily dragging yourself forward using your remaining limb.
As a result, your balance and orientation are all lopsided as the right arm predictably favors one side of the body; you have trouble targeting threats beyond a narrow arc ahead; and reloading weapons becomes a deadly time-consuming and error-prone process. The sheer unwieldyness of actions that, in more straightforward games, are summarily executed via a single button press or nudge of the controller brings Endoparasitic closer to an experimental oddity like QWOP (opens in new tab) than conventional survival horror, but at the same time reinforces the feeling of helplessness. As comical as it is scare-mongering, the clumsiness makes for a unique experience and some very tense moments as the monsters move forward as you laboriously remove each spent grenade individually from your shotgun, then manually grab new ones from your inventory to reload.
Speaking of unusual control schemes, Who is Lila? (opens in new tab)– perhaps the strangest horror title of 2022 – gives you the task of manipulating not arms or legs, but 17 individual facial muscles. William, the high school student you play, describes his plight in the beginning: “I have to make a conscious decision every time I move a muscle”. But William’s biggest problem isn’t so much the inability to channel his emotions; it’s that a sinister entity named Lila, a separate consciousness vying for control of his actions, occasionally takes over and can’t help but broadcast her murderous intent to the rest of the world. Create many misunderstandings and questioning looks when, for example, the news of the disappearance of a classmate, which is whispered among a group of friends, is greeted by the undersigned with a radiant smile.
A high school drama given the David Lynch treatment, your main job is to force the kind of expression on William’s face that will disguise your inner turmoil as nostrils flare, lips twitch and eyes narrow to betray Lila’s malevolent influence. It reminds World of horror (opens in new tab), not only in its use of a monochromatic palette, but also in the way it plays out in short vignettes that gradually reveal more of that twisted universe. With each playthrough, new information becomes available, new locations are unlocked, and Garage Heathen’s very nerve-wracking game takes on the tricky implications of searching the depths of darkness that lie beneath an innocent facade.
Aside from quirky controls and bizarre concepts, another way to develop unconventional horror games is to subvert a popular genre. Walking simulators have been ubiquitous over the last decade and have produced some of the most memorable horror stories SOMA (opens in new tab) and What remains of Edith Finch (opens in new tab). But with Titanic 2 – Orchestra for dying at sea (opens in new tab)Indie developer Flan has adopted the measured pace and combat-free exploration typical of the genre to come up with what could accurately (if inelegantly) be described as an abyssal-soaring-while-suffocating-and-hallucinating sim.
It’s reassuring to see the boundaries of the field expand to embrace games less easily defined: the weird, the unclassifiable, the obscure.
A feverish dream dive into the depths – next to the sinking ocean liner – Titanic 2 is simultaneously eerily calm and deeply disturbing. Several clues, not least a interpretation (opens in new tab) of Celine Dion’s famous anthem caught in a maelstrom of industrial noise suggest that your unseen protagonist is, in fact, Leonardo DiCaprio’s doomed artist, Jack Dawson. Whether the vivid images of giant sea monsters and the alien tongues echoing in his head are real or illusions desperately conjured up by a dying ghost, it remains tantalizingly open to interpretation.
It’s reassuring to see the boundaries of the field expand to embrace games less easily defined: the weird, the unclassifiable, the obscure. And with a number of upcoming releases that don’t fit into the usual categories – the stark dissections of autopsy simulator (opens in new tab)the online hell of Dark web streamer (opens in new tab)the cursed mazes of They speak from the abyss (opens in new tab)—connoisseurs of the bizarre can rest easy knowing that there’s more to video game horror than zombies, abandoned mansions and Lovecraftian first-person shooters.