Above any other genre, horror is most likely to be serialized. Movies like Friday the 13th and Nightmare on Elm Street display an undying nature similar to their protagonists, only finally being put to rest after 7 sequels and a godawful modern remake drag them into the murky depths, sure to arise again someday when a movie producer casts the magical resurrection ritual of “incarnato dinero.”
Horror games often suffer a similar fate, with Resident Evil now on its 21st installment (25th if you count all the remakes), Silent Hill on its 10th, and Dead Space producing 6 different games, 2 comics, 2 movies, and 3 books in one console generation alone. It seems like the only thing that can kill a mainstream horror franchise is a shitty multiplayer sequel paired with a Phil Collins song.
However, every once in a while a game falls through the cracks. Whether it be from changing consumer interests in a shifting marketplace, developer bankruptcy, or sheer manifestation of the eternal will of Satan to keep us unhappy, some of our favorite titles never see the second installment or reimagining that they deserve. Given the release of two new and good horror titles this month, Alien: Isolation and The Evil Within, we here at Dread Central have decided to salute these new and hopefully long-lived franchises by pouring some out for 13 of our homies that ain’t with us no more. These titles hold a special place in our hearts as gems of an earlier era but might one day be brought back for another shot in the spotlight. “Nostalgio, Exploito!”
Honorable Mentions:
As this is meant to be a list recalling games of days gone by that deserve modern remakes, I will not be including anything on the list that saw an installment in console generation 7. Games are still in that awkward phase where they are coming out with versions for both old and new platforms, and many people haven’t found reason to join the ranks of us glorious all-console-owning masters of the universe. Though I thoroughly wish that titles like Clive Barker’s Jericho, Condemned, and Cursed Mountain continue on into generation 8, the fact is that I have stuff in my pantry older than those games. Not really what I’d call a gem of an earlier era.
Also, as a condition of my perpetual employment, my boss has required me to give a shout out to Zombies Ate My Neighbors, which I refused to put on this list because it is not actually a horror game. Given that it was developed by LucasArts, the closest we are likely to get to a remake is someone’s nostalgia map in Disney Infinity. Sorry, buddy.
13: Clive Barker’s Undying
Showing up Bioshock 6 years before it was released, Clive Barker’s Undying was an imaginative psychological thriller shooter that allowed you to use both spells and guns at the same time. Featuring custom death animations, imaginative puzzles, and the kind of mind-bending horror creatures and settings that only Clive Barker can concoct, Undying is a title that truly deserves better than the eternal cenobite damnation of Steam’s “classics” section. Anyone that’s tried to play Quake in a time where it can be booted up on a mid range graphing calculator can tell you that old shooters do not age well, and Undying has fallen victim to the curse of blocky textures and barren environments. It can be argued that Jericho was the spiritual successor and next step in a Clive Barker franchise, but Jericho fails to live up to its predecessor. Don’t get me wrong; I like Jericho better than I like most people, but Undying is a game where you kill a boss by removing its head, take it with you, and then light it on fire and throw it off a cliff when it won’t shut up. Lets all hope for a return to the good old days.
12: Eternal Darkness: Sanity’s Requiem
Best known for fucking with you, Eternal Darkness: Sanity’s Requiem is a game that fakes deleting your save file. Spanning over a thousand years of storytelling, it spins a yarn of inter-dimensional demons, ancient lost cities, and overlapping realities that takes three playthroughs to fully tell. Choosing a specific god to face for each run-through, whom you choose changes what type of enemies you will fight, which in turn dictates damage type and weaknesses. A game where there’s an entire class of enemy just designed to harm your sanity, running through the game for the first time is a bit like scouting for hookers. You never know exactly what’s real, and there’s a good chance it will make parts of you fall off. Each period feels different, and the array of period-specific weapons change how you play from era to era. A spiritual successor, Shadow of the Eternals, failed to Kickstart twice, probably due to equal parts it being a Wii U exclusive and the founder of Precursor Games being arrested for distributing child porn. Oh, Wii U and child porn, is there anything you cannot ruin?
11: In Memoriam/Missing: Since January
In Memoriam, released Stateside as Missing: Since January is part of a rare breed of “alternate reality games.” Almost a lost art outside of promotional events and those odd “find the thing at these coordinates” events that crazy people with way too much travel money take part in, ARGs blend the game world and the real world into one. The player must use outside resources to solve the puzzles, taking advantage of both websites specifically created for the game and generic real world domains. Characters in the game would email you, and the game truly becomes terrifying when the antagonist learns where you live. Never stooping so low as to jump out with pop scares, the game builds a slow and terrifying tension with nothing but disturbing imagery and the growing sense that someone is stalking you. The sequel, titled Evidence: The Last Ritual in the US, actually came in a little sealed evidence bag, which struck me as so badass that at a time when my juvenile brain could handle no thoughts beyond headshots and females, I bought it and played it all the way through. This is also what compelled me to buy Ichi the Killer so I guess one can’t always make decisions based on creativeness of packaging.
10: Dark Seed
I struggled to decide if I should include this on the list or the similarly styled Harvester released a year after Dark Seed 2. I ended up going with Dark Seed because I have an inherent distaste for smug self-satisfaction, and Harvester is so smug that it’s just one bad hairpiece away from asking a sitting president for his birth certificate. The Dark Seed saga is split into two parts. This was an era where characters were voice-acted by developers and motion captured by their immediate family so Mike Dawson just said fuck it and cut out the middle man, making himself the protagonist. The premise was kind of clever, as Dawson’s adventure saw him flipping between the real and “dark” worlds. Objects in one would often have a counterpart that would be likewise affected. The environments and characters in the dark world were the product of legendary horror artist H.R. Giger, which alone is enough to make the game a classic. Overall the puzzles are a bit nonsensical at times, but as far as adventure game moon logic goes, it’s no Phantasmagoria.
Then Dark Seed 2 comes along and treats the franchise poorly. The developers created the game as a christening of the S.S. Logic’s maiden voyage in a heading towards Alpha Centauri, in hopes of setting up a new society free from the constraints of human concepts of sense. Though no longer a developer on the project, Mike Dawson is still the protagonist. They do not treat him well. His new voice actor seems to be a man doing a 90’s style joke about what a computer game developer starring in his own game would sound like. Mike Dawson is such a pussy that he lives with his mom and is afraid to open the closet because when he was a child, he thought there were monsters in it. He is so whipped that his sole motivation is solving the murder of a woman who very explicitly slept with everyone in the town but him. He is such a massive bitch that after using an alien magnet gun to win at ring toss at a carnival, he tries to give the prize teddy bear back. Dark Seed needs a new installment, if only to return Mr. Dawson a shred of his dignity.
9: Bad Mojo
Originally I was going to fill this slot with Hunter: The Reckoning, but seeing as how I refused to include Zombies Ate My Neighbors for it being technically not horror, it felt dishonest to let what was clearly a party-action game on the list. So down I went into the trenches of weird, and from the deep troughs of hipster consensus known as my friends, they came up with Bad Mojo. I was afraid of including too many adventure games on the list for the fear of sounding like a person that would make a list of 90’s adventure games he likes, but Bad Mojo stands out amongst its contemporaries. You play as a man turned into a cockroach and must avoid dangers like spiders, mice, cats, and pilot lights in order to return to your body and burn down your home. The whole game takes place in the bar you work at and sees you going from room to room trying to solve puzzles in a timely manner.
Seeing as how you are a cockroach and do not possess pants with which to hold 6 different classes of assault rifle and 4 different rocket launchers, there is no inventory in the game. Rather, puzzles are solved intuitively and on the level, a lesson that wasn’t taken seriously until Telltale Games noticed no one likes being forced to restart a game because they forgot to give a rat some cheese in the opening cutscene. Bizarre premise, disturbing visuals, and innovative gameplay make this esoteric entry very compelling.
8: Call of Cthulhu: Dark Corners of the Earth
Combining the pants-shitting run away and lock doors tension of Amnesia with a minimalist HUD and realistic shooter mechanics, Call of Cthulhu: Dark Corners of the Earth is the kind of horror game that’s often dreamed about and rarely realized. It seems that not even a major developer with the backing of Bethesda can survive making an innovative horror game that marries combat and stealth in a Lovecraftian setting so I guess half a million now abandoned Kickstarter projects aren’t really at fault after all. Published at a time when iron sights were just being introduced, the shooter landscape was moving from the more bombastic Half-Life 2 and Doom 3 era into the modern brand of more reality-focused shooters.
Dark Corners of the Earth was perfectly positioned at the time to build on this trend, creating a more realistic damage system where individual limbs would take damage and require specific kinds of treatment (bandages for cuts, splints for breaks) to heal. There was no active HUD, and ammo had to be kept track of in the inventory. Guns could be fired from the hip but required stationary aimed firing for full effect. Tense chase sequences and a door locking mechanic that smacked of Amnesia before Amnesia existed gave the game some uniquely frightening and exhilarating moments. Unfortunately, the game suffered from a confusing ending and many unresolved bugs due to the developers shutting down soon after the game’s release. Hopefully some new developers will hear this game’s distant and dreamlike call, summoning this elder spawn to earth once more. For remember, that which scares may never truly die, when on Steam we may still eternally buy.
7: The Thing
The Thing is one of the few exceptions to the view that movie tie-in games have to be shit. Taking place after the events of the main movie, The Thing video game takes an approach similar to the movie by forgoing elaborate story explanations for tight character drama and chilling monsters. They distill the essence of what made the film so terrifying, and it wasn’t being defenseless. The film asked, “What if you had adequate defenses, but no idea whom to use them against?” To this end, the game implements a companion system, where trust is earned and bursting into a flesh-monster is always a threat.
There were three ally classes – soldier, medic, and engineer – who each specialized in a different field. Soldier and medic were as you would expect, while the engineer was required to open certain doors and activate save stations. While trust was low, allies would refuse to follow your commands and performed actions more slowly. Trust could be gained by winning fights, testing your own blood to prove you were not a thing, or by giving away some of your own guns and ammo. However, there was nothing stopping the man you just gave your shotgun and all your shells to from deciding this would be the perfect time to turn you into sandwich, sprouting two heads, and hulking out over your now shotgunless ass. A really unique way of creating tension, that interplay alone is enough to warrant a new shot at the spotlight.
6: System Shock 2
No, Bioshock was not a sequel to System Shock 2. Yes, it took place in a ruined strange and futuristic fallen utopia, far from the rest of the world and possible escape. Yes, there was a hacking mini-game that allowed you to reprogram turrets. Yes, there are magic spells that allow you to shoot fire, teleport, go invisible, and all kinds of other fun stuff. Yes, many enemies are tragic figures of a world gone upside down, mutated beyond belief and fighting for survival like animals. Yes, there is a mid-game plot twist where the person you thought you were working for turns out to be someone else with far more sinister intent the whole time. Yes, Bioshock was made by many of the people that worked on System Shock 2. And of course, the last boss was kind of a letdown.
But you know what Bioshock didn’t have? Kick-ass RPG elements. Back before everyone healed by taking quick cover behind their moms and ammo caps were dictated by the will of God, some shooters weren’t afraid to have grid-based inventories. If you didn’t have the stones to chuck out all your health kits to hold another rocket launcher, then you probably put your points into stealth and lockpicking and other traits for girls. Meanwhile, here I was, rubbing Molybdenum and Selenium on my alien worm cannon, ready to go Exotic Weapons Level 6 on some bitches. Yes, Bioshock, I see your adorable grenade launcher that shoots cans. Oh, it has 3 different types of ammo? I’m sorry, but my Fusion Cannon only has two. Normal and death. Yes, the alternate fire mode is literally called death. I need 4 strength just to carry the damn thing, and you know I ditched all my armor to carry more disposable maintenance tools. Nobody takes care of their baby like I do.
5: Koudelka
Time for Ted to get all esoteric up in this article again! Koudelka was a PlayStation era survival-horror tactics game, and that alone should be enough to make you scratch your heads and wonder what that looked like. While it does have sequels in the form of the Shadow Hearts series, Koudelka was the most horrory of the series. Taking place in a dark and haunted monastery with an evil past, three characters are mysteriously drawn together to uncover its secrets. The game is Japanese, and therefore the plot is way too long and convoluted to get into here, but if you want to read the accompanying manga to get a grasp on it, be my guest.
I can’t say I ever loved the game, or even really liked it, but I always liked the way it pushed horror into a genre most would think couldn’t accommodate it. It makes sense if you really think about it; I mean, nothing is scarier than seeing an enemy with a 1% crit chance start attacking in Fire Emblem and then… oh FUCK, he crit TWICE? And like Sisyphus I go, restarting the entire level once again. This game was made specifically to torment me, I’m certain of it.
4: Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines
Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines is the first half of the best game ever. Possessing incredibly writing, unique and diverse powers, open world level design, compelling moral choices, and a rewarding to invest in but never completely necessary combat system, the first two levels sucked me in like a blackhole fleshlight. Then Troika Games committed that all too common cardinal sin of forgetting how much money they had and released it before the utilities company realized their checks were bouncing.
There is a distinct moment in the game where I went from sneaking around in a haunted hospital, following a film crew being killed one at a time by a malevolent spirit, only to find at the end that the spirit was actually a kind of demon blood witch that was more than happy to trade artifacts rather than fight. The next quest after, I was beating floor upon floor of mindless zombies back with a sledgehammer. Reaching the boss, I tried to reason, but all of his dialogue trees all led to him just adamantly demanding to be introduced to Mr. Sledgehammer. There are a number of unofficial mods created to restore cut content, and the game has a cult following uncommon in today’s release-a-year market. If for none but the fans, this series needs another faithful installment.
3: The Suffering
Some games are on this list because they scared the shit out of me in ways modern games haven’t been able to recreate. Some games are on this list because they innovated the genre, introducing mechanics that are now staple. Some games are on this list because they pushed boundaries and are unique in their style and gameplay. Some entries are on this list because they deserve a new chance at greatness and a day in the spotlight that they for some reason never got.
The Suffering is on this list because a guard told me to “suck his mother fuckin’ cock.” This game had balls. Big monster-shiving, molotov-throwing, demon-transforming, beating monsters with needles for eyes and crutches for hands balls.
2: I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream
When I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream came out, adventure games were moving away from the “rub-things-on-things-and-then-die” model to a system that actually required logic and clever thinking. Over time adventure game inventories have shrunk from chests of items to mere grids of items to the modern context necessary few icons at the side. By shrinking the focus on hitting items against whatever bears you came across until they either opened the portal to Narnia or slapped you into a pool of gator-infested water, adventure games started relying on sensical puzzle cues rather than the player’s psychotic determination. As a result, adventure games have become more accessible, with almost anyone being able to enjoy The Walking Dead. By contrast, old school adventure games can be enjoyed by no one, except for maybe creepy Dave who lives with ceiling-high stacks of old newspapers and for some reason never married.
I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream got the whole compelling story bit right but decided that a game about a mad computer torturing its victims was some kind of “life imitating art” project and therefore designed the puzzles so that your computer could mock you gleefully as you slammed the keyboard in frustration. The game is borderline unplayable by modern standards but was so compelling in narrative, setting, and themes that lacking a modern remake is almost a crime. If Telltale Games can get you to care about Clementine to the point of tears, they could certainly compel you to not be turned into a suicidal jelly-monster.
1: Breakdown
There are two people on the face of the earth that I know of who have also played Breakdown. Releasing around the time of the original Xbox’s launch, Breakdown was quickly overshadowed by Halo and all the other consoles having a million games in their library. It’s a shame really since there is not a shot of piss tall enough that I would not chug to see another Breakdown game.
Taking place entirely in the first person, Breakdown never cuts away. I know a lot of games claim to feature first-person immersion, but Breakdown goes all the way. There is never a cut in the action, cutscenes are done entirely through the eyes of the protagonist, and you never will fade to black and wind up someplace else, theoretically getting there led by your guide-dog. Health recovery is done by scarfing down burgers and cracking open a soda. Ladders are climbed one hand at a time. Your fists are always right in front of your face, and the physicality of your movements has never quite been replicated.
Oh, and it’s a fighting game. That’s right; when not picking up guns to try to shoot back at armed foes, you are punching aliens in the face. As the game progresses, the player begins to gain the powers of the aliens, starting with the ability to punch right through their bullet-reflective shields. Soon you are blocking bullets, slowing time, and triple backfist punching people across the room. Still, combat never becomes easy in Breakdown, and two-on-one fights become carefully choreographed deathmatches. Trippy dream sequences accent an already compelling and mysterious story, and with limited graphics the game manages to concoct strange monsters and visions of destruction that are still haunting. To this day, I have never played a game with such an unexpected and truly mind-blowing mid-game plot twist. It builds tension right to the end and makes the last blows you land even more satisfying than the punching of Zeus at the end of God of War 3. If a perfect game narrative exists, this is it. It seems to defy any kind of weakness, and it dismays me that more people aren’t aware of it. If anyone makes a sequel, I will suck them off even harder than I am sucking off this game right now, and I’ve been warned by several concerned parties that that would be seriously hazardous to my health.
What are some of your forgotten horror video game epics you’d like to see revisited? Sound off below!