WizWay, 2017

Remember Dragon's Fury (aka Devil Crush) on the Sega Mega Drive and TurboGrafx-16? If so, then you know what you're dealing with here.

Demon's Tilt is an homage to that game: a single digital pinball table with a vast number of secrets, multipliers, special zones that upgrade your ball, spawnable enemies that wander around the table, secret areas, bosses, and three distinct sections, or tiers, of the table to play on.

This is “occult pinball” (because there's lots of secrets, right?), so it wouldn't be complete without the odd pentagram (in the background of some stages of the priestess Lilith's transformation cycle), but that's about it as far the fun symbolism goes. However, there's a satisfying array of skeletons, wild animals, and miscellaneous dungeon scenery to populate the ominous tower where the table is set.

Demon's Tilt has a nudge mechanic to allow you to shove the virtual table just enough to change your ball's trajectory. It's massively important to high-level play, and I am very, very bad at getting the timing of it right. I'm rather better at cradling to catch balls and line up shots, which you'll also have to do a lot of.

Taking screenshots while you're playing pinball is incredibly hard, so I've instead made a full-table view out of some promo shots. If you're playing on a standard widescreen or ultrawide display in landscape mode, you'll never see the whole thing, but I've seen posts showing Demon's Tilt running in portrait mode, and it looks incredibly fancy.

Even if you're rubbish at pinball, it's good to dip into for a quarter-hour of fun every now and then, although it's clear that, in the hands of an expert player, this game could eat hours.

The chiptuneish soundtrack and low bit-depth samples add the atmosphere, and while I'd like my occult pinball to be more, well, occult, this really does what it wants to perfectly.

Buy Demon's Tilt for 16,79€ on Steam – https://store.steampowered.com/app/422510/DEMONS_TILT/

Also available for Switch, Xbox, and PS4.

#LinuxGaming #Pinball #CasualGames #SteamDeck #ActionGames #IndieGames #Occult

Anton Riot, 2016

Anton Riot's Don't Open The Doors is a delightfully squishy isometric claymation action adventure with distinctive graphics and complementary level design.

The world had been invaded by doors to strange pocket universe dungeons infested by dangerous monsters, corrupting the area around each portal and making random objects sentient, mouthy and occasional hostile. It's packed with giant pumpkins, massive mushrooms and sundry squishy insects.

You are... Some dude who will soon some into possession of a large hammer, who's been tasked with blowing the main door up to put a stop to these things incursions. But the guards who're supposed to help you just want you gone, and throw you out of the city without your megabomb.

You rapidly makes friends with Ray, who can conveniently make a new megabomb, if you can find the ingredients. But you'll have to explore the dungeons beyond the doors and undertake missions to find then and level up your skills ready to take on the final challenge.

The claymation is exquisite and the gameplay is an open homage to Bastion, which is hardly something to complain about.

The world is relatively open but a quest log helps you stick to your task list while exploring the doors for upgrades, and you can pick and choose which order you want to tackle them, if at all. Splatting foes and environmental objects with your sledgehammer is eternal satisfying, and the music is this fantastic folk meets Danny Elfman with occasional distorted guitar flourishes affair.

Don't Open the Doors is a sensory treat and an obvious labour of love, which makes it easy to overlook its flaws. The dialogue and characterisation mostly involve sarcastic insults, and the English dialogue is more than a little rough around the edges.

Although the setting is visually inspired and immediately engaging, the plot and lore, such as they are, slide off the brain, making little impression. Combat is a little uninspiring and many enemies are better avoided than taken out, although whacking stuff with a giant hammer is always a solid choice.

DOTD has its weak points, but it's fun to play, lends itself to casual gaming, and definitely has that Extremely Halloween vibe (giant pumpkin boss! giant pumpkin boss!) and holy crap, that claymation is amazing.

It runs well on both the Steam Deck and my Pop!_OS Linux desktop via SteamPlay Proton.

Buy Don't Open the Doors on Steam for 10,99€ at https://store.steampowered.com/app/533950/Dont_open_the_doors/

Watch for spooky season sales.

There's a less overtly spooky survival/life sim sequel, Disdoored, that appears to have been abandoned in early access. You can find it at https://store.steampowered.com/app/845630/Disdoored/

Screenshots

#IndieGames #LinuxGaming #SteamDeck #ActionAdventure #Claymation #StopMotion #SteamPlay

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

TeamV, 2022

Spookity Hollow is a Halloween spin-off of Play With Gilbert, a kid-friendly exploration/collect'em-up game in which you control a kitten.

This is more of the same, but with a new environment to investigate: the autumn-touched valley of Spookity Hollow, replete with jack'o'lanterns and costumes to collect, as well as kitten and bird friends to meet. I'm still looking for the ghosts!

It's aimed at ages four and up, so there are approximately zero scares here, but plenty of locations tucked away amid autumn landscapes, from a mansion atop a hill, to a little tomb???, to what's hidden beneath the lake.

Configurable day/night cycles and seasons add some variety (fireflies come out at night!), there's local multiplayer, and you can, of course, name and customise your cat.

Sure, the landscape and plants could be more varied, and the architecture could be spookier (and more furnished).

But look, you either want the very chill, nonviolent Halloween kitten game for very small children or not here.

This may really be one for existing fans of the main Play With Gilbert game, which has more depth and its own seasonal Halloween event, but I'm happy to have all these games in my library for Smol Owlbear, and it's fun to dip into them even as an alleged adult.

I've seen Spookity Hollow discounted to 3.29€ on Steam – it's also available on itchio – and you'll be supporting a solo indie dev who makes cute things.

Plays nicely on Pop!_OS Linux via SteamPlay Proton.

Buy on itchio: https://joure.itch.io/spookity-hollow Buy on Steam: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1739150/Spookity_Hollow/

Screenshots

#HalloweenGames #KidFriendly #SpookityHollow #IndieGames #LinuxGaming #CollectEmUp #Cute #NonViolentGames

Hidden Fields, 2021

One of my favourite games of 2021, Mundaun's hand-drawn textures and folk horror atmosphere are impeccable.

Set mostly in the 20th century, in the (real) Alpine village of Mundaun in Switzerland, the game is voiced entirely in the Romanche language, with full subtitles in numerous others.

It's the culmination of six years' work, largely by one person, Michel Ziegler.

As much adventure game as survival horror, combat – always best avoided through stealth and cunning – at first feels terrifyingly clumsy. But as you settle into the gameplay and bolster protagonist Curdin's will, challenging foes head-on becomes viable, if always a source of potential terror.

Even if you don't take to combat, these encounters don't dominate the game, and you'll spend a wealth of time exploring hidden trails, meeting vividly depicted characters, piecing together the past, making strong black coffee, and developing a genuine affection for a vintage agricultural vehicle.

The pacing is perfect, and a handful of jump scares never overstay their welcome or feel forced. But the beating heart of Mundaun's horror is the sense of suspense as the game introduces threats and then briefly alleviates you of them, never allowing you to become too comfortable.

You can pet the goats in Mundaun and I now fear haystacks.

I recommend playing with a controller rather than mouse and keyboard. I ran it on Pop!_OS Linux via SteamPlay Proton, using a PS4 DualShock 4 controller.

It costs less than €17 at full price, and you can expect anywhere from 5 to 10 hours' gameplay from it, depending on how much time you spend just hanging out and enjoying the atmosphere.

There's also some replayability for multiple outcomes, with the deciding choices mostly in the final act.

Buy on Steam: https://store.steampowered.com/app/720350/Mundaun/

Also available for Nintendo Switch (for which a limited physical run was released by Super Rare Games), PS4, PS5 and Xbox One.

Screenshots

#FolkHorror #Horror #Maundun #IndieGames #LinuxGaming #SurivivalHorror