Horror Games

They are a lot more interactive than straight VNs. The dungeon crawling movement and checking scenes will take most of your time. I enjoyed them.

I liked the first chapter of Visage I played. Really liked it. For some reason I kind of went off it when I started the second though. Need to get back to it. It's incredibly obtuse at times but it is a very good game. Must get back to it. Think I'll wait til the darker nights though.

I finally finished The Evil Within, to satisfy my curiosity (Digital Foundry time!) I hooked up my PS3 and booted up that version to see if I was just remembering it wrong. No, it's pretty much the same, to be frank I think the jaggier murkier look works better with the quality of the assets.

When some of the textures are this bad the higher visual fidelity of the PS4 version isn't doing the game any favours. Going back to a PS3 controller feels incredibly weird, it's like the PS4 controller... But not quite. Give it a try it causes some interesting cognitive dissonance.

Overall The Evil Within is incredibly uneven and poorly paced with survival horror resource drops in a game with locked room Resident Evil 4 action scenarios where you can't stealth things as you did earlier in the game. Meanwhile you're picking up drops of two and even one measly bullet. Basically I ended up getting chased around until an enemy obliged and team killed most of their friends with a rocket, I walked out with practically every weapon dry.

Much like Mass Effect Andromeda you can't help wondering if the game would have been better under a different publisher, Idtech 5 really wasn't a great choice. Even on the PS4 it pops in like crazy and in places has the textures that look like they're from a PS1 game with terrible frame rates too. For the first time on my PS4 I had to recover my account and sign into PSN just so I could download a patch. Even then I had to manually delete a save that didn't work anymore and locked up the game and I had a couple of other lockups where the game kept going but Sebastian wouldn't move.

Overall it's mediocre plus the story is kind of pointless since you could chop and change the order of most of the chapters without a first time player even noticing. You plod along and a 'Ruvik' happens and you just get plonked down somewhere else so one chapter is easily substituted for another.

Song of Horror is on sale (£28) on Xbox a the moment. Think I'm going to buy, anyone played ?

Not sure if this should be in the Japanese game thread but I think it fits better here.

For an obscure horror VN option, the PC88 game Mirrors has had a fan translation released and a cursory look seems pretty promising (although I do need to figure out how to save). If you read through the how to patch part of the link you may 'find' an archive link all pre-set up too . Oddly, it has a European setting too. Might be worth a look.

nebulous.group/index.php/projects/translations/mirrors/

From the bit I did play it was choosing options, not a text parser. Seemed pretty standard VN style to me. Not played enough to give a full judgement yet.

I'm hoping Song of Horror is good, it's nice to have some more options when it comes to third person horror.

I just picked this up and will likely start it this evening (after a few glasses of vino). I suspect it's going to be more of a QTE fest/open door simulator than traditional survival horror, but hopefully the environments and narrative will be worth it. I see they've also introduced a mode that removes the permadeath mechanic, so might go through it once on traditional difficulty and then replay with the new mode should I end up messing up any of the QTE stuff.

On a slight tangent, I see that both Amnesia: Rebirth and SOMA are heavily reduced on Steam atm. Any consensus on if either is worth it?

Cool. I will likely pick them both up. I'm perfectly fine with walking simulators that aren't perhaps as terrifying as they might have been

BTW for any Lovecraft fans out there, a short and free version of Dagon appeared on Steam yesterday. It's effectively just a dramatic retelling, with very little game play, and can be completed in less than 30 mins, but I think the indie dev's heart is in the right place:

store.steampowered.com/app/1481400/Dagon_by_H_P_Lovecraft/

I've no issue with safe modes at all I'll personally tend to play through on original/intended difficulties, but always happy to revisit in an easy mode just for particular stories I like.

Case in point: having completed it on Survivor mode, I still have an Evil Within 2 NG+ save on the go with all the invincibility settings switched on. Just love the world/environment, so it's fun to revisit and one shot every enemy I even enabled the cinematic black borders (that totally fuck the FOV) for added hipster cinematography points.

Coincidentally I started this last night (Xbox 1x). Only on episode 1 and have managed to get all 4 of my players killed...it has permadeath. So I need to start the complete episode again, not sure I have the patience for this style of gameplay.

I will say that my 3 plus hours with it have been mostly fun. Totally "old school" gameplay with fetch the key to this lock etc, also puzzles with fuses etc, we are in familiar territory here. It does have great atmosphere, but mostly rubbish voice work and not the best looking game you are going to play. I know it is indi but it comes with a £40 price tag on consoles, when not in sale.

I will probably have another run at it.

I've also contrived to get two of my characters killed and haven't yet finished episode 1 I'm playing on the standard difficulty, but there is a lower tier difficulty available in the options menu that removes the permadeath mechanic -- not tried it myself, but I believe it will just reload you to just before the relevant QTE or insta-death scene.

Hopefully everybody is getting excited for the upcoming month. I'll be clearing the decks for a horror gaming marathon and pull some things off the backlog I never got around to playing or finishing.

I'll probably start with something easy to complete, the PS1 version of D which has been waiting about 15 years for it's time.

Re: Song of Horror at the moment I'm leaning towards Tormented Souls, the competing product, it just seems more evocative of 90s and earlier 2000s horror games. Horror games head to head, it's just like Shadows of the Damned versus Neverdead again (I favour Shadows of the Damned BTW, but you might as well have had both back when they were cheap).