Hello, Matthew, we’re joined by another special guest. So Louise, would you like to introduce yourself? Hi, I’m Louise Blain. I’m a freelance writer and presenter, and I work across games, tech and horror movies, mainly. Wow, yeah. I mean, you are such a professional presenter, like just from your cadence there, I realized the gulf between us. You’re on the BBC and we’re amateur hours. So I guess like to kind of give a bit of a background that you’ve worked with me and Matthew before at Future, and then you’ve kind of graduated into full-time presenting and writing and editing freelance, like you say. So can you tell us a bit about your background in media? Gosh, it makes me feel old every time I say it, but I’ve now been in the industry for 10 years. I first got my job as a staff writer on official PlayStation magazine in 2011. And I remember that because my first review was Assassin’s Creed Revelations. That’s how I literally work out my entire life now is down to which Assassin’s Creed releases there are. But yeah, so I worked as a staff writer for six months. I moved back up to Scotland, did a little bit freelancing, did work for other companies. And then I came back down to Bath. So I was in the future office when I rejoined Games Radar as a news writer. And then I went on, I think I was doing, I was in a channel editor on Games Radar. So I’ve been really lucky in the fact that I’ve worked on a lot of mags, like you guys like writing for Games Master and PSM3 and all the sort of old school classic ones before they’re sadly gone. And yeah, I’m working online as well. So basically what Games Radar gave me was then being able to do video and guides and reviews. And then I got to do a little bit of entertainment stuff as well. So it really, that was great because I got to kind of branch out a bit. And then I moved from Games Radar to work on the Logitech G YouTube channel. So I did that for a bit on their editorial side, basically making list videos and stuff. And now I have been sort of self-employed and doing my own thing since last September. So I work for the BBC. I do stuff for BBC Radio Scotland. I do a weekly tech slot talking about consumer tech and gaming, if I can get it in there. And I also now host BBC Radio 3’s Sound of Gaming show, which is every month. So it’s been a lovely, I feel very lucky for my sort of progression that I’ve gone through. It’s been really nice. Yeah, that’s awesome. Did you always want to move into presenting or was writing your first love? Do you know, writing was my first love, but I think when I went to uni and I did film and media, and I did, initially I did loads of, they kind of forced us into radio modules. And initially I was like, oh, I don’t wanna do radio. That’s not what I wanna do. But then I really got into radio stuff and I really got into listening to podcasts. And so that was always a really nice thing that I always really enjoyed. Writing was always the thing that I loved. Like I loved, I’ve always loved writing about films. So I, at one point, do you remember they did the really cheap Cineworld card for like absurd prices. And what would happen is my mum would get me that every year for my birthday. And then so that I knew, so that she knew that I was taking it seriously and I was using it, I reviewed every movie I saw. So I’ve always loved, I’ve always loved writing. And I think I thought I would become like a movie reviewer, but I’ve always, you know, games have been something that I’ve loved ever since my first PlayStation. So it actually, when I got into, when I got into OPM and suddenly was writing the demo disc page, remember that? When I was writing the demo disc page. And that was something that when I was wee, you know, that was something that my brother and I were completely obsessed with. So it’s all just been kind of this lovely combination of all the things that I love. But I think video was a really interesting exercise in sort of learning how to write differently. Learning how to write for video is very different to writing for a magazine or writing for a website. So suddenly you kind of develop all of these different voices. And I’ve done it again for Radio 3 because I have to realize that I’m writing a script for a Saturday afternoon audience who have just been listening to an awful lot of classical music and potentially don’t really know what games are. So I feel like I can talk to the people who haven’t picked up a controller, but also so that the people who love games can connect with it as well and not go, oh, this is basic. Why are we even talking about this? So that’s an interesting challenge as well. So it’s constantly been endless learning about writing for different audiences. And also working out how to write 5,000 Assassin’s Creed previews for every magazine in the future. Because I remember you were always our absolute go-to for Assassin’s Creed as you were for many other magazines. Yeah, that was insane. I think over the last 10 years, I think I’ve exhausted every pun that you could possibly have. The minute it was like go and write about that, go and play Assassin’s Creed. So that would be great. And I’d come back and the first preview you’d write would be fresh. And you’re like, this is great. And then you’re like, okay, right. Okay, it’s time for Games Masters one. You’re like, I need to change this a little bit. Okay, how do I say all this in different ways? And then you’d have all the crossheads. And then you would have the captions for all the images. And you’d be like, I have already written these puns. You know, I think I was so excited when Assassin’s Creed Syndicate came out because I got things like Hey Boy, Hey Girl, which was one of my favorite Assassin’s Creed Syndicate puns because I actually got to change things up. But honestly, the number of, that’s the first thing that sticks in my mind is not the paragraphs of stuff, but the accoutrement of gaming, magazine, sidebars. Yeah, that’s the stuff that breaks you. Yeah, pun trauma. That’s like something you only get from working in print media for sure. No, I was just agreeing wholeheartedly. Was that a weird time to come into magazines Louise? Because like you say, some mags are closing down and stuff. Was that kind of a strange time to sort of enter that space for you? I think we’d had the sort of golden age of mags because I heard about all these like insane trips that people would go on and all the endless numbers. But what was actually happening just as I joined was all of the websites were becoming much more cohesive and essential and it was like mags were becoming slightly less relevant. I think I was hired just as official PlayStation magazine got a website before it was then sort of made into GamesRadar. It had its own individual website and it was one, you know, I think it was one or two, it was Leon Harley. And he’s just sort of, that was his thing. He was the online ed for that. And I think it was watching mags become slightly less relevant was something that I always came into. So I kind of have this idea of what it must have been like in the sort of mid even to late 2000s. But then when I came in, it just, it kind of changed. But at the same time, there was still passionate audiences. There were still really nice communities. There were people that, you know, got in touch about how much they loved the mag and things. So I think there was still an audience there and there still is now, but therefore it’s just kind of performing a different function. It was an interesting time, yeah. So moving into mainstream presenting is really impressive. I listened to a few episodes of Sound of Gaming and I was really impressed that, you know, you kind of like badge each episode by theme and then have like a kind of cool relevant guests and then you kind of introduce what the game is before you play the music. So I guess like, what’s it like angling a show like that for a mainstream audience? I think it’s… I really enjoy the fact that I work quite closely with the production team on it because they basically say to me, what are we doing? And I go, oh, well, there’s this new game and this new game and there’s this theme that we could go for. But at the same time, it means that they can kind of filter me a little bit. So I’ll come up with the games and I’ll listen to the soundtracks because actually that’s something I’ve always loved is I’ve always worked to gaming soundtracks because they’re wonderful and they don’t have any words to get in the way of our words. I don’t know if you guys are the same. I can’t write to music that has words. So I’ve always loved gaming soundtracks. So I feel like I have this kind of bank of a good knowledge of that. So it’s nice to be able to pick the things I like and sort of send them to them. And what they’ll then do is they’ll listen to the soundtracks to make sure that that hour has a really nice musical flow. So they’ll make sure that there’s lots of different tones and themes and instrumentation, which is not my thing, but importantly what they also do is once I’ve got my script to them, they go through the script and go, well, that’s a bit, you know, all these acronyms, you’re going to need to explain what that is, or you’re going to need to explain what a Metroidvania is. Like we did an episode on dark fantasy and Metroidvania. And suddenly it was a case of, right, I need to explain what this word means and why it’s important and also play these soundtracks. And suddenly you’re like, this is all quite a lot. So it’s really good to be able to send a script to the producers who then highlight bits and go, this makes no sense to a normal human, Louise, what are you talking about? And I think that with every script that I’ve done, I’ve got better at it. I’ve worked out how to say that, or actually these people don’t really need to know the intricacies of this, or let’s talk about roguelikes from the base level. Like you start again, do it again. That’s been the biggest challenge is talking to the widest possible audience without making anyone feel talked down to or gatekeeper-y. I think that’s really important to make everyone welcome in it. And we’ve had really good feedback from people that are like, I’ve never played a game in my life, but this sounds great. It’s a whole world of this. I might do it. So I think even changing one mind a week about what video games are, because video games interact is incredible, is a good thing. So that’s been the most challenging, but also kind of the most rewarding bit too. Yeah, you’re very concise. You’re very good at like boiling down. This is what this game is. This is what its place in the landscape is. Here’s how it relates to the theme of this episode. And then kind of going from there. I mean, like you say, metroidvania, that’s not even a term that people who work in games media can agree on the correct definition of. That’s it. I think you’ve got to go, okay guys, I’m not going to, it’s like roguelike and roguelite. I’m never going to break that down on Sound of Gaming. That’s just not gonna happen. So just be glad that I’m using a word. Just be glad that I’m using a word that pertains to this industry. But yeah, I think our industry can get really obsessed with terms and boiling down really, really big, like tiny details that I think sometimes that can seem overwhelming. And it’s really important for us to be able to tell those differences. But at the same time, I think we also need to kind of be ready to unshackle ourselves from them a bit for further understanding and accept that. You know, it’s video games have been accepted. That’s not a question anymore. Like we’re all doing it. But I think for individual people to kind of understand the intricacies of it, we need to kind of be a little bit faster and looser with how we talk about them. How do you find the interviews? Because I imagine for like game composers whose music maybe has been overlooked in more traditional spaces, they must be pretty pumped to get asked to be on like BBC Radio 3. I mean, it’s a pretty big deal. You know, it’s amazing. It’s made me happy every time because I kind of, I don’t forget, but it’s the fact that they always get offered up in interviews and stuff. And I don’t think the, I don’t think the coverage of gaming music is ever as big as it should be. I think it’s always level designers and everyone else, which is fine. But at the same time, the music is, there’s nothing. I’ve gone through, you know, so many, I think almost a year now, and there hasn’t been an episode where I haven’t learned something amazing from a composer about what they did with the music. You know, I think, so they’re, they’re always super excited to talk. You can just get them started. Like, so we have this, we have this section which is called The Cutscene, and that’s where the interview lives. But what’s cool is, at the start of it, we get them to kind of talk over a piece or a theme, kind of song exploder style. So they just break it down while you’re listening to it. And you get this amazing, they’re so excited to talk about it, and they talk about the real intricacies of it. And you get this new appreciation for that theme that you heard when you went over that hill in that game. But suddenly you’re getting all of what went into it, and them sitting alone, or Austin Wintry wrote the theme for Journey when he was on the way back from the car after his first meeting. He was on his way to the car, and he was like, oh, I think we should do this. And he wrote the Journey theme like that. Just, you know, off the cuff, on the hoof, just about to get into his car. Oh, yeah, I’ll just write one of the greatest, you know, themes of modern gaming. Just on the way. I’ll just write it down. I’ll just pop a napkin on the back of my hand. It’s fine. But, you know, it was moments that, you know, when you’re listening to that and he’s saying those things. So I think they’re enthusiastic about it. They love it. And I, I learned so much. And they use some bizarre instruments sometimes. It’s really cool. They basically like, I think it was Gareth Coker for Immortals Phoenix Rising, commissioned this Lyre instrument, which had never been, basically had never been created for hundreds of years. And he just basically had it made so that it sounded a bit more Greek. So it’s amazing, the stuff that they talk about is really cool. That’s so wild. That’s really cool. Louise, we brought you on this episode because, I’ve wanted to have you on since we started doing this, but Ubisoft rudely didn’t release an Assassin’s Creed game this year. So rude. So you’re very rude. So it’s obviously like Halloween time, and we’re talking about horror games in this episode. So you’re someone I know is a horror expert. So is that your first love horror when it comes to sort of like sort of media generally? Is that the thing that you’re sort of most interested in, or is that kind of like a secondary interest for you? It’s kind of, it becomes a more primary interest in times like this at Halloween. It becomes all I experience is horror. But horror movies have always been something that I’ve really loved. And generally, the horror genre as a whole, I think when you, if you are of a creepy inclination, and you grew up in the 90s, and you were reading Goosebumps books and Point Horror books, and just consuming them. If you are, if you like horror, suddenly they’re just gateways to everything else. And suddenly you’re watching Scream, and suddenly you’re watching all the late 90s horror. And then for me, seeing all the late 90s horror movies, kind of, I was really young. And suddenly when you watch something like that and you think, oh my word, like grownups are making scary stuff. Like grownups are, this is what they do. They can do this. All these grownups made this and there’s going to be more of it. So suddenly that kind of unleashed this whole smorgasbord of genre work for me. And I’ve literally spent the 25 years, I hate saying that, since Scream was first released, filling out what all the references in it were, because I was really young when I saw it. So I feel like I’ve spent the last 25 years doing my Scream homework. And I enjoyed it when I first saw it, but I enjoy it even more now. And I think what games have done in that is the fact that I get to experience. And one of my choices for my favourite games is directly related to a horror movie. But I think the kind of interaction that you get when you play a horror game is very, very different to the one when you watch a horror movie, to the point where sometimes it’s much more challenging to play. But I think the all kind of the best horror games tick the same boxes as horror films. They’re kind of the ones that stick with you and stay with you and kind of sear themselves into your brain in a kind of a good way. So I think the horror genre in all of its forms, all kind of tick boxes for me in different ways, whether I want to, you know, listen to ghost stories or watch horror movies or TV series or play them. Horror is a continually surprising, intelligent genre. And I think people get that wrong. They think it’s stupid and gory and silly. But actually it’s about the human condition and it’s essential for us to experience, I think. So I’m a big fan of like genre cinema. I don’t get on as well with horror because I’m a huge wuss. Like everything scares me. I’m just the idea of horror film is a huge hurdle for me to get over to actually start watching it in the first place. But I do wonder about, you know, people who are self-confessed horror fans and have seen as many horror films as you. Like, does it become, do you find it like hard to find stuff that kind of like affects you or kind of gets to you in the same way as those earlier films? Like, do you get a bit desensitised to horror or does horror have to do like truly wild stuff to affect you these days? Do you know, now I don’t think it’s not like, oh, you need to turn the gore up to 11. I think what’s interesting now, especially we’re having this sort of horror renaissance now. It’s not that horror ever went away, but we’re having, I mean, we’ve got Shudder, which is a horror streaming service, and we’ve just seen the, we’ve just seen this re-imagining of Candyman and we’ve just seen another Saw, we’ve got more Scream, we’ve got another Texas Chainsaw, we’ve got more Evil Dead, like we’re now getting recreations of everything that we have always loved. But I do think that looking at independent horror and independent filmmakers, what I’m looking for is, I think I’m just looking for something human, you know? I think a direct example of something that’s terrible is there’s a new Amazon Prime I Know What You Did Last Summer TV series, and it’s dreadful. It’s not even fun. It’s just really badly written, really terrible plotting. And I actually don’t think horror fans are looking for, like, I don’t think they’re looking for the impossible. I think they’re looking for characters they can connect with, situations that feel convincing and plausible. You know, for instance, last year’s Zoom-based horror, Host, that came out of nowhere. It’s 56 minutes long. The guys made it over lockdown. They never even met their actors because they recorded it over Zoom, and it perfectly tapped in to our fears that even though we were in lockdown, something could still get us. And that’s a very base fear, you know, the idea that you’re sitting with all your friends in front of you in little boxes, but something can still find you and happen to you when you’re on your own. And that’s not reinventing the wheel, you know, that Host didn’t do anything that no film has ever done before, but it gave you characters that you vouched, that you loved, that you connected with, that at least one of your friends was like them. It gave you situations of, oh, I’m just at home, and it gave you relatable sort of lockdown moments, and all of that combined, when it went really wrong, was so much more effective and really got me. I mean, it really got me. I was sitting petrified for the last 15 minutes of that film. It did not. It was relentless. So it didn’t do anything different, but it did it well. And I think that’s what I want horror to do. I want to be convinced and I want good filmmaking and genre filmmaking is often powerful enough to be successful at that. What I loved about Host was that it kind of maximized every possible scale you could get out of that one idea. And like it was so innovative in that sense. It was like asking the question, like, what are the different ways we can kind of fuck you up with this one quite simple format? And it turns out, you know, there are loads of sophisticated ways to freak you out. The thing I always remember from that film is the the looping animation. Yes, the background, yes, the background that kind of loops and then that just that fucked me up a little bit. That was quite spooky. I can’t watch that film. It’s officially the scariest. I think there was, I can’t remember which site did, like, according to science, Host is the scariest. And I think they just hooked a lot of people up to Fitbits and tracked their heart rate. So it used to be it used to be sinister. And now it’s Host. Host is at the top of that. And those guys actually, LFF just had the premiere of those guys’ new movie, which is called Dashcam. So apparently, if you didn’t like what Host did with Zoom, you’re not going to like what Dashcam does with cars. And those are kind of vital. It’s a quote from the poster. Your recommendations for Shudder. I meant I had a good Halloween last year, Louise. I watched Hell House and One Cut of the Dead and that weird Jesse Eisenberg film where they’ve got the child in that strange estate. Viverium. Yeah, Viverium. Scare Me, I watched as well. I really like that. The one about the writers. That was a great horror film. So yeah, your taste is impeccable. You appear on the Popular Evolution of Horror podcast too, right? You go on that one sometimes. Yeah, Mike Munser runs that. He goes through sort of one genre at a time. I think it’s four years he’s been running it for. And he’s currently on Aliens. But yeah, I’ve done a few episodes and I tend to cover Fright Fest with him as well, which is really fun. But yeah, thank you for that. I’m glad my shutter recommendations because it’s such a good service. So what about your background with horror games then? What’s your starting point there? You say Goosebumps and Point Horror are significant for you getting into the genre generally, but what about on the game side? On the game side, I mean, I played Resident Evil, the first Resident Evil I played with my brother. And I think everyone has that story of when they first watched that, you know, the zombie looking over the shoulder thing. But that genuinely really bothered me when I played it. And I still think that the dog scare in that is still petrifying because I think as well as it just being a jump scare, I think it also scared you into thinking what can games do? Like, you’re not safe in these games. These games can, they can come through the windows at you when you just think this is a corridor because back then you weren’t entirely sure what games could do because everything felt great. Like if you could see something out of a window in a game, you spent ages looking at it, going this is amazing. It’s like there’s, I can see views, I can see other places. So suddenly when something almost broke the rules of itself to scare you, you would say I don’t, I can’t do this. This is the, this is the scariest thing. So I played that, but then I think all the horror games that stick with me were games like Silent Hill, especially one of the ones that I’m going to talk about today. But there’s a lot of, I don’t, I’m quite sort of careful with what horror games I play simply because I do find them a lot more frightening than horror movies. I can just mainline horror movies. I do have to get myself into a specific mindset. I can’t just go, oh, it’s time for a horror game because I find that they’re so effective and they’re so, you are so a part of that world and it’s so unsafe. I find there’s a real, a good horror game is properly unsafe. And I think that’s the best way for them to be. But also it means that I do have to sort of psych myself up to do it. I’m not some kind of desensitized monster of horror games. I do have to be ready. That’s cool. Because yeah, one thing that sort of bugs me a little with the horror scene is where, you know, the next big thing, the allegedly the next scariest film ever or whatever comes out and you get all the horror buffs who are kind of, I saw it wasn’t a problem at all. And then I go and see it and I basically shit myself inside out. And it’s just truly horrendous. And I just wonder like, does this does any of this work for people anymore? But you know, as you said earlier, you know, it’s a case of what it maybe does around the edges that that kind of that helps elevate these things. So I think that’s that’s good to hear. I think there’s an investment too, isn’t there? Like, I think I think people when they’re either even if they’re whether they’re playing horror games or they’re seeing horror movies, like they expect to sit in front of it and for it to do a trick and for them to immediately be scared. But actually good horror is about investment. I mean, it’s like when people watch The Blair Witch Project, there’s I mean, loads of us. I mean, I’m particularly it’s one of my favourite horror films. I find it completely petrifying and awful. But then there’s also people that go, you didn’t see anything was rubbish. And that’s the perfect example of the investment that you need to have. So when you play a horror game, you automatically put yourself in that situation, which is investment. You spend time in it, which is investment. And then you fully believe it. So actually they don’t and you’re also playing a horror game. So you’re aware of what surroundings you have. You know that when you go down a corridor, something’s going to happen. So a good, a good, a perfect scare there. I actually I was interviewing some horror composers for an NME piece. That’s I think it’s probably going out next week. And they were talking about how to, while jump scares are easy, tension is not, but when it’s done right, it’s amazing. So you can walk up a corridor and actually in Resident Evil Village, there’s, I’m not, I won’t spoil what it is, but there’s a corridor that you walk down where there’s so much tension being racked up where you’re literally, your controller is just like, you cannot grip it hard enough as you’re walking down this corridor because you know something will arrive at the other end and it’s going to be awful. And personally, if Winnie the Pooh had just popped out at the other end of that corridor, I would have been petrified because of the way that scare had been built. But what it was, was something that literally made my brain feel like it was unhinging. And I just, I was like, I need to go to bed, I can’t do this. But I think you need to put yourself in. And as much as you put in is as much as you’ll get out, which is why I hate it when people are like, it’s rubbish, it’s terrible, it’s not enough. It’s plenty enough if you put yourself in that situation. Very well put. Shall we take a quick break then and we’ll come back with some cool horror recommendations, talk about some of the games that we’ve picked. I think that’d be good. For the people listening at home, we’re going to do this episode a bit like our indie games Hall of Fame episode where we all pick five games and kind of go in a circle. So I think people will look forward to that. So let’s take a quick break and we’ll come back with our horror recommendations. Welcome back to the podcast. So, let’s talk about some cool horror games. Louise, you picked five games, we each picked five games. Let’s start with one of yours, and we’ll talk about some cool horror games to spook people for Halloween. What’s your first pick? Okay, so my first pick is Layers of Fear, which is from Bloober Team, who have done lots and lots of horror games since, but I don’t think any of them have really lived up to Layers of Fear, which is actually quite short, but it’s when you’re going into a creepy mansion full of creepy paintings and you are an artist looking to finish your masterwork, which is particularly grim, and you basically discover the horrible history of this man and the house that he’s in. And I can honestly say it’s kind of like one of those brilliant James Wan ghost rollercoaster movies where it just zips along, it scares you in all the right ways, but it’s also, it does with what I was talking about earlier, where it plays with your expectations all the time. The Libertime are really good at that. So you’re going along a corridor and you might turn around and there was a noise behind you. And then the minute you spin around again, the room’s changed or there’s now a wall there or things are shrinking, so there’s no way you can go. And it kind of expertly steers you through this horrific house of nastiness. And it hits all the spots. Like there’s a point with some really creepy dolls, there’s points where there’s sort of things collapsing around you. There’s lots of jump scares and it gets a bit weird. And the end doesn’t really land for me, but there’s so many scares leading up to it that I absolutely forgive the ending because Layers of Fear just properly scares me. Every time I play it, I think I’ve played it two or three times and it’s just, it gets worse every time. So your stance on jump scares, right, is that they have to be earned basically. Yes. So do you think this game earns the jump scares it has? You know, I think it does earn them. I think initially you might be like, oh, that was really cheap, I’ve jumped out my skin. But actually it does enough with your, I think your positioning. It’s one of the most sort of inventive games that way, where, you know, when sometimes you play a game, you go, was it meant to do that? But There’s a Fear doesn’t do that. It’s so confident in its design of how to scare you and how to misdirect things and its use of audio and its use of even the base fear of, paintings are scary, paintings that follow you around the room. Like when you go to an art gallery and suddenly you become a bit fixated on, you’re looking at print and you’re just like, oh, those eyes can see me. Those eyes are following me. And then you’ve got a whole house of them. Like it just makes the most of them. So that kind of design earns its jump scares throughout. I think, and sometimes I think you need a jump scare just to wake you up a bit. And then if something is quiet enough for the next maybe hour, then the next jump scare, you’re like, okay, yes, you’re doing this in the Flanagan way, not in the cheap, terrible way. So that’s okay. Okay, yeah, that makes sense. Any thoughts on this one, Matthew? Yeah, I think I’ve talked about it on this podcast before. Like I have issues with the later blooper games in terms of I think they’re trying to be a bit too clever and actually don’t necessarily deliver on the big scares. You know, I wasn’t wild about like Layers of Fear 2, for example, or their Blair Witch game didn’t really do it for me either, or the medium for that matter. But yeah, this one, great perspective trickery. It’s almost like a really scary version of like some of the scarecrow stuff in the first Batman game. It’s that kind of, you turn around and just on a technical level, the whole room has changed and it’s pretty impressive. Like I know what, I fully understand why lots of people fell in love with Blooper in this game. Yeah, that makes sense. This is one I’ve yet to play, but I think it’s available on basically every format, isn’t it? I think it might even be on Switch and stuff. So yeah, easy to get hold of. Cool. So my first pick is Telltale’s The Walking Dead. So not the scariest game, I would say, but it’s one we haven’t really talked about in this podcast before. Obviously a very significant game in the lifespan of that studio. It was kind of the game that made them. And then arguably they used the same format too many times and then it kind of lost its magic and they went away. And it was a very sad story, but this first Walking Dead game absolutely clobbered me out of nowhere when it was like, when my interest in The Walking Dead was at its peak basically in 2012. So you play Lee, a convicted murderer who essentially becomes a father figure to this orphan girl called Clementine in The Walking Dead’s basically zombie apocalypse. And it really demonstrates the power of choice. I mean, the kind of like the big decision in this game that you don’t realize you’re making is that at one point you take supplies from a car and then it turns out that the quote unquote main villain of the game is the person who supplies you took and they’re out for revenge. And that’s a really great conceit. And I think what I loved about it was it was very sophisticated for a storyline in The Walking Dead, which I think is maybe too often like here’s a big new bad and a kind of weird new community and a shocking character death. And it became a bit too formulaic. And I think this game had a lot more going on in terms of like emotional depth. I’m assuming Louise that you played this one at the time, right? I did play it at the time. And these games make me so stressed that such and such will remember this. It’s genuinely one of the things that gives me proper anxiety of decision making. Simply because I don’t think other games do it as much. I mean, until Dawn did it, they had like a butterfly effect arriving on the side of the screen, which would say, hey, you’ve just made a decision that could mean someone could die. But I think The Walking Dead had that painfully human element, you know, that thing of horror that does get you of I don’t actually want anyone to die. I don’t want any of these people to die. These people are complex. And I’m just making tiny decisions that can affect everyone. So I find them. I find the minutiae of a zombie apocalypse really scary, because while, you know, you can see the bigger picture in so many apocalypse games, going down into this is just how day to day survival is, is much more effective. And especially in that that first season felt genuinely sort of revelatory of the fact that you were making real differences. So yeah, I love that. I love the walk. I didn’t go much further. I think I played, how many seasons did it become? Was it four? I think there were four at the end. I think I played the first two and I haven’t played the latter two, but I really enjoyed what I played because I love Clementine and I love their relationship as well. It was lovely. Yeah, for sure. Like Matthew, I’m guessing that you did play this one because I think you’re fairly familiar with Telltale’s output. What was your take on it at the time? Yeah, likewise, I was kind of really impressed in sort of how invested it got me in quite a short amount of time, compared to other game stories. I think the arc of that first series is really brilliantly done. It does that great thing that I think like a lot of zombie stuff does, where it’s more about the kind of conflicts of the survivors and the game very cleverly kind of puts you in with people who you’re going to have very mixed feelings about and what’s the right thing and what you personally want, are often very, very different. Yeah, this is brilliant. And I think it’s easy to forget that just because the format has been repeated so much by them that just how spot on and perfect this was to begin with. Absolutely. So Matthew, what’s your first pick? It’s a bit obvious. All of mine are quite obvious, I think. I’ve gone for Resident Evil 1 Remake on the GameCube. Obviously, it’s been HD’d up since then on just about every platform. So this is still readily available, but it’s the frankly astonishing redo of the PlayStation original. Completely transformed. Kind of it’s kind of interesting. You know, it is a remake and it’s largely the same, but it also riffs on the original in some interesting ways. So even if you know Resident Evil very well, I think this game kind of plays with expectations a bit and has some sort of fun with this really established, like horror text. It’s absolutely gorgeous. I mean, we talked about this on our Resident Evil episode where it isn’t necessarily my favorite Resident Evil, but I think it’s definitely the best Resident Evil horror there’s ever been in terms of just the classic sort of, you know, haunted house. You know, it’s a huge cliche, but it’s so effectively done. And with this visual style, it’s just so decaying and cursed. And, you know, I just remember being, you know, opening doors and just looking into the rooms or, you know, the little sliver of the room that the camera angle gave you and not being able to sort of proceed into a lot of these places, just being kind of sort of frozen to the spot in terms of the dread of the place. And I think that’s probably the kind of, the horror this taps best into. Yeah, just a really full on frightening experience. It really is. This on a CRT TV in 2002 was like the nicest looking game I’d ever seen. Yeah. Louise, what’s your history with this one? I mean, I think I didn’t, I’m trying to remember where I played it or I might have watched someone play it because I think they’re the kind of good ones to actually watch horror games because you’ve given someone else the controls. But I seem to remember the, just the feeling of it because it’s such decadent design. It’s so rich. Those every wall looks truly, I think it was something that Village tried to sort of bring back with a sort of decadent nature of Lady Dimitrescu’s incredible castle. But it wasn’t something you just can’t even touch it because that world is just, it is just really horrific. And I think the idea of those camera angles still frightens me. I think there was an entire generation where we, I think the power of the second analogue stick has really done something for our peace of mind. Because when you’re given these restrictive angles, suddenly you don’t feel, again, safe. There’s not a safety aspect. You’re suddenly, am I running into the camera? Am I running out of it? What’s it choosing to show me? And suddenly it’s like the most expertly designed or directed horror experience because you’re not going to see anything that designers don’t want you to see. And you’re going to feel exactly like this for however long we want you to feel like this. So yeah, I feel like I’m trying to remember my core experience with this initially, but it is stuck in my head. Yeah, the first, it’s funny because I started playing the original Resident Evil after we did that podcast because I was like vaguely familiar with it, but had never just like sat down and actually played it. And I think I really underestimated how just how good the original Resident Evil was. Like it was, it’s like, you know, it has the kind of like flavor of low art, but made by people who are absolutely like, artists and geniuses. Like that’s what it feels like. It’s so sophisticated as a game that like, it’s quite interesting to see this gorgeous art design and genuinely scary moments and like innovation in horror alongside these really goofy cut scenes. And like you’re watching high and low art at the same time, which is kind of weird, but it’s sort of like, I don’t know, it just, just so self-aware. And then only six years later, six year gap and they make this. Like it looks like a game that’s about 15 years on from the original. So yeah, just pure magic. What’s your second pick, Louise? Ha ha, my second pick is PT. Ah, wonderful. What was your first experience like with PT? So my first experience, I actually streamed on Twitch to about three people because I am not known for being a streamer, but I thought I’ll stream this because I thought what it will do is it will mean that I have to keep going and I’ve played it so many times since because my PS4, I kept it on it. But I think my first experience of PT going around that looping corridor, I mean, if anyone, maybe someone hasn’t heard of PT, which was the playable teaser for the then cancelled tragically Silent Hills, which was worked on by Guillermo del Toro and Hideo Kojima. But looking at PT’s looping corridor was an absolute descent into perfect hell. You, it’s got that relatable element where you’re walking around a suburban house, but things are very wrong. But I think my most memorable scare in it, it’s quite early on in it, you’re going around, and maybe you’re on your second or third loop, and you go around the L shape and Lisa, who is the horrible ghost creature thing, is standing motionless halfway down the corridor. And her legs are kind of apart slightly and her heads tilted. And there’s a horrible noise that’s creeping from the bathroom where the bathroom door is like slightly ajar. And you can hear the thing that’s in the sink. But I don’t think at that point, you know what the thing in the sink is. And I did not want to move. I didn’t want to go forward. That was it. I was just done. It was like this is, I genuinely, it was that moment again that I had in the house Benevento this year. It was genuinely, I don’t want to go any further because if I do, I think I’ll go insane because this is just such a combination of things that I don’t want to see what happens. I mean, if that figure rushes towards me, I don’t think I’m going to be able to cope. And it didn’t happen. You just walk forward and I think she disappears or things go to black or the, I think maybe the bathroom door slams. But my only, my searing memory is turning that corner and going, I don’t want to go any further. I don’t want to do it. And I think it’s because it had that perfect combination of total, just total nightmare feel, really strange things like the hanging fridge. The first time you saw the hanging fridge that was slightly swinging and seeping and screaming slightly. And you’re going, this isn’t, this is relatable enough. It’s kind of an uncanny valley of humanity, isn’t it? You’re seeing things that should be normal in strange places and you’re being absolutely bombarded by horrific noises. And it’s just, it’s basically reorganizing your brain because your brain doesn’t expect these things. And Pete, he just did that so effortlessly. Yeah, absolutely. It’s a game we talked about quite a while ago in this podcast, but yeah, like one I kind of miss actually because I gave my PS4 to my dad and now I don’t have access to it. And the pandemic happened. He hasn’t, but I’ve told him you cannot delete this from the hard drive. Did you give it to him? Is this cursed? What a cursed gif. Yeah, if you finish this game, you can have the PS4 otherwise, you know, you’re trapped, your soul is mine forever. I think that might actually like kill my parents if I gave it to them. Yeah, yeah, there’s things that I watch or experience that I go, I can’t tell my mum about this. Like I literally watched a horror movie at Fright Fest called The Sadness, which is advertised as the most depraved zombie movie of all time. And there was a scene in it that basically it was pre-censored, so it hadn’t been cut. No one will ever see the version that we saw, but I could never tell my mum and dad about that scene, ever. Like there’s things in games that I see and things in movies that I see that I’m like, no, no, no, this can never, they can never know that this entered my eyes. Dare I ask what that scene is, Louise? Okay, spoiler warning for The Sadness, which you will probably not see. The Sadness is about a particular infection which turns people into depraved killers. And not only are they depraved, but they’re also sexually depraved. Oh. So, and the thing is, it’s told, and I hate to say this, and there was a lot of laughter because it’s actually very funny. Because when you make something that dark, and if you tonally do it correctly, you can actually make it quite funny. But the sequence involved a man who had stabbed an umbrella into a girl’s eye. And then he came back to make the most of the socket. Oh my word. Oh my word, yeah, I could see why you wouldn’t want to tell your parents about that. There was a moment in the movie where you see him, and then you see him unbutton his fly, and the whole cinema was just like in stitches. And then some people left. So I completely understand why it’s horrific. But also when it’s such high concept, you can kind of put it in the part of your brain that says, this is the stupidest thing I’ve ever seen. So it’s kind of okay. It’s not exactly shot like hostile, which I would have genuinely not been able to experience if it’s something that kind of gritty, but it was done in such an absurd way. So, but that’s the kind of thing that I just can’t, you know, I just can’t tell my, I just can’t tell my mum and dad about. I completely understand. Yeah. I’m sorry to anyone that’s now picturing whatever you’re picturing. I’m so sorry. I hope no one had this on their car radio where their kids were being taken to soccer practice. I hope Radio 3 don’t listen to this. Don’t tell Radio 3. Oh, okay. Yeah. Great. Great. Cool. But PT, yeah, of course, like an absolute modern classic. Like I still kind of dream about some of the influence of this ending up in a future Kojima game, even though I’m not totally convinced that Kojima had a big hand in making this teaser. Yeah. A great pick. I don’t think I could play a whole game with this level in intensity. It would be hard to do structurally as well, like a whole game of this. Because PT is a whole game basically, isn’t it? It takes two or three hours to finish. Yeah. Do you think Louise, do you think they can make a whole game out of that? I didn’t want them to. I mean, that experience was actually the fact that we’ve all kind of built this mythology around that one experience, which gave us everything. We didn’t need the rest of the game, but I did think that there was, at one point there was a TGS preview, like of other gameplay of it, which a lot of people have seen and then kind of forgotten that had really different, horrific imagery in it. And one bit of it that kind of made the most of that unnatural imagery was there was a ball hitting against a door and it was slamming against it and then it was rolling and it turned into a human head. And it was that kind of horrific stuff that I thought that maybe they could have made like a five or six hour experience, but nothing like a, you couldn’t have had a giant silent hill of that. You wouldn’t have been able to do it. And also even if the, you know, the second or third act of that game had been as scary as the first, by then you might be totally desensitized to it, you know, I think these experiences do need to be quite short and unless you’re doing the kind of balancing it with action stuff that Resi manages so well, I do think it’s challenging to sustain a sense of terror for that long. Yeah, that’s a good call. So my second pick is The Glass Staircase, which is a PC game by the developer Puppet Combo, who’s a really interesting developer of like B-movie style horror games, who is backed on Patreon of all places. And sort of like basically if you back the Patreon at the $10 level, I think it is, you get all of the stuff that the developer and the crew that works on the games makes. And this game is like a Silent Hill and Resident Evil kind of like PS1 pastiche. Like it has, you know, kind of blocky graphics. It’s obviously like a filter on like more modern sort of renders, but you’re in some kind of institution. There’s a lot of kind of like young women in identical dresses and you kind of take this pill and there’s like a megaphone that comes on and says like, good girls take their pills and stuff like that. And the girls one by one, you play as the girls one by one, you leave the room that you’re in with these girls, you wander around this house and you kind of keep exploring until basically a jump scare happens. So first one occurs when you open the front door and that and just try and leave the place. There’s a jump scare. It’s like it cuts on them. The image cuts in on like the eyes of the main character. The second one, you get to like leave the building and you’re in this kind of like rainy estate. This very old kind of like stone building and you’re wandering around this maze. You’ve been told there’s a package that’s been sent for you. And you go looking for it in this maze. You actually have to treat it like a maze. It takes quite a while. And there’s like this quite freaky sort of synthy score playing in the background. And then you find the package and the rain stops and the music turns to like drums. You just hear this banging over and over again. And as you try and leave the maze, all of the routes you took to get there are blocked off and you realize that you’re trapped there. And you turn a corner and there is a 12 foot Nemesis style monster that you run into. And that’s the second jump scare. And then the game resets again. And that jump scare, I had to fucking turn the game off. But coming back to it, it has like Resident Evil style combat as well. It has the old tank controls and stuff. And then later on, you’re kind of like using kind of conventional weapons and that’s how the rest of the girls’ stories play out. But I thought it was like a really cool, powerful, interesting sort of horror experience. It’s only about 90 minutes long. But have either of you heard of Puppet Combo? Has this kind of like gone over your head? What about you, Louise? This is new to me. I think I saw the Glastier. It was a couple of years ago it came out. I think I seem to remember it coming out, but I looked at it and thought that actually looks terrifying. I should play it. And then I obviously gave myself many excuses not to, because you’re just describing that sounds horrific. Yeah, it is. It’s like it’s really, really effective. I think that like for most people, you could probably, I mean, there’s like a commentary-free walkthrough. Obviously, I encourage backing the developer, giving the developer money. But if you wanted the measure of it, it is on YouTube. You can see the bits I just described. What I described was basically the first 20 minutes of the game. And then like, yeah, there’s an hour more of that, but even scarier. You describing that gave me like big vibes back to being in the playground where people are telling you about horror. Because that doesn’t happen when you’re an adult as much, but when you’re a kid and people have seen something and it becomes like playground sort of like urban legend, you know, right back to like, I remember someone explaining like the concept of alien and the face hugger and it being born and all that kind of shit. And it just how vivid it is when someone explains something to you and you’re like, oh, man, I’ve got to see this terrifying thing. Supposed it’s like creepypasta. Yeah, right. That’s the kind of modern version of that, because you still feel it. It’s like it happened to a friend of a sister’s friend’s cousin, all the rest of it, and you read it on no sleep and you’re just like, I’m never going to sleep again, because even though I know this is fake and someone has written it specifically to be told like this, I still don’t like it. Yeah, I have nothing to do with that stuff. That stuff is just so cursed, I have no interest in scaring myself like that. Yeah, I’m a really interesting developer though. I like the idea that becoming popular enough that you’re backed on Patreon, they hit a stretch goal to hire environmental artists basically, so they can focus on the actual horror game part. The rest of puppet combos games are a bit more sort of schlocky, like this one called Murder House, where you’re like a news crew investigating a spooky house and stuff. And I think they’re all fairly short, but I think Murder House is actually on the Switch this week. It was a news story during the rounds actually about this really creepy icon on the Switch home screen. I don’t know if you saw that during the rounds. I think it was on Kotaku and stuff. But yeah, an interesting developer for sure. So yeah, I do recommend at least watching it if you’re not necessarily playing it. But yeah, puppet combo, want to definitely shout that out from the kind of PS1 style horror movement that’s definitely a thing on PC. Matthew, I’m really excited to hear about your second pick. So next up is Eternal Darkness, which is the Nintendo published horror game, survival horror game. I guess it’s got like some roots in a kind of Resident Evil style play for the GameCube made by Silicon Knights, but with Nintendo’s input. One of the funniest things, you can find the patents for Eternal Darkness and it’s like a lot of Silicon Knights people on there, but also Miyamoto and you can find the patent for this game’s got an insanity system and it’s just funny seeing like these horror mechanics broken down and Miyamoto’s name on them. It’s so different from what you associate with him. How much involvement he actually had, I don’t know, but I love the idea that Miyamoto made like one horror game. It’s a Lovecraftian tale set across several thousand years where you in the present day visit your grandfather’s house and through exploring that house, you uncover the long dark history of the sort of family line, I guess, and how this sort of family has been sort of battling some kind of cosmic Lovecraftian horror for 2000 years. What’s interesting about it is that each level you play a different character in a different time period. So it jumps from sort of starts at like Roman times all the way up to modern period. Each character is very different. I mean, they control differently. They’ve in terms of like some are more action capable. You know, you play like a fireman, I think, with like an axe and a machine gun in modern day. But then you can also, you also play sort of a sort of monk scribe who’s basically just zombie fodder and very, very slow. And it kind of recycles a lot as well. Like it jumps through history, but it uses a lot of the same environments. So you get to see them at different points in history. And you maybe get to find out what happened at the end of certain character stories in later character stories. So structurally, it does some quite interesting stuff, especially for Nintendo who don’t tend to go heavily into like big narrative games. This has got a lot going for it. I don’t know if it’s like the scariest horror game per se. You know, I always thought the Lovecraftian sort of thing is more the kind of impossible scale of what you’re dealing with. Like it’s not quite the same as a sort of jump scare or a horror that’s in your face. It’s more about just how this family line is just doomed by something bigger than itself. So it’s more overwhelming than it is, like genuinely frightening. It has got one of like all time great jump scares, which I won’t spoil. It’s quite early in the game. Everyone who’s played this game will know it. Involves the bathroom. Genuinely made me shit myself and also gave me, no, it didn’t genuinely make me shit myself, I should say. It really messed me up at the time and I was really worried that that’s what, because it came early on, that that’s what the whole game is gonna be. It isn’t, like I say, it’s more this kind of creeping dread. But the thing that really defines it is this insanity system where every time you basically meet an enemy, it saps your sanity. And you know, if you kill them, you can earn a bit back, but the game is sort of designed that your sanity is going down one way or another and it begins to sort of make all this weird stuff happen. The camera will begin to tilt to begin with, but it leads all the way up to these almost Kojima-ish mind fucks where you go into your inventory and all your items are now missing, or it will say the controller is disconnected, or it looks like the game is bugging out or glitching out or the TV is breaking in some way. And it’s kind of weird because a lot of people love that stuff, but it’s also like punishment. So the weird balance in this game is like the coolest stuff. You almost need to go out of your way to see. You know, you need to fail for it to happen. I think Watch His Chops from Silicon Knights, Dennis Dyke came back a few years ago and tried to kickstart like a spiritual successor to this, which I’d actually really be up for. But I just don’t think at the time people kind of trusted him or the effort enough to kind of make it happen, which is a shame because this was a really distinct horror thing from a company not known for it. Yeah. So I missed this one at the time because I didn’t have a GameCube. I do own it, but I’ve never actually played it. But Louise, is this one that you caught in some form? No, it wasn’t. I didn’t play it at the time. I didn’t have the console. I only then ended up getting a PS2. But I really, I’m with you on the cosmic horror and now I want to just watch all of it. But I do have a question. Does the sanity meter actually work? Because do you remember? Was it Amnesia of the Dark Descent? They basically admitted that you couldn’t stop the nastiness from happening because it was all just a cheat. They would play with a sanity meter as and when they wanted to so that you would always get the scariest experience. Because that’s, because I initially, you know, when you play that and you see a meteor, like I really affect this. But I guess the fact they had a patent meant the fact that it did work. But yeah, I don’t think amnesias did. Yeah, it’s it’s it’s genuine. Like the meters they’re doing it’s thing. I mean, that’s, yeah, I mean, one of the criticisms of the game is that you almost have to like deliberately play badly for it to drop all the way to the bottom. And like the really crazy things, you know, there are some things in this like, you know, it can go to like a fake blue screen of death and things like that if you really let it get bad. And yeah, so like I said, I think what it does do is, I think it balances it nicely. I think the, you know, the resources are balanced enough that you are dropping into it enough to see the system. You know, I definitely didn’t come out the other end feeling like I’ve been shortchanged, but it also felt like a genuine, like mechanical concern that you had to deal with. You know, I think it is legit. No, I just wanted to say it’s really interesting that like, I think now that’s something that horror developers need to think about is so that you don’t miss those moments because like Alien Isolation, they basically give a director to the alien that said that it would know what part of the ship you were on. And they even put eyes on the back of its head. So you could never walk behind the alien, even though it doesn’t, you don’t see those eyes. You could never do it because basically they’ve created it so that it will always be as scary as possible. It always knows actually where you are and it can literally see out the back of its head just so that you always get, you always have the most terrifying experience possible and you can’t just walk along. It’s always fine the alien wasn’t programmed to walk along this section, so I’m fine. I always think that’s really cool. I think there’s another game I’ll talk about in a bit actually which has a similar balancing interest. I think there’s some Japanese developers have maybe done some more legitimate experiments in trying to make horror emerge kind of mechanically rather than scripting it. I feel like this game is one of the first to be, you know, this feels like there’s a bit of an obsession with Lovecraft now in horror games but I feel like this was less of a thing at the time. I think this is the first time I had heard the name Lovecraft but I didn’t really know what the deal was. I mean, for me, when you get to the end and it becomes properly Lovecraft-y, I thought it was quite silly. I find Lovecraft stuff quite silly rather than scary. I don’t really know people who are into Lovecraft properly, like what they get out of it, you know, if it’s just like the iconography of it, it’s quite cool. But I don’t… do people find it genuinely chilling? I don’t know. Yeah, I don’t know either. But like Dark Corners of the Earth is another sort of like a good early-ish sort of 3D Lovecraft game. Bit incomplete, but like a very atmospheric game on PC and Xbox. So yeah, it was just kicking off around this time. Louise, I’m so excited to hear about your third pick. What have you got here? Well, I think we have to have one from this. And it’s… well, I suppose we did with PT, but it’s Silent Hill 4, The Room, which I played when I was at university. And I will fully say, you know, when you’re at university and you’re all in your tiny little university cells and you’re probably partaking in the more herbal aspects of university life. I don’t know what you’re referring to. Exactly. Suddenly, when you combine that with something like Silent Hill, The Room always gets… The Room is always really… people are like, oh, it wasn’t meant to be a Silent Hill game. It’s not scary. It’s a bit weird. It was always meant to be a Silent Hill game. It’s just quite different. So you are in an apartment and you basically crawl through holes in the walls and go to the strangest parts of… You go to water prisons full of horrific creatures and it’s genuinely… It still frightens me when I think about it now. The creature design. There was one called… I think it’s called… I want to see the twin victim and it’s basically like a two headed baby monster that walks around on two hands and points at you really slowly and then screams and runs at you. Genuinely, one of the most horrific… I think it’s just one of my scariest games ever and I don’t think it’s necessarily because of those horrible experiences that it’s… They maybe are the reason that it’s still in my head, you know, but I do think that that game had a lot of really scary stuff in it, really consistently scary stuff in it, really unhinged, strange designs. I mean, that water prison that I was talking about, it was basically like a multi-layered prison of… It was just endless cells that were going in looping circles that were ever decreasing. And that’s the kind of thing that taps into your head and makes you go insane, regardless of having things that run after you and point and scream. And there’s a few bonus scares in it that really still get me. Like when you’re in your apartment, it kind of starts off quite normal. You can’t go out the door, it’s chained. But when you get sort of spat back into your apartment, it begins to sort of de-evolve and become more like the places that you’re crawling through the hole. And it becomes the walls become dirtier, chains probably, more chains appear on the door, or you go and you look out the peephole and there’s someone just staring back at you. But one of the scariest ones is you’re looking into your next door neighbour’s flat. And every time you look through this little hole on the wall, you see that Robbie the Rabbit doll sitting on the bed with his back to you. But then in one of the occasions where you go, he’s turned around and he’s looking at you. And that’s genuinely just one of the most, it’s so simple. You don’t need to be being chased or haunted or fighting. It’s just this thing of that was like this before, and now it’s not like this. And now I want to turn this game off. And yeah, so the room genuinely still bothered. I don’t think I could even replay it. Maybe I should. Maybe it would just show me that it just doesn’t look great and is a bit janky and strange. But my memories of it are probably scarier than the game itself. Yeah, it’s not one I actually played. But I was always fascinated by the idea of like voyeurism being like a, you know, like a device you could use for horror in a game. Like I don’t think that that has really been done that much elsewhere. But like, I feel like having peepholes kind of taps into that. Is that is that part of the sort of like vibe of the game? Is there like a voyeuristic aspect to it? You know, I think I almost think it’s like a it’s it’s kind of like just how to make a perfect bottled horror element. I think it’s kind of this idea of, yes, we can scare you by dumping you into a world where you’re chased by someone strange and you can hear gates creaking and horrible things. But also that we can actually terrify you the most when you’re back where you are meant to be safe. And I think it’s I suppose it’s voyeuristic in the sense that you’re looking out at a world that’s that’s trying to scare you. But I also think it’s looking back at you because you’re in a room that’s meant to be safe. And as you progress through the game, you start like you start lighting candles to try and ward off the things and you put them into different rooms because otherwise horrible things happen in those rooms. You’re kind of defending yourself with these candles that you have. And it’s it’s an absolute endurance. It’s a proper endurance of a game. And I think we played it. I don’t even know how many nights we played it over. But genuinely, it would get to be like, is it Silent Hill time? Yes, it’s Silent Hill time. We’ve got to go and do that again. And it would just be this absolute terror fest as we sat in this breeze block cell in Sterling University. So yeah, it’s quite the experience. Wow. Yeah, that’s great. Matthew, is this one that you played? No, I haven’t played. You know, from what I know of it, you know, I wondered if it had some similarities with PT in terms of like a recycled, like limited domestic space, that kind of horrible stuff happened in. But yeah, I just a bit too cursed for me. Does it have those similarities? Oh, totally. Yeah, it’s exactly that. It’s that taking advantage of a of a natural situation where you’re meant to feel safe and then like just turning it on its head and then shaking you. That’s freaky. I think it is. This one’s been re-released on PC on GOG in recent years. Oh, press it. Yeah, yeah. So I believe it’s fairly easy to get hold of right now. I don’t know how it runs on PC, but I imagine you can probably mob this to look quite nice. But yes, if there’s anything like The Other Silent Hills on PC. But yeah, great pick, Louise. I should definitely play that at some point. That’s cool. So my third pick is Condemned Criminal Origins, which was an Xbox 360 launch title. You can also play on PC. It’s backwards compatible on Xbox. Actually, at the time that we’re recording this, I think it will still be valid by the time the episode’s live. It’s £3.74 in the Xbox sale or $5 for American listeners. So very, very cheap to get hold of. First-person horror game from Monolith, best known for the No One Lives Forever games before this. Very different vibe. Yeah, very different vibe. And so it’s like a kind of a melee-based first-person horror game. The optics of it aren’t necessarily great. You’re fighting a lot of homeless people who are kind of amped up on this drug. You know, not sure the optics of that are fantastic, I’ll be honest. What I really like about this game is that, okay, it is genuinely scary, but it’s the best I’ve seen a David Fincher influence on games. It’s got a very sort of 70 vibe where the first thing you do in the game is you’re like a police officer, like a detective, forensic detective, big sort of CSI vibes, is going into like a sort of like a kitchen area at a dinner table where there is a dead body of a woman opposite like a really fucked up looking mannequin and then you’re kind of investigating the crime scene and looking for clues and then there’s kind of like scribblings on the wall and there’s the vibe of it is just very, very similar to Seven or, you know, something like Zodiac, even though it’s about before Zodiac. It definitely has that very distinctive grimy borderline horror Fincher vibe and I think that’s done really effectively, but this game is full of like people sort of scurrying past in the distance and you know they’re going to be around a corner to try and like thump you basically and the way that people move is really quite scary and the spaces you’re going in are just these really grotty kind of like apartments and train stations and stuff and it’s just so, so scary that probably the most famous section of this game is in a department store where there are these mannequins that start basically moving around you and that section, the execution of it is so, so good. It’s probably one of the scariest things I’ve encountered in the game. When you hear that out loud you think, okay, well, is it going to end up being quite daft and maybe a bit bio-shocky but it’s actually just really fucked up and spooky. I think this is quite chill sort of classical music playing in the background as well and it’s just an absolutely horrible section but probably one of the most memorable sections of a horror game that I’ve played. Louise, have you got much history with this one? I don’t but I have played that sequence because someone said, you need to play this bit and mannequins are horrifically scary and I didn’t realise. I only played that in the sort of isolation and it was scary enough so I didn’t realise it was actually a proper breakdown investigation type thing as well which always makes horror so much more attractive when you’re looking at it from that way because it’s almost, it gives you that hook of a storyline and an investigation and I think I love an investigation that way. I think there’s a reason that sort of crime books are one of the biggest sellers is because we like filling in the jigsaw pieces of a story and I actually didn’t realise that that’s what Condemned’s wraparound was and now I want to go play it for 379. Yeah, it’s really like, it gets really, really silly on that side but it’s a kind of like a way into a horror experience. It is really effective, like you say, it’s kind of like a real world grounding and yeah, that section, I would recommend even if you don’t want to play it at home, watch that section on YouTube and just be like dazzled by how fucking terrifying it is. It’s really, really good. It’s not that far into the game, I would say, only a couple of hours to get to that bit. So yeah, what about you Matthew, you play this one? Yeah, yeah, too scary though. I don’t think I finished this game because it was just, you know, just the dread of having to progress in it, kind of over, over, over balanced out the kind of enjoyment of that progression, not to say it’s bad or anything, it’s just, it’s super full on. Probably also worth a little shout out for Monolith’s Fear series. It’s the same Monolith, right? Yeah, that’s right. Yeah, different, a different team, I think, but yeah, same developer. Yeah, which, you know, we’re, you know, for a first person shooter, you know, very action heavy, the Fear series, also the, particularly the first one, super effective kind of use of like J-horror tropes to have some proper scares in it. I think they’ve got a pretty good record of this, Monolith. Yeah, but now they make Middle Earth Shadow of War and Tolkien games, which is really bizarre. But yeah, I’m with you on that one. That was, they were really, really good at this stuff around this time, particularly. So yeah, Condemned, an interesting sort of little series. But yeah, I think because it’s first person horror, it holds up pretty well. It’s not that dated and because it’s like early HD graphics, there’s almost a kind of like VHS effects to playing something that’s a little bit blurry and kind of like muddy and weird. I certainly got that vibe this week. So Matthew, what is your third pick? So I’ve picked Fatal Frame 4, which was the Wii exclusive Fatal Frame, also known as Project Zero in some parts of the world. This was never released outside of Japan, but handily, there is a English language patch for this. So if you own a Wii and you can import a copy of Fatal Frame 4, you can get this patch and play the whole game. I’m not going to claim to be any big Fatal Frame expert or know where this necessarily sits in the series, so there may be a better Fatal Frame. I think there’s a lot of love for Fatal Frame 2, but I wanted to include it as a nod to the series. This is the originally Tecmo, now TecmoKoei series where you fight ghosts with a magical camera which is very, very silly, but the whole mechanic of it is that you kill ghosts by taking a picture of them and there’s this tremendous risk reward element to it in that the closer the ghost gets, the better you’ve framed it, the more damage you’ve done. So you know, you’re basically encouraged to let them get as close as you possibly can. You know, basically you want to wait for them to lunge and really get up in your grill and a lot of these ghosts, you know, they’re kind of lank haired girls, allering and they kind of obscure their faces and it’s not until the very last minute that the kind of true horror of their, their like twisted faces is kind of revealed. So you have to wait for it to be them at their very scariest to really like nail them. In motion, it’s a little, it looks a little arcadey, you know, to have this camera that you’re kind of reloading with film as ammo, basically, to kind of snap these ghosts. But it’s really, really effective, especially if you are into that kind of, if you are spooked by those J-horror tropes, which, you know, for me, that’s the stuff that gets me more than anything. I just find it so unnatural and, you know, the concept of ghosts, I don’t find particularly scary. But for some reason, combined with these like Japanese designs, it’s just absolutely horrendous. This game looks beautiful, a really, really gorgeous step up. They kind of did the Resident Evil 4 shift with Fatal Frame 4 where it stops being kind of fixed camera angles and is over the shoulder, which just means it’s a bit more playable. Annoyingly, like I say, it’s quite hard to play this. Interestingly, there was a sequel, there was Fatal Frame 5 was a Wii U exclusive, which is Maiden of the Dark Water, and that’s just about to be re-released on PCX. But basically everything. I think it’s even on Switch. So that’s, you know, they’re fundamentally the same thing in terms of you’re in a quite traditional Japanese environment and you have this ghost combat, which defines the series. I think there’s quite minor tweaks that maybe separate one game from the other in terms of quality. Four is the one that I’ve played and know the best, so that’s why I’ve included it. More as a shout out for the whole series. It also has this really goofy mechanic where you have to pick up items, you have to hold the A button to reach your arm out to grab them, and if you let go of the A you retract your arm. The whole thing is that it lets you do those horror film moments where you’re slowly easing your hand into a crack and you’re like, is something going to grab me, is something not going to grab me? Which when I was watching videos of it back, it looks really silly, but I at the time really shat me up. I thought it was a brilliant representation of that kind of classic moment in a horror film, of that kind of creeping dread of slowly pulling back the curtains, but you’ve got to hold the button to pull back the curtains. I love all that shit. I thought it was great. I think this is probably, this was like a coveted kind of import game at the time, I remember, because it’s got Grasshopper involved, right? Koichi Suda is the director of this one. So yeah, an interesting pick and like you say, not easy to get hold of, so it’s cool to have you talk about it. Hopefully they’ll find some way to get this onto modern formats if they’re doing the other one. But I guess we’ll see. What about you in this series, Louise? Did you play any of the Fatal Frame games on PS2? I think I played Fatal Frame 2. Was that Crimson Butterfly? So I think I played that one and genuinely, you’re just absolutely right. It’s that idea. It’s that risk reward thing of having to have them come so much closer in order to actually damage them, which I find really terrifying because obviously games teach you that the minute something appears, you just hit fire, but actually you’re like, no, the scary thing has to come really close to you. And I’m totally with you on, I think that was my first kind of experience of J-horror properly. Right. And that was around, I think maybe, did I see it before? Before I saw the remake of The Ring, which was kind of my first J-horror movie experience. So I think seeing this experience of such like, they had those, I think you would go into rooms and I feel like I’m not, I hope this was the game where you would go into a room and you would maybe see like feet poking out from under like curtains in the corner and there would just be weird hauntings that were happening around and you kind of had to wait until those perfect moments to snap the camera until they’d revealed themselves. But there was just this absolute sense of complete dread. And I think the alienness, the sort of alien nature of Japanese horror means it’s intrinsically terrifying. It still scares me. That ring imagery, that sort of there’s a real obsession with hair and it getting in mouths and just there’s a very interesting physicality to those, even the way those spirits move. And I feel like they were all kind of tied into sort of traditional Japanese spirits as well. So it was all very, it felt very real for a game that had such a silly, you know, that had such a task. And even then, it doesn’t feel so silly when you’re going into a room, you know, that all disappears, that all, that all sheds away. So I do feel like when I played that, I don’t even think I finished the game. So I’m actually really excited to play The Maiden of Blackwater on Switch because I bet I bet it’s got motion controls that means you can control the camera with your Joy-Cons. Yeah, because in the Wii U one, the Wii U controller was the camera. You had to hold it up and, you know, you got a separate viewfinder on it. So that was quite nicely done. Yeah, I just, yeah, good, good, good spooky series. Yeah, kind of gorgeous as well. Just really beautifully made. Yeah, just right around the time of that sort of J-Horror boom in the early noughties, I suppose the series was just sort of spot on, kind of accompaniment to that. But yeah, what’s your fourth pick, Louise? My fourth pick is Outlast. Now Outlast does the thing that so much horror does where it says, hey, night vision is scary, isn’t it? So you arrive at Mount Massive Asylum as a journalist that’s been sent a letter from a whistleblower. And of course you decide to go at night because that’s, that’s the correct time to go or without anyone else or without telling anyone else that you’re going. And you kind of, even the, I think the introduction to Outlast might be again, one of my favourite scariest gaming experiences simply because you know how badly it’s going to go. Like you’re driving along this really sort of overgrown road and you’re kind of going over potholes and your, your headlight lamps don’t really light up enough of the road. And then you get to this gatehouse where you find some batteries for your camera that you’re taking in. It’s like, oh, and it’s teaching you how to use night vision. And this is when you’re outside and you’ve got this, like, hulking mass of this asylum just on the horizon and you’re like, oh, I’m going in there, great. And you arrive at it and the front door won’t open and you’re like, of course it won’t open. Why don’t we just go home for tea? Like you’ve got all these pushing forward on the horror tropes of you’re going to have to keep going, but you really don’t want to. And you don’t want to know what we’re going to do with this horrific night vision mechanic that we’ve just given you and these batteries that are going to run out. So by the time you actually enter the asylum through a window that’s clearly been used as an escape, like you can see that it’s been there’s been like boarded up windows that have been slammed out from the inside for something to get out and you’re going in and the minute you go in, the lights just go out and it just because it’s about I think it’s five or six hours and it does get quite absurd by the end. I don’t love the end, but the first few hours of outlast where it’s just so glossy and Hollywood and rich as you’re exploring this sort of first person asylum and constantly having to use your night vision and kind of worrying about whether you’re going to end up stumbling around in the dark. And I think it actually does that quite masterfully. It makes sure that you constantly do find enough batteries. So as long as you’re not constantly got the night vision on, you’re actually going to be okay. You’re not going to be left, but they’re limited enough that you mentally feel like you’re never quite ready, which I suppose is what survival horror does. It gives you the odd bullet, et cetera, but I think Outlast just does that so well. So by the time you’re chased by the horrific inhabitants of the asylum, you’re already sort of ramped up to absolutely, it’s that Winnie the Pooh thing again. You’re absolutely ramped up to anything could be chasing you and it would be the scariest thing ever. But although I say that… You’re quite fixated on Winnie the Pooh as a horror icon. Well, you know, Thomas the Tank is obviously the horror icon that we all love. So I really think Winnie the Pooh could really have a career in this as a mod horror. But yeah, I think Outlast ticks all my creepy boxes. Yeah, I didn’t so much love Outlast 2. It was full of unnecessary chasey stuff. But the worlds that Red Barrels build are really horrifying. They love their horror and you can feel that they love their horror. You can feel as you look down a corridor and you see someone standing at the end with sort of eyes glowing or just a wheelchair there and you know that they’re all kind of big horror tropes, but it doesn’t make them any less terrifying. So I think it deftly handles horror tropes to make you feel like you’re in hell basically and it’s really, really good at it. Yeah, I feel like this arrived right around the time that like, you know, I think amnesia preceded it. But like there was this boom in first person horror. I suppose I’m curious about what you made of that movement, the kind of thing that led to like Slender Man and then on the high end, like Alien Isolation. Do you think this is like a good starting point for people who are kind of intrigued in that side of horror? I think it is a really good starting point. It’s a really strong one because there’s been a lot of clones since and I think it’s also very tied into YouTube and watching scary experiences on YouTube and watching people react to scary things on YouTube. I think a lot of people came to these games, especially Slender Man and Amnesia The Dark Descent even, through streamers and through YouTube and that became a sort of place for people to share these experiences because actually sometimes it can be too much playing them on your own. I don’t find them particularly always particularly pleasant to experience on your own, but if you’re watching someone and you’re going through it with them, it’s kind of like that lovely sort of childhood thing of playing with a sibling or a friend. So I think these games really lend themselves really well to playing together because they’re almost they’re played for screams, for laughs, you know, and I think sometimes it can become a bit grim otherwise, especially there’s some really scary DLC for Outlast, which is I think it’s the whistleblower and there’s some really horrible, disturbing characters in that that I would always rather experience with someone else because of how scary it is. So I think this is the real high point and there was a lot that came after it that was just a bit of a clone. And also the thing that Outlast also balances, which actually the sequel initially didn’t before they updated it, was insta-fail chase sequences, which I hate. I think horror games should be able to steer us through narrative experiences without making us frustrated. And I don’t think that necessarily means that they have to be super easy, but I do think there needs to be a point where you’re hungry for the next scare, but this one isn’t scaring you anymore. You know, the new Amnesia Rebirth dealt with that really well. So if you died in Amnesia Rebirth, you would be kind of dropped into a sort of randomised point before it, and it would almost sort of help you dodge it if you wanted to. So you wouldn’t basically hammer your head against a wall to try and get through it because they would kind of auto-correct you so that you would still be scared, but you would never feel furious about it because you would just want to get on with the experience. And I don’t think, I think you could be able to turn that on and off if you wanted that if you wanted that sort of nightmarish, I just want to stealth through everything. But I think horror games should equally be able to take you on that journey to pull you forward and let you experience those scares without repetition. So I think Outlast actually does that quite well, which surprised me that the sequel didn’t initially, but yeah, as I say, they did, they did change it to make it a little less chase heavy. Okay. Yeah. Interesting. Yeah. Great pick. I’ve still never played that one, but yeah, I should, I should at some point given considering all the games I’ve played that were inspired by it or borrowed from it. I feel like this is a key game that leads to probably, you know, Resident Evil going first person, for example. Yeah. So yeah, significant. Cool. So my fourth pick is Stories Untold. So this is the game by NoCode, a studio set up by John McKellen, I think it is, who worked on Alien Isolation, the UI elements of that game. And I kind of want to spotlight the first episode here because if people haven’t played Stories Untold, it’s very cheap to get hold of, very easy to get hold of. But if you want to just play the first episode, it’s available as a demo on Steam. And it’s the scariest and most memorable of the episodes, I would say. It’s called The House Abandoned. You’re playing a text adventure within the game. There’s John Carpenter-esque horror music playing in the background. And what goes on around you in the sort of game world is corresponding to what’s happening in the text adventure inside the game. It’s very, very cool. Very, very effective. The other episodes definitely have like big memorable moments too. But I think this is just a fantastic, singular, one simple idea done perfectly. And yeah, I was kind of really fond of it. And obviously that studio has gone on to make Observation and it’s now working on a full-on horror game with Annapurna Interactive, which is really cool. I look forward to seeing how that pans out. But yeah, Stories Untold, I was on PC Gamer when this came out and we were like, we’re all kind of excited about it. It hit right around the time of Stranger Things as well and they kind of like they were riffing on similar 80s sort of influences, has kind of like opening credit sequences and stuff. So yeah, yeah. I suppose then Matthew, I’m sure you’ve played this one, right? I can’t remember if we talked about it in the podcast before. Yeah. Were you fond of Stories Untold? Yeah, I really liked it. I think I liked them more. I wasn’t wild about the final episode and the way it kind of brings them together, but I liked the standalone elements, I thought they were all super distinct, just very well executed and very well observed individually. I think my favourite one is the one with the listening station. The thing style one? Yeah, where you’re tuning into all the different wavelengths and trying to decipher the technology of it. Yeah, I thought this was great. I know I’ve got so much time for this lot and whatever they do going forwards. I think they’ve just got a really singular style. Yeah, very, very cool. Yeah, it doesn’t take long to fire through this one. Is this one you played, Louise? Yeah, well, I’ve played the first of the House Abandoned, which I find really scary. I find its multi-layered nature particularly scary because you were the one playing but also playing, it’s kind of like playingception and it makes you think about what’s behind you. So suddenly you become very aware of yourself, if that makes sense. You have a real sense of, oh, I’m sitting with my back to the room and I have a set of headphones on and there are things happening here that I don’t like. So yeah, I really I don’t want to spoil too much about it, but I really, I really enjoy that particular show. And it’s also, it’s just a really clever way of reflecting horror back at us, really. It’s and it’s very, very smart stuff. Yeah, it’s cool. The idea of using a kind of like retro style game inside the game to evoke the particular time period they’re going for is just really well done. And they obviously think very carefully about things like visual filters and color and like the props on the table and stuff like that. It’s all just really, really well thought out. And it’s a kind of slow building raise up realization that what is going on around you as a player is is corresponding to what’s going on in the game itself. It’s just yeah, fantastic stuff. So, Matthew, what’s your fourth pick? My fourth pick is The Evil Within, which again is maybe more of an action survival horror game than it is outright horror. You know, like a few things on my list, you know, Resi and Eternal Darkness. It’s got a similar, you know, it’s it’s almost too full on to be properly kind of like, sort of scare inducing. I think this has like this amazing intensity to it, which I think is a bit love or hate compared to Resident Evil 4. It’s a lot more full on, you know, it’s almost, you know, it’s another I should say it’s another Shinji Mikami game. It’s the first game he made with Tango Gameworks, which is the studio he sets up once he’s parted ways with Capcom and made his game with Platinum. And I guess the best way to describe it is kind of like Resident Evil 4, but maybe meets like the Saw aesthetic in that it’s just a bit more full on. There’s a bit more body horror, you know, there’s lots of barbed wire. It’s very like aggressive and in your face. It’s quite difficult and quite long. So I’d say it’s a more intense playing experience than Resident Evil 4. It’s quite grueling, which some people don’t react to, but don’t react well to. But I think it really puts you through the kind of wringer in a way that some great horror films do. It’s not necessarily about scares, but just this sort of relentless pressure on you. And when it occasionally releases that pressure, when you get to the save rooms, which in this game are kind of marked out, they play the Claire de Lune piece of music. So when you hear that music, you’re sort of flooded with this kind of relief that you’re going to have a break from just this relentless kind of onslaught of action. That’s really, really effective. That kind of constant kind of sort of application of pressure and then easing it off, I think is brilliantly done. And the thing I mentioned earlier about more mechanical based horror, and maybe he, I think he does this in Resident Evil 4 as well, but you know, I remember reading about the evil within it, it’s got a very careful balancing system where it like rebalances the resources in the world, like on the fly based on how you’re doing to make sure it keeps you in that difficult spot. You know, if you’re really struggling, it will maybe give you more ammo. If you’ve got juicy ammo, it won’t give you the good stuff. You know, it constantly keeps you in that place very, very effectively, which is quite a McCarmy touch. Like I always associate him with sort of mechanics and sort of gameplay ideas first. And that that feels like one of his. It’s also got this really great thing, which is maybe harks back to Resident Evil 1 remake in that some of the bodies will get back up once you’ve killed them unless you burn them. So there’s this extra like resource risk reward element of like, should I use my precious, you know, matches to burn this body or that body? You know, do I think this one’s going to get up and give me more trouble? Can I maybe engineer combat scenarios where I knock down multiple people at once and can set them all alight with a single match? That to me is like a very kind of classic Mikami-ish idea of just trying to stretch what you have far. It’s just a shame that the game’s got like an absolute bullshit story. Like it’s complete nonsense. Very, very confusing. But as an action romp, it’s, I really, really rate Devo within. Yeah, I always thought I would love this because it just seemed on paper, oh, it’s, you know, Mikami returning to survival horror after making Vanquish. But it just wasn’t a game I loved. I think like the story was maybe part of it. It felt like it was kind of a sort of sequence of non-connected imagery in some ways. Yeah, it kind of is. Yeah. For like bullshit reasons. Is this what you played, Louise? I didn’t finish it, I’m afraid, for the story based reasons. But I think that that combo of imagery is spot on that it is so it’s all spinning blades, like especially that intro as well. It has a really powerful intro where you kind of that’s that you sort of wake up hanging upside down and having to hide from a horrific butcher and the most, I think, the visuals of that sequence, especially that the horrific nature of where you’ve woken up and how you have to kind of stale through its proper heart and mouth stuff. But I think and then sort of I think that’s the one where you’re at one point kind of you don’t really have function of your leg and you’re kind of sort of staggering through this bit that’s now got spinning blades and someone’s chasing you. So it’s just like, we’re going to hit you with everything, the entire kitchen sink and you’re not going to be able to run properly. But it lost me and I think again, those that limitation that risk of will I use my matches now that completely that completely worked for me and also didn’t. Because again, I would always feel like, oh, I have to go back in to that world, which just hates me. And I felt I felt like it really didn’t like me at all. But I loved the because that was it had 16 by nine bars, didn’t it? They patch them out or you could turn them off later on, but yeah, at the start you had to play with them. But I felt nice. Like I love the idea of an interactive movie. That’s like an extra element of we know that you like this kind of thing as a movie. See how you do with actually being in being in control of it. So I like those bars. But I do think it’s full of night. I mean, the creature design, the boss design in it is horrifying, like the sort of weird boxes and chains and the real monstrosities and nastiness. So it’s weird to say that that’s the thing I like about it, but the game itself as an experience wasn’t. I couldn’t. It was an endurance rather than a what will happen next? Yeah, 100%. Yeah, it’s certainly an interesting pick and one of the only real kind of like big budget horror games that happened in the last generation. So along with a sequel. So yeah, good one to have in there even if I really hated that boss battle where that girl who follows you around that little room, you got to set her on fire and shoot her. I hate that boss battle so much, Matthew, but I should play again at some point though. I think it was an interesting debate that the black bars triggered about a director’s intent versus like what the players demand. I thought that was interesting and yeah, stylistically it was certainly cool. I think people were just paranoid that he was trying to pare down the resolution because the game wasn’t very well optimised, but anyway, enough about that. So Louise, what’s your final pick here? I’m really excited to talk about this one. My final pick, because it’s actually perfect for horror movies too, is Friday the 13th, The Game. So Friday the 13th, The Game is another of the now very popular asymmetrical horror experiences where you are either playing as one of the camp counsellors or you are playing as Jason Voorhees, everyone’s favourite masked mummies boy. But I think the thing I really love about Friday the 13th is exactly how much the developers clearly love the movies. They have created these perfect recreations of Camp Crystal Lake over the years and everything is perfect. Everything in the cabins is perfect. Every single, you know, every pool of light underneath a street lamp in the middle of the woods is just exactly as it would be in the movies. And then they just layered Friday the 13th on top of it. So where games like Dead by Daylight, which is obviously very, very popular, but it basically reskins the same scenario of restart all these generators and you’ll get out. And that’s literally what Dead by Daylight still is. Meanwhile, Friday the 13th is a genuine Friday the 13th experience. So it’s simple. Jason is killing the camp counsellors and the camp counsellors need to escape. But there are multiple ways to escape so you can fix the boat or you can call the police. And there’s all these really interesting rules in it as well. So if someone has been killed, then if someone performs a particular act or gets to Jason’s mother’s house, you can resurrect characters. It’s just got so many. It implements the theme of the movies so perfectly into actual gameplay. So even your camp counsellors, which who fit into very clear tropes, you know, you’ve got your jock, you’ve got your cheerleader, you’ve got your nerd, but their strengths and their weaknesses are directly correlated to their tropes. So the jock is obviously really strong and he can run for longer. But at the same time, maybe he’s actually secretly really afraid of the dark and he’s not very good at X, Y and Z. So I think that what they did was perfectly translated that. And the minute you start playing with friends, it’s just the best thing because it’s got proximity audio. So if you’re playing as Jason and you kind of you’re wandering through and you can’t see anyone or you’re using your special abilities, which even has special abilities for each of the Jasons, depending on which Jason you’re playing as, whether it’s part three or part four, you’ve got a slightly different mask and you’ve got a different weapon. Maybe it’s not a machete. It’s like a like a fishing spear. So it all fits perfectly to it. But if you’re walking through the woods and all of a sudden you can suddenly hear your friends like, oh no, hide in here. Do this, do that. And suddenly you become Jason. You are not just playing as something with a mask and a machete, but suddenly you can hear them and you hear your friends as prey. I think that’s kind of boils down just the epitome of what a slasher game can be. And it just does it so effortlessly, even if there’s a really cheesy cut scene to start, which has quite unrealistic graphics, graphical faces, shall we say. Oh, I was going to say, they’ve got quite funny screaming faces. They have interesting faces. But at the same time, they did full mocap of Kane Hodder, who was the guy who played Jason for 3, 4, 5, 6 and 7. So they got him to mocap actual deaths from the series, like the sleeping bag death or all of these things. There’s literally a death in it where he punches a hole through someone’s chest and then looks through the gap. It’s funny and silly, but it’s also massive fan service. And actually, now I’m thinking about it, they were showing it off at E3 one year and Cain Hodder was there. And I actually have a picture of me with Cain Hodder with his hand around my throat, which now I think about it, it’s not a great shot, but at the same time, I was like, yeah, just pretend to strangle me. But yeah, there’s a lot of, there’s so much love in it. And I think that’s what people really connect with is the fact that they feel that horror love and they feel part of it. And it doesn’t feel cheap. And it feels genuine, which is something that people really, really sort of attach themselves to. Why do you think this type of horror experience has really taken off in recent years, Louise? I think the idea of asymmetrical horror is interesting, knowing that if you were playing Alien Isolation, for instance, and knowing that your friend was the alien, I think knowing that someone who is real is doing the hunting makes all the difference, and especially if that person’s your friend. You know, I think that being on edge for that kind of thing. And I also think, you know, as much as I sounded like I was being mean about Dead by Daylight, they’ve had some really interesting DLC editions. You can obviously play as Ghostface, or you can, there’s a Silent Hill experience, and there’s all of these ways that people can now interact with the things that they love by the medium of any symmetrical horror experience. I know why people love it. But I think there’s just the rise of, again, people viewing on Twitch, people love watching Dead by Daylight. That’s one of the most viewed, because actually a lot of people don’t like playing horror games. So watching horror games or even playing with friends kind of blunts that kind of sharp edge a bit, which I think is really important. I love the idea of recapturing all of the beats of a horror movie in the form of a multiplayer game. That’s brilliantly conceived. I should play that at some point. I think I got it on PS Plus at some point, maybe. It’s sad because they lost the license. There was license issues, so they didn’t add any more. It’s fine. The servers are still live, as far as I can remember. But they’ve just never added anything else because that went away. But rumour is that Gun Media is making a Texas Chainsaw Massacre game, is the rumour. There’s been a few. I think leatherfacethegame.com was registered to Gun Media at some point. So maybe it’s a fake out, but if they’re doing that, if what they did with Friday the 13th is anything to go by, their version of Texas Chainsaw will be really interesting. That’s really cool. Cool. So my final pick for this episode is No Players Online, which is a free game set inside a haunted multiplayer first-person shooter server. So it’s really straightforward, quite short, I think you’ll finish it in about 10 minutes, but like it’s kind of like a catch the flag map 90s style Quake infused sort of game has all the kind of different trappings of a first person multiplayer shooter. You kind of walk the flag back and forth and you start to notice a figure in this empty map and kind of what emerges, there’s a sort of plot based reason for what is going on, but the very simple effect of this, there are no other players here except me and there’s, but there is something else here is really, really effective and clever. But the reason I picked this is because when it got popular, the developers built an ARG to expand the experience. So the game, you finish the game, you find out a kind of twist and then it sort of moves on, but then they started like playing around with it. So its developers would hint that entering the Konami code in the game would let players see other endings and players discovered that they could make an eye appear in the sky and shooting the eye with your gun cut to a video of a person’s hand drawing arrows with a pencil. And so there were these like mysterious kind of like arrows. And then if you then entered the arrows that you saw on screen in your keyboard, a PNG would be saved to your desktop. You’d open the PNG and the PNG would have a date in it. And on this date, the developers add an email address to the game’s itch page. And emailing that gave you a spooky auto reply from the fictional developer of the game. Now, in his signature, there was a link to a GeoCities looking itch page for an unknown game called I. So you download I and it’s a game about walking a dog that you can’t see down this dark path. You kind of have the leash and you see the leash going out into the distance and you follow the dog down the path until you come to a dock. And at the dock, it’s pitch black. And if you walk off the edge of the dock, the screen goes red and no players online appears back inside the game and like a video plays and offers another clue for no players online. And if you can decipher that clue, then you can see the real ending to the first game, no players online. So it’s like a completely different game on itch basically unlocks the ending to this this first game. And it escalated because at first it was a game jam game, no players online. They were like, oh, wouldn’t it be cool if a multiplayer server was haunted? But then a Discord server was set up to start deciphering all of these clues. So this everything I just described that that unfolded over a series of like days and weeks. The game took four days to make, but the ARG took them six days to make. And there was like there was an element where there was a real life clue. There was like a sign attached to like a tree in a park in Belgium. And people went and found it. And basically like that your reward for it is going to the secret developer room, which is really fucking weird in in no players online. And I just love the idea that it was like one cool game that they attached to like another game and then built this whole kind of like extended horror experience around it. And as a player, like diving into that whole conspiracy was one of the most immersive horror experiences I’ve had. So I wrote a PC Gamer feature about it, actually, which I’ll link when this episode goes out. So I don’t expect either of you have played this, but I wanted to kind of talk about that whole experience because it was just really, really cool and fundamentally the idea of a, you know, if you think of a map like Halo’s Blood Gulch and the idea that could be like, you know, a horror kind of like entity in there somewhere. It’s a really powerful idea. So no players online. That’s what I wanted to flag. Any thoughts on that one? I know once you read your feature on it, it sounds incredible. I’d literally I heard I think I heard sort of talk of it, especially the sort of ARG element and watching it go by. But I never I never experienced it directly. But I love I suppose all ARGs, especially if it’s a horror one, suddenly makes things significantly more interesting. And again, what you say about imagining something awful on a map that you know, the idea that something is hiding somewhere is kind of that ultimate horror of the unknown. So that sounds really cool. Yeah, it was certainly certainly a cool experience. It was a really hard feature to write because I had to try and trace the order of how people deduced what was going on and that was like tough. But it’s interesting because one of the developers lurked in the Discord and clues that people thought that they thought it would take weeks to solve. They solved in like hours, just because that’s what like people are obsessed with this stuff, kind of like Reddit style detectives are kind of are all about related. It’s worth watching the film under the Silver Lake for a bit more on that sort of side of things. But yes, so no players online. That’s what I wanted to flag. But Matthew, what’s your final pick? It’s my final pick. I’m going to put my hand up and say I haven’t played a huge amount of this because I found it too scary. But I picked Phasmophobia, which is a online cooperative ghost identification game. So you’re not Ghostbusters, but you and I think it’s up to four. I think it’s a group of four of you go into buildings and your job is to identify what kind of spirit is haunting it. And you have a series of tools which you take in with you, things like thermometers and crucifix and a little sort of spirit box thing and a Ouija board and all this kind of stuff. And you have to apply these tools to the house to try and work out the ghost behaviour and then kind of look into your little, you’ve got a little encyclopedia of what different ghosts will do, a bit like the witcher basically really. And you have to go in and then work out what ghost is in it. And that’s it. You don’t fight the ghost. You just have to identify and get out. But when you’re in the house, the more you sort of interact with it and the longer you spend in there, you begin to sort of attract the irer of the ghost and it may begin to hunt you. And so it it occupies this sort of terrifying space of there’s just nothing there. It’s completely empty. You can’t really see anything, but you are kind of upsetting this thing. And the sense of, you know, it definitely has to be played in co-op, but the sense of being in this house and trying to kind of communicate, I should say, one of the very clever mechanics in it is that, you know, you can’t just talk over voice chat in the game. You have to sort of buzz in on your radio over like a walkie-talkie type system. And so everything you hear is just like little blasts of staticky speech from your friends. You know, a bit like Louise was saying with being able to hear like the counselors in Friday the 13th. It creates this incredibly realistic soundscape of that you’re in this house and you’re just hearing like crackly versions of real friends saying, you know, I’m going into the bathroom and you’re downstairs and you’re like, okay, I’m going into the basement and all this kind of stuff. And it just sounds so much like you’re in a horror film. It’s such an accurate version of the same we’ve seen a thousand times. And I think, you know, like I say, I haven’t played a huge amount of this. I wonder if it works brilliantly because I don’t really know how it works properly. And, you know, it’s in early access. People are kind of picking away at it, like working out the rules of this world. And it’s sort of fun in its ambiguities of like, you know, is this working? Isn’t this working? And while you’re like puzzling all that out, it can really creep up on you and give you a horrible scare. Like, one of these ghosts emerges, you know. I will say when I played, so I played this with Rich Stanton, a friend of the show, yet to appear on the show. And I was, I became legitimately convinced that the game had recorded Rich’s voice and was using it to lure me into a room. This didn’t happen. This isn’t something the game can do. But that’s the kind of head mind space it puts you into, where I was in a room and then I heard just Rich’s voice say, don’t turn around. And I genuinely couldn’t turn, I was frozen in the corner looking into the corner thinking if I turn around, there’s gonna be a ghost in this room. I was so scared and Rich had to come basically save me and say there’s nothing in there. It is so effective at putting you in this space to really scare yourself. Like that’s, it’s, it’s kind of genius and awful. I was shocked to learn that I own this and now it seems like a good time to play it around sort of Halloween. It’s got a big steam player base. Louise, I’m guessing this is one you know fairly well. Yeah, this is a horrifically scary game. And in the way that, so you are obviously, you’re sort of ghost hunting and the idea that you not only need to identify what ghost is in there using the tools that you have, like as Matthew was saying, but there’s like a book that you take in which has like, gets writing in it so you know which room the ghost was in, but you need to identify what type of ghost it is. But also they all do different things. So I played with Matthew Elliott and we were actually, I think we were playing as kind of a let’s play type thing. So actually we didn’t use the walkie talkies, we were actually just playing. But what it meant was we arrived at this horrible farmhouse and we’d grabbed our gear and our torches and all the rest of it. You can even get sort of nice found footage feel by it. There’s a camera that you can take in and then you can watch the camera from your like the safety of your haunting kit van, which is fun. But Matt and I were going into this house and he went in first. The door slammed because this particular ghost likes to split you up. The door slammed and all I could hear in my ears was Matt screaming because the ghost was killing him. But I was just outside and it was genuinely horrible because it does do that perfect thing of you know that you’re going to be haunted, but you don’t know how. But it feels properly. The ghosts are really vindictive and horrible. So then eventually when I could actually get into the room, Matt was lying dead at the bottom of the stairs and it was just like, oh, OK. And when people die, they actually go into like the spirit world. So they’re just kind of wandering around in this sort of white version of the world that you’re also in. So they can kind of help and they can kind of see the ghosts sometimes as well. So again, like that situation where you were looking into the corner and you didn’t want to turn around because sometimes it is there because it separated you from everyone. And it’s that idea of, I think you go in with all that expectation again of when you’re playing Alien, you know that you’ve got 30 years of cinematic experience of Alien behind you. You go into this sort of haunting thing because we’ve all watched those stupid paranormal hunting ghost shows like Most Haunted or where people just go, oh, what was that? But suddenly the minute you’re in that, it doesn’t feel as hokey and silly anymore. It feels really, really, it feels really intense. And you’re playing with all the same toys that you’ve seen people use before. And having that relatability is what makes it so scary because I think it’s one guy that’s made it, which is amazing, really. And I think he’s brought in a version that you can actually play single player because the other later levels in it, I think you actually have to play with people. I don’t think it’s even possible to do it if you’re on your own. So I think he’s actually brought in single player. But just going in there with friends and being prepared to be terrified, because it’s also in VR. I’ve not played it in VR. That would be horrific. Horrifying VR again is a completely different step that I just don’t like to take. I mean, I started Resident Evil 7 on PSVR. I think I got in maybe 10 minutes and I was like, I’m going to tell myself that it’s because I feel sick. It’s not because I feel sick. I feel sick with fear. I cannot do this. But yes, I think Phasmophobia is just this genuinely acutely terrifying experience, which I think can only get better because it’s in early access and he’s only going to work harder on it. And I think it’s really developed a really strong community as well, which is always so important. It’s just evil. It’s so evil. That thing where you can talk to the ghost, you’ve got like this ghost box, you can ask it questions and you’re like, are you in the room? And then it will be like, hate. Yeah, because it tracks your microphone the whole time. So you don’t actually want to speak because some of them are like, it doesn’t like people. So you don’t want to talk because it will just come for you faster. Yeah, that’s what’s scary about it. It’s playing with people I think you almost have to be introduced to it by someone who knows it as well because it’s got a few like weird sort of idiosyncrasies in some of the gadgets. Controls are a nightmare. I don’t know if they’ve been fixed, but I spent ages putting stuff down and picking stuff up and not being able to do it while being whispered to by a ghost. Yeah, but playing because when I played with Rich, like Rich properly gets into it and he’s really like because you don’t want to speak too loudly because that will attract the ghost. So he’s like whispering very calmly. He’s like, everyone needs to come upstairs now. And then you’re like, oh, shit, you know, what’s going on up there? It really freaked me out. Oh, that’s good. Oh, man, I should play this. I like I bought it with the intention of playing the VR one and basically just made myself too scared by the thought of it. And so it’s sat on my desktop. But yeah, I don’t know what’s the kind of optimal like number of people you need to play this one? Um, I don’t know if it like you see different size levels need different numbers of people. Like I’ve I’ve played it with just rich and had a really, really good time. But I think we’ve also played it with like the full group of four and it was there’s just more there’s just like more going on with four people. I think it just works too upwards really. Yeah. That makes sense. Yeah. I do an escape room or something. Yeah, definitely with a friend though, like I don’t think randos would necessarily do it because I think you need to have like people who are open for the communication element of it properly. And you need to care as well. It’s nice if you care. Like I really cared that Matt was dying inside, even though I tell him that I don’t care. I did care. Oh, amazing. Well, we did it. We fired through 15 horror games there for Halloween and thank you so much for being so generous with your time Louise. I really appreciate it. Oh no. Thank you for having me. Oh yeah, of course. It always lasts longer than I think it’s going to. So yeah, but we really appreciate it. Yeah, that’s a good range of picks. Yeah, for sure. So Louise, where can people find you on social media and check out your work? The Best Place is on Twitter. So I’m at shiny underscore demon and you can listen to Sound of Gaming on BBC Sounds at the moment or you can listen live, one of those strange live things on BBC Radio Three at three o’clock in the afternoon on the first Saturday of every month. That’s awesome. Yeah, I definitely recommend our listeners check that out. You can find an episode that covers a genre that you’re interested in and check it out. As people have listened to this will have deducted Louise is a proper kind of pro host and not just sort of like doing the silly nonsense that me and Matthew do on this every week. So yeah, definitely check that out. You’re being absurd. You sound great. Thank you very much. So yes, if you’d like to follow the podcast on Twitter, it’s Back Page Pod on Twitter. Matthew, where can people find you? I’m at MrBazzill underscore pesto. I’m Samuel W. Roberts on Twitter. We’ll be back next week with a new episode if you’d like to leave us a review on Apple Podcasts. We’d massively appreciate it. Many of you have, which we’re very grateful for. But yes, we’ll be back next week with an episode, our 50th episode, all about the art of The Back Page, which is appropriate for this podcast, given our name. So thanks very much for listening. We’ll be back next week. Bye for now.