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Washington is a big state in the American games industry, so the Penny Arcade Expo in Seattle has traditionally been a great convention for smaller games and niche releases. For every Nintendo or Capcom that’s drawing all the attention, there are traditionally 6 to 12 independent developers somewhere else in the venue who’re there to look for a publisher, show off a passion project, and/or make you wonder if you’ve gone insane.
For whatever reason, 2024 was a banner year for horror at PAX West. Every time I went back into the venue, I found another half-dozen games from all over the world, which ranged from escape room simulators to revivals of classic survival horror to tongue-in-cheek parodies. It was a great four days to be a fan of the genre.
I made an effort to check out everything I could while I was at the show. Some of the games weren’t ready for prime time yet, are coming out very soon (i.e. the Dead Rising remake), or were popular enough that I couldn’t get anywhere near them.
Here are write-ups for the 20 games that I got a chance to play, and which I intend to play again as soon as I can.
Centum – Hack the Publisher/Serenity Forge
My first impression of Centum was that there was a real disconnect between its ad copy and the PAX West demo. It was presented as a surreal point-and-click adventure with an unreliable narrator, with the conceit that Centum, in the fiction of its own universe, is an unreleased video game.
Then I sat down to play it and the first challenge was to get a cat off a keyboard so my character could start work. Clearly, we’re on a slow boil here. As I poked around my character’s apartment looking for cat treats or something, Centum started to show its hand. A poster on the wall changed once I’d looked out the window, there was a broken piece of alien tech hidden in the bookcase, and a .bat file on my character’s computer was capable of resetting local reality.
I get the impression that this is the sort of game where no two people will interpret its plot in exactly the same way, but Centum has a low-key sense of unease that’s stuck with me since I played it.
Clock Tower Rewind – WayForward/Limited Run
The first thing I asked at PAX was why Clock Tower, of all things, was making a comeback. Apparently this has been a years-in-the-making passion project for some of the developers at WayForward.
Clock Tower Rewind is an enhanced re-release of the 1995 Super Famicom point-and-click adventure, which is a cult classic of console horror. As an orphan who’s just been adopted by a wealthy recluse, your first visit to your new home is interrupted by a crazed killer with a giant pair of scissors who’s intent on killing everyone he sees. Fun fact: it’s heavily influenced by Dario Argento’s Phenomena.
Rewind marks the first time that the original 1995 Super Famicom game has been officially released in English. (The game that was released as Clock Tower in 1997 is actually Clock Tower II.) You can opt to play through it in the original format, or in a Rewind mode that features save states, an animated opening, and a new theme song performed by Mary Elizabeth McGlynn.
Corpse Party 2: Darkness Distortion – Team GrisGris/Marvelous
Corpse Party 2 has the darkness distortion dubious distinction of being the most disgusting game I played at PAX. In 10 short minutes, its demo packed in two different vomiting scenes, some cadaver abuse, and a sequence that involved fishing a key out of a dirty toilet. It went for horror, terror, and the gross-out, in what street thinkers call the Stephen King Hat Trick.
Darkness Distortion is a stand-alone entry in the Corpse Party series, although fans will spot a few connections between it and previous games. As high school student Haruka Nanami, you’re talked into entering an abandoned hospital to help your buddy Nemu make a YouTube video about the urban legend of “Ayame’s Mercy.” That legend is real enough to potentially kill them all, and it’ll take stealth, wits, and luck for any of them to get out of the hospital alive.
It should be said that the real star of Corpse Party 2’s show is its sound design. It’s made to be played with high-quality headphones, and features some really impressive audio engineering. Even through the noise of the PAX expo hall, several of DD’s effects sounded like they were coming from directly behind me.
Demon Spore – DinoBoss/Null Games
The easiest way to describe Demon Spore is that it’s Smash TV by way of John Carpenter (or Brian Yuzna, if you’re nasty). You’re a scientist whose work has been sabotaged, and as a result, your entire lab is getting eaten by fast-growing mutant flora. You need to find weapons, team up with other survivors, and fight your way to the nearest exit.
Demon Spore is a deliberately challenging twin-stick shooter for up to 4 players. You can use lab equipment to create improvised weapons or fight your way to a firearms cache, but each level is a race against time. Every time you enter a new area, the infection takes over a little bit more of the building, and every room it inhabits is a nearly inescapable death trap.
It’s gory, difficult, and made for multiple runs. Each successful escape unlocks more characters, extra weapons, and more information, until you can finally figure out who’s responsible for unleashing your experiments.
Don’t Be Afraid II – Eneida Games, Cat-astrophe Games
There’s a dark joke at the core of Don’t Be Afraid II. David survived a run-in with a serial killer in the first game, but instead of self-medicating with booze like a normal horror protagonist, he’s actually going to therapy. Unfortunately, it might actually be making things worse.
David’s suffered from chronic nightmares since the events of the original Don’t Be Afraid. When his therapist recommends he try to take a vacation, David books a stay at a nearby resort. On the first night, he wakes up to find he’s been locked inside his hotel room, and the only way out is to solve another gauntlet of sadistic puzzles.
Don’t Be Afraid II is an adventure game with the significant twist that the moment your flashlight goes out, you get choked to death by what appears to be my sleep paralysis demon. Between that and the first 30 seconds of the demo, where you’re immediately dropped into a basement full of murder mannequins, this might be my pick for the least subtle horror game at PAX. That doesn’t mean it’s bad, but if many of these other games are whispering, Don’t Be Afraid II is a scream.
Edge of Sanity – Vixa Games/Daedalic Entertainment
During the Cold War, you’re part of a team that’s sent to resupply a remote lab in Alaska. When you get there, the scientists are all dead, monsters have wrecked the site, and you barely get out intact. By the time you’ve established a base camp, Lovecraftian nightmares have taken over most of Alaska.
Edge of Sanity is one of those games that puts the “survival” in “survival horror.” In addition to smashing interdimensional monsters with a woodsman’s axe, you have to manage your supplies, protect other survivors, scavenge for food and water, and try to not go completely mad.
It’s got a dry sense of humor at times, but even in the PAX demo, there’s a feel to Edge of Sanity like Alaska is slowly being turned into a new biome, and most of the local fauna view you as a prey species. If you’re into the Mythos, keep an eye on this one.
GHOSTS – Visible Games, Limited Run
GHOSTS sounds a little silly when I try to describe it, but it was also responsible for the single most memorable moment I had at PAX.
In GHOSTS, you’re the new camera tech for a reality show, where 5 women go into supposedly haunted locations to look for supernatural phenomena. Your job is to keep the audience focused by making sure you’re always showing the most interesting thing that’s happening on your camera feeds.
My assumption, when I played the demo, was that I’d trigger something on-camera if I hit a certain audience threshold. Eventually, the guy running the booth had to tell me to turn around in-game. I’d been so focused on the screens that I hadn’t noticed what was happening right behind me. The stars of GHOSTS weren’t in any danger, but I was.
GHOSTS was funded via a successful Kickstarter campaign in 2021, and created by Jed Shepherd, the co-writer on the 2020 horror movie Host. The final version of the game is planned to feature a unique gimmick where you can only play it as intended – in real time, with no saves, ironman-style – if you start at 10 PM in your time zone.
God Save Birmingham – Ocean Drive Games
It’s 15th-century England and the zombie apocalypse is here. Some unknown pestilence has killed and reanimated everyone else in your village, from the priests to the peasants. You’re the only one left, and you’re some random farmer with a pitchfork and a dream. You’re left to survive by any means necessary, and when you die, the game is over.
I spoke with Sungchul Park, the CTO at the Korea-based Ocean Drive Games (Lost Eidolons), while playing the God Save Birmingham demo at PAX. Park freely admits that his development team was inspired by several other zombie-themed survival games, particularly Project Zomboid. It’s an attempt to put a fresh spin on the genre by setting it well before the modern day, when the best weapon you’re likely to find is a pitchfork.
As a result, GSB really revives the idea of the slow-moving Romero zombie as a genuine threat. Individually, they’re no big deal, but they’re everywhere and tend to move in groups. You also have to keep a close eye on your fatigue levels in GSB, as it’s easy to overexert yourself and end up unable to fight or run. If you’re still interested in zombie survival but have had enough of rationing ammunition, GSB might be enough of a change of pace to get you back into the apocalypse.
Hyde’s Haunt & Seek – Smol Games/Daedalic Entertainment
This is more Tim Burton spooky than anything else, but it’s an asymmetric multiplayer game where one team is working to feed the other to a clown monster. As far as I’m concerned, that’s horror.
In Hyde’s Haunt & Seek, one player takes the role of a paranormal investigator, who’s searching the area for clues with the help of their trusty flashlight. Everyone else is a ghost, so they’re usually all invisible, and they’re trying to keep the investigator from solving the mystery.
The investigator can temporarily banish ghosts with his flashlight, but the clock is on the ghosts’ side. If time runs out, the ghosts can trap the investigator and try to summon a monster to finish them off. It’s a fast-paced, brisk party game with a fairly forgiving learning curve.
I won my round at PAX, by the way. Suck it, ghosts.
Heartworm – Vincent Adinolfi
Sam is a photographer who’s recently suffered a terrible loss. As a result, she tracks down an abandoned house from an urban legend, which supposedly has a room in it that will let you speak to the dead. When Sam enters that room, she’s taken to an abandoned suburb full of strange lights, TVs tuned to dead channels, electronic ghosts, and her own twisted memories.
Heartworm is the first project from solo developer Vincent Adinolfi, who’s been working on it for the better part of the last 5 years. It’s the latest in a series of indie games that take their inspiration from late ‘90s survival horror, particularly the first Silent Hill. According to Adinolfi, Heartworm was also influenced by the early Halloween films, the photography of Gregory Crewdson, and R.L. Stine.
This has been on my radar since its Steam Next Fest demo last January. Primarily, it’s because I’m a sucker for old-school survival horror, but Heartworm makes a point of not stopping there. Adinolfi hasn’t just run the Silent Hill playbook and called it a day; instead, Heartworm is a mildly autobiographical story about grief, memory, and the dying art of physical media. It’s one to watch.
Love Eternal – brika/Ysbryd Games
Go into this one totally blind, if you can. Love Eternal is a deliberately challenging platformer in the same vein as Super Meat Boy or The End is Nigh, where you can shift your personal gravity to navigate through and past mazes full of spikes and laser traps.
What makes it a horror game is its deliberately subtle presentation. Love Eternal initially doesn’t look like it’ll have any plot at all, or like it might be a dream sequence, but the end of the demo came with a couple of sharp twists that turned the entire experience on its head. I don’t know if I’ll be able to beat Love Eternal, but I’m genuinely curious about how it ends.
The developer, brika, is a two-person team. Toby Alden previously developed several short platformers and released them on Itch.io, and Sam Alden used to be an animation storyboarder for Cartoon Network. Love Eternal is their first major production.
Mouthwashing – Wrong Organ/Critical Reflex
Critical Reflex didn’t have a booth at this year’s PAX West. Instead, it was holed up in a nearby hotel and only available by appointment. When I got into the room, the first thing they handed me was Mouthwashing, a psychological thriller about insane space truckers.
You’re one of the 5 crewmen aboard a cargo ship that’s on a long-haul shipping run. After six months in space, your pilot crashes the ship in a failed attempt at a murder-suicide, but only puts himself in intensive care. That leaves the rest of you trapped inside a crashed ship with no realistic hope of rescue, rapidly dwindling supplies, and a cargo hold that, instead of containing anything remotely useful, is full of 15% ABV mouthwash.
The rest of the game is about how this situation manages to deteriorate even further, as told through flashbacks, hallucinations, and the occasional brief flash of actual reality. It’s a game about living through a slow-motion, six-month train wreck, and I found it hard to look away.
The Occultist – DALOAR/Daedalic Entertainment
This was one of the hardest demos to get to at the show. The Occultist is a first-person adventure game by the new Spanish studio DALOAR, which features Doug Cockle (the voice of Geralt in The Witcher) as the title character.
Alan Rebels is a paranormal investigator who, it must be said, might take himself a little too seriously. (If John Constantine met this guy, Constantine would never stop laughing.) When his father disappears, Alan’s only lead to his whereabouts is to go to his hometown on the abandoned, cursed island Godstone.
It’s worth saying that when I say The Occultist is an adventure game, I mean that in the sense that it’s built around some tricky puzzles. Alan’s main tool for investigating the island is his pendant, which gives him the ability to look through it and see the recent past. You’ll need that and some investigative chops to solve the mysteries of Godstone, which includes laying some of its ghosts to rest.
oneway.exe – Disordered Media
Note: this used to be known as >one way, or More Than one way, before it rebranded on September 10.
In oneway.exe, you’re a researcher on the trail of a piece of lost Internet lore. The title application is a game that was left unfinished when all 3 of its developers suddenly disappeared. In the hopes of finding some information that might lead you to the developers’ whereabouts, you fire up the game and get much more than you bargained for.
oneway is essentially a horror anthology, where each character in its cast represents a different level and potentially a different genre. As you progress through the game, you’ll get little snippets of information about what’s happening and why it concerns you through snatches of instant-messenger conversations and comments in code. It’s an adventure through a version of the Internet that doesn’t exist anymore, where you’re under attack by scratch-built digital legends.
Regular Home Renovation Simulator – Substandard Shrimp/Critical Reflex
One of the things I appreciate about modern video games is the implicit assurance that anything with the word “simulator” in its name is usually as unrealistic as possible. Regular Home Renovation Simulator triples down on this, as 3 out of the 4 words in its title are lies.
You’re the guy who shows up to fix the damage after cultists, murderers, or murder cultists wreck somebody’s hunting cabin or country manor. Take out the trash, repaint the walls, clean up the blood, and once in a while, accidentally resummon something from beyond the veil of night. It’s got the same nice meditative quality as “cozy” games like Powerwash Simulator, interspersed with moments of sheer terror or slowly mounting dread.
There was a little jank in the PAX demo of RHRS, but I’m told a lot of it will be ironed out for its eventual release. I didn’t know this at the time, but the Steam version is a rework and expansion of a project from a 2022 game jam, and the original prototype is currently playable via Itch.io.
Slay the Princess: The Pristine Cut – Black Tabby Games
The first big surprise of my PAX this year was realizing halfway through a casual conversation that I was talking to Abby Howard, the artist and co-creator of Slay the Princess. She and her husband Tony Howard-Arias were at the show to hype the game’s upcoming console debut, which will coincide with the PC version of the game getting one last major update.
According to Howard-Arias, the Pristine Cut came about when “we realized there was more to do.” This is officially the final version of Slay the Princess, which grows the game by roughly 35%. This includes revising and expanding a couple of “underbaked” characters from Chapters 2 and 3; improving the ending; and adding more animated sequences.
Slay the Princess has been a solid success for Black Tabby Games, with the Howards estimating it’s sold around 400,000 copies on PC. After The Pristine Cut launches on consoles this fall, the Howards told me their plan is to return to work on the last three episodes of their episodic 2021 horror game Scarlet Hollow.
Slitterhead – Bokeh Game Studio/Marvelous
I’d wondered what he meant when Keiichiro Toyama said Slitterhead isn’t “the typical horror game.” Now that I’ve played some of it, I can hazard a guess: it’s because you’re the scariest thing in it.
You play Slitterhead as a bodiless spirit called the Hyoki, which can only interact with the physical world by possessing people. This is in the service of hunting down various demons that are preying upon the citizens of the fictional Chinese city of Kowlong, but it also opens the door for you to do terrible things to people. I possessed a guy so I could fight an eight-foot-tall tentacle monster, then ate a few stray hits and jumped to another host right before the monster beat the last guy to death. That man got turned to paint and he never knew why.
The combat in Slitterhead is the focal point of the experience, where you use your hosts’ blood as weapons in a careful exchange of parries, dodges, and devastating counterattacks. It’s not at all what I expected from the team at Bokeh, which has a few giants of Japanese horror games on it, but it’s evocative, gory, and surreal.
It’s also a game where you hit things and people with petrified chunks of blood, so anybody who calls the combat in Slitterhead “visceral” has to go sit in the time-out corner.
The Stone of Madness – The Game Kitchen/Tripwire Interactive
Those wacky funsters who made Blasphemous are at it again, with another quietly disturbing video game about the dark side of faith.
In 1799, a Catholic priest is unjustly imprisoned by the corrupt monks who run an asylum in the Pyrenees. The priest, Alfredo, resolves to escape from the asylum so he can tell the outside world what’s happening there, and to do so, enlists help from 4 other inmates.
The Stone of Madness is a stealth-based tactical RPG where every room plays out like a series of puzzles. Each member of your team has their strengths and weaknesses, including circumstances that will quickly drive them insane. One woman will cheerfully murder every guard in your path, but the sight of their bleeding corpses will unnerve Alfredo to the point where he’s useless; another character is enormously strong, but cannot function at all in the dark. You have to carefully balance your approach to keep all 5 of your characters alive, sane, and active.
Threshold – Julien Eveillé/Critical Reflex
This was the first of several games I played at PAX this year that could be usefully described as “labor issues horror.” Threshold is a game about shutting up, doing your job, and maybe staying alive.
It’s your first day at work, and you’ve been stationed on the top of a mountain somewhere to keep the trains running on time. The air is thin, your tasks are repetitive, and it’s not entirely clear why your job is so unnecessarily dangerous. Maybe you’ll figure it out along the way, or maybe you’ll screw up your task rotation and quietly die of oxygen deprivation before your shift’s over.
Threshold is a solo project by Julien Eveillé, a level designer at Crytek who previously worked on the Dishonored series at Arkane. It’s one of the more deeply weird things I played at this year’s show; in retrospect, it feels more like an abstract play than a video game. It’s a “cozy” crafting game as written by Samuel Beckett, with set design by the guys who made HROT.
Whisper Mountain Outbreak – Toge Productions
Toge Productions is an Indonesian indie studio that might be best-known in the United States for “cozy” games like Coffee Talk and A Space for the Unbound. With Whisper Mountain Outbreak, Toge heads back into the zombie apocalypse for its first horror game since 2016’s Infectonator.
In Whisper Mountain, a strange fog has zombified most of the population of Jakarta. You play as a squad of survivors who’re out to gather supplies and investigate the cause of the fog, which is broadly hinted to be the result of some occult ritual.
Whisper Mountain plays like an Indonesian spiritual sequel to Capcom’s Resident Evil: Outbreak series, with some Left 4 Dead thrown into the mix. Bullets are scarce, inventory slots are scarcer, and you occasionally get jumped by multiple waves of fast-moving mutants. It’s perfectly playable solo, but you’ll want a couple of friends along for the ride to juggle quest items, carry the extra guns, and mow down the zombies when the hordes arrive.
