Connor Sherlock & Cameron Kunzelman, 2017

Set deep in the woods of the US state of New England, Marginalia is an elegant walking simulator that really does make you feel like you're lost in a forest.

At first, red lampposts mark out a forest trail, each conjuring a new, fully voiced, narrative snippet. As you start piecing together the nature of the forest and memories that you're exploring, both the glowing markers that guide you through the dark and the story of the narrator's missing boyfriend begin to take on a stranger, more otherworldly tenor with shades of cosmic horror.

There are no jump scares, and the mood is one of ominous mystery, rather than full-on terror as you explore the vast forest. The ambient soundtrack is excellent and, for me, brought to mind Cult of Luna's more synth-driven moments.

Marginalia takes just over half an hour to complete, and there are no alternate endings (unless, like me, you fall off a big cliff and end up accidentally exploring a ravine instead of the mountain peak that everything's leading to).

Either way, the story is the same. The narrative is static. Interaction and emergent gameplay elements here are all about how you explore the deep woods. I managed to get myself turned around in the darkness, a familiar experience to anyone who's taken a half-familiar road too late in the day.

Marginalia a one-shot with no saves and no restarts, bar Steam Deck's suspend. However, you'll probably want to play this one straight through without too many distractions.

I had a fun time with it on the Steam Deck while keeping someone else company, but it's much more absorbing on a big ultrawide display, or at least in a dimly lit room, all alone.

Buy it on itchio for $6: https://connor-sherlock.itch.io/marginalia (includes the fantastic OST and a Steam key, get this one!) If you bought the Bundle For Ukraine in March 2022, you already have a copy (sans Steam key).

Alternatively, buy it on Steam for 4.99€: https://store.steampowered.com/app/889280/Marginalia/

Screenshots

#LinuxGaming #HorrorGames #WalkingSimulators #SteamDeck #LGBTQgames #ShortGames #HauntedGames

Horror Soft, 1990

Every movie and TV series got a computer game license in the early 1990s, and these were rarely good. Horror Soft's Elvira: Mistress of the Dark was a rare exception.

It doesn't have all that much to do with 1988 horror-comedy film of the same name, but that's really not a problem. Like the film, Elvira has inherited property and has found a recipe book of spells that she can tap into.

This time, however, it's a castle in England, and instead of being up against conservative US America and a scheming warlock, Elvira is facing off against mediaeval witch-queen Emelda and the unquiet dead that she's brought along with her, conveniently allowing this modern-set game to have the look and feel of a fantasy RPG.

To tackle this, the Mistress of the Dark has... placed a small ad in the local paper and hired the first person to come along and answer it. That's you. You don't get a name, and you don't get to be Elvira, but you do get to interact with her.

This is one of my favourite games that I've never finished. I adore the lush atmosphere, the lovingly rendered B-movie gore, the adventure-game/flick-screen dungeon crawling RPG hybrid gameplay and interface, fantastic soundtrack, and the presence of bisexual icon Elvira.

It is proper hard, though – combat is in real time, enemies respawn, you only get limited magical reagents, and dozens of gory deaths await you.

While all this is going on, you have a series of adventure puzzles to work out, many of them by gathering information from books and conversation. It's not always immediately clear where to use specific items, however, and some are single-use and can be used in the wrong place.

Horror Soft would later rebrand as Adventure Soft and continue making seminal British adventure games, notably the Simon the Sorcerer series.

I'm strongly tempted to throw this on the Steam Deck and officially declare that Halloween 2022 will not be over until I've finished it. Wish me luck with the touch controls.

Buy it for 4.99€ on GOG – https://www.gog.com/fr/game/elvira_mistress_of_the_dark

Or with its sequel for 8.49€ – https://www.gog.com/en/game/elviras_horror_bundle

Either way, play it on more recent hardware using ScummVM: https://www.scummvm.org/ (Your preferred DosBox is also fine. Works fine in FreeDOS on vintage kit, too.)

Screenshots

I have entirely misplaced my extensive collection of proper screenshots, so here it is running on 3DS.

#ScummVM #3DS #DOS #DOSBox #DOSgames #AdventureGames #HorrorGames #DungeonCrawler #Elvira #RetroGaming

Silicon Knights, 1996

This melodramatic, bloody and gothic vampire action-RPG for PlayStation and Windows 95 epitomised the “games for grown-ups” zeitgeist surrounding Sony's console, and is a fantastic reminder that grimdark can (and arguably should) also be fun.

A nobleman murdered and transformed into a vengeful vampire, our antihero Kain is set with the task of restoring peace to the doomed land of Nosgoth by slaughtering the Circle of Nine demented keepers of

Its perspective, puzzles and upgradable stats, spells and abilities always feel to me like someone started by asking “what if Zelda, only metal?”

Exactly how bloody a trail of slaughter you leave behind you is up to you, and there are no significant consequences for putting entire villages to the sword.

Kain never feels overly fragile, and you can restore your health by feed on living, human foes once you get them to the brink of death.

The top-down isometric graphics are dripping with atmosphere and I'm a huge fan of games that use this perspective.

Although you can't get in much casual chat with NPCs, Nosgoth feels like a vibrant, living (...dying?) world, and combat is very satisfying.

The 3D-rendered cut scenes have not exactly aged well, but nonetheless have that hauntingly lo-fi PS1 era charm.

Although it starts by railroading you along a fixed path, the game's plot becomes more convoluted and its world more open as you progress. I'm having a lot of fun with this replay.

Once out of print, Blood Omen was hard to come by for many years, following a legal battle over rights to the game's intellectual property between Silicon Knights and publisher Crystal Dynamics, which ultimately hung to the Legacy of Kain series.

Fortunately, you can now buy it on GOG for 6.99€: https://www.gog.com/game/blood_omen_legacy_of_kain

It works nicely with both joypad and mouse on Pop!_OS Linux via Lutris using the GOG version installer at https://lutris.net/games/blood-omen-legacy-of-kain/ (lutris:blood-omen-legacy-of-kain-gog)

The series would never return to Blood Omen's gameplay or graphical style. Although the sequels retained the setting, characters and atmosphere, the first in the series remains my favourite.

Screenshots

#LinuxGaming #ActionAdventure #Lutris #PS1 #HorrorGames #ActionAdventure #HackAndSlack #Vampires #RetroGaming

Mia Blais-Côté, 2018

Hir Corruption is an extremely short bilingual (fr/en) interactive story written in visual novel engine Ren'py, although it's not a VN in the strict sense.

You are disturbed by a mental connection from another world, where the game's protagonist has found themselves in a dire situation in a famously haunted hotel. If you answer hir plea, it becomes your job to monitor hir vital signs and guide hir to safety. There are seven distinct endings, most of them going from bad to worse, and one of which I got unexpectedly by tapping in the wrong place.

The writing's enjoyable in both languages, particularly on some of the bad endings and on the stairway sequence. However, getting the good ending was surprisingly hard, because one of the choices it hinges on really doesn't signpost the fact that it's any “better” than its alternative in terms of in-game logic. Fortunately, the meat of the story is in your less wholesome decisions.

Rather than offering a language selection screen, Quebecois author Mia Blais-Côté has opted to display both French and English text on-screen. I liked this approach more than I expected to, although I ended up playing the game mostly using the French text, as it's at the top of the screen, with English at the bottom.

The game is runs on Windows, macOS and Linux and can be played with a mouse, controller, or the Steam Deck's touch screen. I used the latter, which was comfy but not as accurate about on-screen button presses as either of the alternatives.

No content warnings are supplied, but prepare yourself for some light body horror, a description of a dead child, reality warping, and a couple of claustrophobia triggers.

Blais-Côté has made Hir Corruption free to download on itchio: https://miaqc.itch.io/hir-corruption

Hir Corruption is no longer available to buy on Steam, but if you previously bought it, you'll find it in your library. Its community page includes some notes and guides: https://steamcommunity.com/app/982770#scrollTop=0

If you fancy spending zero money and perhaps ten to twenty minutes on a tiny, incidentally queer, interactive horror story about reality gone bad, it's a fine choice.

Screenshots

#IndieGames #LinuxGaming #NativeLinux #SteamDeck #HorrorGames #CasualGames #VisualNovels #LGBTQ #HirCorruption #InteractiveFiction

Grey Alien Games, 2015

It's a cute Halloween themed match-three game for PCs with no microtransations, ads or other exploitative bullshit!

There are surprisingly few seasonal match-three games for this time of year, and this one's packed with 100 levels full of skulls, pumpkins, ghosts, coffins, poppets, eyeballs, sinister books, flaming torches and black cats.

You can find Halloween decorations for your house by beating levels, and this gets more impressive looking as the game does one. You can also find gold coins that you can use to by extra house decorations. You can save your house as wallpaper.

Dating from 2015, it's not the most sophisticated match three by modern standards. You can create area-affect bonus items by matching four or more objects, and the yard decorations you collect can give you extra, limited-use-then-recharge items.

Recharges come in the form of dust released by glowing objects on the play field. Some squares have gold tiles or steel plates that require extra clearing or have their contents locked by spider webs.

There's no narrative beyond “match shapes to stamp out evil” and an occasional hint from one your neighbours. (This is fine, I don't actually want to read a visual novel in between making colourful objects go “pop!”)

Music is a synth affair somewhere between stereotypical Halloween/ghost train music and one of those meditation study types. It's likeable enough but there's not much variety. You can switch it off when you get bored, though. Sound effects bang and fizzle in a satisfying manner.

You can disable level timers for an extra-chill gameplay experience, and I'm not very good at this these things, so usually do.

It's for computers rather than ported from mobile, so there are no unexpected quirks when it comes to mouse interaction, and no relics of exploitative microtransaction systems. It works fine via the Steam Deck's touchscreen and works perfectly on my Pop!_OS Linux desktop via SteamPlay Proton.

Anyway, I like the cute spooky match-three game. Grey Alien Games are great this kind of casual brain-soothing fare, and while this lacks the narrative elements and gameplay depth of some of their other games (Buy Shadowhand!), it does exactly what it's supposed to.

Buy on Steam: https://store.steampowered.com/app/388450/Spooky_Bonus/

It's usually 8,19€, but I believe it sometimes gets a discount nearer to Halloween.

Screenshots

![“The main attraction – there are 100 festive sinister-stuff matching levels that can be played with or without a timer.”] (https://hauntedgames.net/images/spooky_bonus/big-level.jpg)

#HalloweenGames #IndieGames #LinuxGaming #HorrorGames #MatchThree #Match3 #CasualGames #PuzzleGames

Dead Idle Games, 2021

This isometric point-and-click portmanteau horror game is the reason the initial run of these reviews was a full day late, because I was compelled to finish the entire thing. This was an excellent decision on my part. You'll get a couple of hours' gameplay out of it, if you set about things in a leisurely fashion.

Set in the late 1920s, If On a Winter's Night, Four Travelers is one of the most elegant works of horror fiction I've encountered in the medium, touching on both the existential and the personal. If you enjoy questioning the relationship between reality and perception, you'll have fun thinking this this one through after completion.

Perhaps unsurprisingly for a game that's titled after a postmodernist novel (If on a Winter's Night a Traveler by Italo Calvino) there's a literary feel here, but this is no book masquerading as a game.

You might be forgiven for assuming that after the first, very short, act, The Silent Room, in which we see the tragic unwinding of an illicit love affair between two men, as this part of the game is rather puzzle-light.

However, Act 2, The Slow Vanishing of Lady Winterborne, sees some inventive puzzle design kick in. There's no serious moon logic, but you'll have to follow the internal consistency of a person experiencing grief and drug/withdrawal induced delusions – patterns and sequenced order are important to her. This serious subject matter that is handled well here as we follow Lady Winterbourne as she struggles with memory, loss and an unquiet mind in the wake of tragedy.

Act 3, The Nameless Ritual, is a my personal highlight of this outstanding game, concerning a doctor who seeks solace in occult ritual. With strong themes of self-annihilation, redemption and once again that fuzzy middle ground between what reality might be and what we understand it has, this one really speaks to me. The puzzles in this act also fit the sense of ritual.

The fourth act presents a resolution to the anthology's wrapping device. It's short and ends in a sufficiently satisfying manner, although it leans into somewhat conventional mythology after the third act's esotericism.

We don't often see the portmanteau structure used in the games – I Have No Mouth And I Must Scream and, in a more serialised manner, Lamplight City, are the only adventuring gaming examples that immediately spring to mind, although I'm sure there are others. It's something I'd like to see more of, as the self-contained tales here never overstayed their welcome and provide the means to explore a range of engaging themes and puzzles.

The native Linux version of the game worked well on Pop!_OS 22.04. If you're playing on a higher resolution display, there are a couple of points where small objects can be hard to find amid the pixel art – hardly a surprise given the AGS engine's 320x200 resolution. These are rare, but I nonetheless wonder if I should have played this one on the Steam Deck. The game will run in ScummVM's AGS interpreter, which allows you to resize the window, if you'd prefer your pixel art a little more petite.

The art is, incidentally, excquisite, with particularly notable use of colour to reflect the characters' emotional landscapes.

I've seen some forum complaints about this, so will also note that AGS games are by nature pretty old-school in certain conventions – there are no auto-saves: invoke the menu and hit save before you quit.

If On a Winter's Night, Four Travelers carries content warnings for “thematic elements such as racism, homophobia, mental illness, murder and suicide.” Its art book adds warnings about “pixel-graphic depictions of corpses, horror themes and war.” See my next toot for an extra CW about a couple of extra personal triggers that I encountered, which constitute light spoilers.

There are no jump scares, but there is some pixelart gore and a general tone of sombre tragedy.

If On a Winter's Night is a fascinating jewel of a game, and well worth your time.

Get it on itchio (pay what you want, $1 or more for OST and art book): https://laurahunt.itch.io/if-on-a-winters-night-four-travelers

Get it on Steam (free): https://store.steampowered.com/app/1603980/If_On_A_Winters_Night_Four_Travelers/

Steam supporter pack DLC with OST and art book 3,29€ : https://store.steampowered.com/app/1628970/If_On_A_Winters_Night_Four_Travelers__Supporter_Pack/

Additional Content Warnings for If On a Winter's Night Four Travelers (light spoilers)

I'd also add the following content warnings:

• opiate drug use (oral, active depictions of consumption)
• death of a family member (husband)
• death of an animal (pet, cat)

Although it has a metaphorical role and has left me with some really interesting questions about Act 2, I am really, really over the use of animal death as an emotional lever in fiction. I adore this game nonetheless.

Screenshots

#IndieGames #LinuxGaming #NativeLinux #HorrorGames #PointAndClick #AdventureGames #Horror #CosmicHorror #ExistentialHorror #GameJamGames #FreeGames

Maldo19, 2020

Set in post-revolutionary Chile of 1992, Ignacio “Maldo19” Maldonato's The Horror of Salazar House (formerly known as The Enigma of Salazar House) is a visually distinctive adventure game that tips its hat to the classics of Italian horror cinema, something of a recurring theme in games published under Puppet Combo's Torture Star label.

Taking the role of journalist Elisa Muñoz, you're dispatched to investigate the deserted house of author Jaime Salazar, whose entire household disappeared under mysterious circumstances in 1986, the house left untouched ever since. As you wander its corridors, you'll find yourself at the centre of a cursed ritual, which you can end... or complete.

The graphics in the first person viewing window are inspired, the creator says, by the Virtual Boy. Their atmospheric use of solid block colour leans into that, but there's also something of 80s first person graphic adventures like Shadowkeep in there.

Gameplay revolves around exploring the map, locating a series of ritual sacrifices and learning how to safely negate then, all while avoiding the monsters that wander the corridors of the Salazar house.

The monsters are lovingly created, with rotoscoped animation for you to enjoy as they beset you. The house is dripping with atmosphere and personality, and it's worth the 3,29€ entry fee for this alone, but I'm also having fun working out the solution to each victim.

Although the graphics are simplistic, there is real horror, a couple of jump scares, and some dark themes here. The game carries content warnings for: “A hanged depiction, a face without skin, and the use of medical drugs and overdose.”

It works very nicely on Steam Deck using touchscreen, touch pads, and controls. Native Linux and Windows builds are available. Helpfully, the deck appears to default to native Linux runtime.

Buy it on itchio: https://torturestar.itch.io/salazar-house (steam key included, better profit share, you should get this one)

Buy it on Steam: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1405440/The_Horror_Of_Salazar_House/

Screenshots

#IndieGames #LinuxGaming #NativeLinux #SteamDeck #HorrorGames #SurvivalHorror #RetroAesthetic #AdventureGames #PointAndClick