It’s the Halloween season, so what does that mean? Spooky games of course! If you are looking for a scary experience or want a refresher to some of the scariest, unsettling, or very stylistic games: take a look at these suggestions! As a reminder to everyone, each game can dive into unsettling topics, language, or visuals and if you are interested in a game to look at its rating and content warnings.  

Resident Evil VII Biohazard: The game that brought the Resident Evil series out of the grave and gave a very unsettling experience full of filth, mold, and a regular day in Louisiana. One of the few triple A horror games that can actually unsettle a player, Resident Evil 7 has a disturbing environment of disgust, and gives the urge for players to gag as you solve puzzles and manage your resources in this Survival Horror game. You play as Ethan Winters as he gets a message from his late wife telling him not to enter the Baker Mansion. Ethan, wanting to find his wife (and getting the actual game to happen), disregards this, goes to Louisiana, goes into the clearly abandoned building, finds his wife, gets his hand chopped off: BY his wife, and gets knocked out by the patriarch of the Baker family! This game is well crafted to make you think fast on your feet as you escape the family and search the entire place for any resources you can find to heal your character and have enough ammo for you to use your weapon. The writing in the game is excellently done if you just want to sit back, manage your resources, and have a good scare as throughout the game you unlock better weapons and gain more resources to concur the mold (even have small laugh here and there). The graphics are also unnerving to look at as Capcom made a special engine just for their horror games as each character and item are full of realistic detail that can contort into something visually horrifying and disgusting. An overall frightening experience as Capcom had finally gone back to its Survival Horror routes to bring the Resident Evil franchise back to what it was known for: building tension, and the payoff it brings.  

Slay the Princess: Slay the Princess is a horror visual novel made by Black Tabby Games where your choices, DO matter and your actions will impact the story in very meaningful ways. The plot is, is that there is a Narrator telling you that you are on a path in the woods, and at the end of the path is a cabin, and in the basement of the cabin: is a princess. Your job is to slay her. The game’s artwork is all hand drawn and all the designs for the Princess are elegantly and smartly crafted to show where the story is heading and the path you are currently on. The visuals also do an amazing job with how unnerving it is, with claustrophobic drawn halls, to the pristine blade that you hold, to the horrific encounters you face and the only color of the game other than greyscale being the blood red that appears whenever you do your job of slaying the Princess. The writing is strung together in such a gorgeous way for even after you read the same piece of dialog over and over, you still appreciate all the little details in it as its use of imagery and sharp diction keeps you always alert. The voice acting in the game is also very impressive, as there are only two voice actors, but each of them do such a good job conveying different forms of the Princess, or each of the voices inside your head. You always wonder how a line is going to be delivered, and each time it’s always delivered in the most satisfying way possible. The characters are also very well written as the Princess in all her forms is very entertaining and all her motives and actions perfectly align with what you do in the story. The voices and Narrator in your head bounce off each other so well as they all act as foils to one other. They all say something meaningful (or comedic) and by the end of the game, you’ll have a favorite voice that you are just waiting to appear after a new loop. The game has a looping aspect to it as you make new choices to get branches paths that makes you want to see everything that the game has to offer, and every little choice has a new line of dialog to go along with it or a totally different branch path. You get five loops until the end game kicks off, and the end game is a Lovecraftian fever dream as you must face horror itself as you stand your ground and learn what your true purpose is. The game has philosophical questions to it as you are faced with the ever constant, or the ever changing and its consequences to life. You also are faced with what happens to a person afraid of death and even if you should be afraid of death. You will die a lot in the game, and any choices you make don’t necessarily lead to bad endings. Each choice is meaningful and every choice matters, even if you take the Pristine Blade or not. But overall, one thing the game tells you to remember: is that this game is a love story; no matter what you do or what happens. 

House: A pixeled horror game by Bark Bark Games, House is about trial and error and is also a type of “collect the deaths” game. The premise of the game is that you play a girl named Tabby, and your family just moved into a new house. As you explore the house, more and more creepy things start happening, and you find that your family members have died in unfortunate (but oddly funny) ways. (Like your mom tripping over a puddle and dying) You will eventually find yourself dead, probably due to the spiky carpet or toilet monster, and find yourself at the start of the game once more. Your goal throughout the game is to experiment with the loops and try to find a way to stay alive until 3 am were you come face to face with your own father. The game is very charming in its art style, and the deaths are pretty creative in how you die and are gruesome to the point where it’s so absurd that’s it sort of funny depending on how you look at it. The puzzles in the game are creative and take full advantage of the loops, making you pay attention to what happens in the game and for you to problem solve with your items, and if you really experiment, you can get better and more powerful weapons. The family members are charming, making you invested in them and trying to figure out solutions to save them. The monster designs are unsettling and push the pixelated art style to its limits to make your imagination run with how they look and operate. Overall, this fun game makes you problem solve, and the numerous endings keeps you coming back to get new endings and to see the deaths that could happen. Will you save your family, or will the house end up corrupting you within its halls.  

SCP Containment Breach: You find yourself in a cell along with a paper declaring your as D-9341, and a guard rudely telling you to step out of your cell. You are to be in the presence of SCP-173 and to not blink or break direct eye contact with it. Failure to do so will result in your death. The lights go out and you can no longer see the statue and the facility you are in collapses into chaos. This game was created made in 2012 and created by Joonas “Regalis” Rikkonen and Undertow Games and was inspired by the SCP wiki, a group of horror writers who write about a fictional scientific foundation whose main goal is to contain and study the anomalous. You play as a D-class, or disposable personal, and the current experiment you were in described above was interrupted by a containment breach. You are now to survive and to not get killed by the various SCPs, or the Foundation itself. You can get various keycards to advance in the facility and avoid any SCPs that attempt to kill you. You can collect files on your journey to learn about the anomalies you are trapped with, and some can be helpful like the coffee machine that dispenses anything: SCP-294; or the giant clockwork like machine that can improve or deconstruct your items: SCP-914. The game’s sound design is unnerving as it keeps the player on their toes when traversing through the dark corridors. You can hear the announcements go on which a screech, the electric gate going on and off, or the excellent voice work that make the place you are in callous and cold. The game can be challenging if you can’t find any healing items; you can run the risk of you soft locking yourself if you don’t have any healing items and if you accidentally saved while on the edge of dying. However, after a few runs you can eventually find yourself getting used to the gameplay. The game also has a unique mechanic of blinking as you have a meter that tells you when you are about to blink. This ties in with one of the main SCP you will encounter, 173, as you will have to look at it if you want to save your run. Each enemy is unique and is very faithful to its original documents and the game is a fun treat to anyone familiar with the SCP universe and is lore, and to anyone that isn’t familiar with the writing project. At the end of the day, SCP Containment Breach will creep you out with its amazing and uncaring atmosphere.