Nine years ago, Matt Filer officially began work on the OpenCAGE mod tools for Alien: Isolation—following two-and-a-half years of work on prototype versions. During that time the tools have been available for anyone to use, which is part of the reason Creative Assembly's legendarily scary horror game has a variety of mods already. (Though the VR mod works differently, since it's actually enabling an unfinished mode that shipped with the game.)

OpenCAGE has finally made it to version 1.0, which can be downloaded on Steam. Filer proudly told us his mod tools have "now reached the point where you're able to implement full custom maps, missions, modes, characters, weapons, animations, sounds, models, textures, and more!"

As a demonstration of what's possible, Filer is making a Halo-themed custom map. "It features custom cinematics, enemies, weapons, all on a brand new map with a custom HUD," he said. "It has reached a point now of being able to make full total conversion mods, which has always been my end goal, so it's cool to finally be here!"

Alien: Isolation just won our scariest videogame poll, and I consider it a well-earned victory. It's one of the few games I've seen frighten even people who aren't normally bothered by horror thanks to how unpredictable and relentless the xenomorph is when pursuing you. And those dead-eyed Worker Joe robots are no slouches either.

Hopefully some creative mods will give us reason to go back to Alien: Isolation, and help tide over the wait for the upcoming Alien: Isolation 2, which is likely to be available some time in 2027.

A week ago, I asked PC Gamer readers to nominate the scariest PC games they could think of. I collected the top 16 submissions from that comment section (with some editorial discretion) and randomly seeded a bracket.

After a week of voting, we've finally got a winner. The scariest game on PC is...

🏆 Alien: Isolation 🏆

Some of you called it from the start, and Alien: Isolation plowed through its competition without much resistance, beating SOMA, Darkwood, Silent Hill 2, and finally Amnesia: The Dark Descent.

Having a Xenomorph stalker is scary: reconfirmed. "Alien: Isolation completely destroys me, drenching me in sweat and causing me to take leave of my senses," Fraser wrote a couple years ago. It took him 10 years to get up the courage to finish it.

Our runner up is classic first-person horror game Amnesia: The Dark Descent, which entered the final after a close battle with one of its younger siblings, Amnesia: The Bunker.

Solid arguments were made for the scariness of The Bunker, which Ted once said is the scariest game he's ever played, but The Dark Descent was a landmark PC horror game that lodged itself in a lot of our memories 16 years ago as a very scary thing that once happened to us.

Speaking to PC Gamer back in 2010, Frictional Games co-founder Thomas Grip said that their strategy was "to hint at things and then let the players build up an image in their head."

It was a worthy contender, taking out S.T.A.L.K.E.R. and F.E.A.R. before slaying one of its own on its way to the final. But ultimately, it was a harrowing stay on Sevastopol Station that shook PC Gamer readers the most.

If you haven't played any of these games, it's a good time to pick them up. Alien: Isolation is $10 on Steam right now, and Amnesia: The Dark Descent is just $4.

Thank you to everyone who suggested games and voted! We also recently crowned the best RTS unit: a large tank.

There are many scenes from Outlast that are burned into my memory, The Groom's sequence in Outlast's Whistleblower DLC, the finger amputation from the first game, or perhaps it was landing on a bunch of baby bones in Outlast 2. There's quite a lot to pick from over two games, a DLC, and the live service The Outlast Trials. But if Philippe Morin, co-founder of Red Barrels, had to pick the scene that made the team really stop and think about whether this was ok he'd go back to the first game.

For those who don't remember, or perhaps have never played the game, or maybe just wiped the encounter from your memory, as the protagonist Miles Upshur is navigating the abandoned Mount Massive Asylum he stumbles across an inmate engaging in necrophilia. It's a pretty startling moment, and was actually the last thing I thought I'd come across, even in an Outlast game. But that was the whole point of that scene.

"We felt like we needed something that's going to make people think that anything can happen in this game," Morin explains. "Then J.T. Petty, [lead writer for Outlast] came up with this whole dialogue of switching things around, having the [necrophiliac] say to you, 'You like to watch? You're fucked up!' So that was a really nice spin because it turned things around. Because obviously, yes, the player is making the choice to watch. So yeah, I mean that's probably the very first sequence that got a bit [heated]."

The only other time Morin can recall where the team spent so long debating whether or not to include a scene actually happened more recently, in The Outlast Trials. Specifically, the decision to include child mannequins instead of animated children in trials like Grind the Bad Apples or Punish the Miscreants.

Morin explains how the team questioned "what to do with the kids? Do we make them mannequins, or do we have actual characters? At the end of the day it's a bunch of polygons moving. But you know, in the player's mind, it's not the same thing. That was probably where we found our limit. Like, no, let's stick with mannequin kids, and not go too far with that."

This was undoubtedly the right decision. There's plenty of extreme moments in The Outlast Trials with objectives like Pervert the Futterman or Despoil the Auction, the gore and horror already present is more than enough to make players feel uneasy as is—trust me.

But as it is with most games, the best decisions tend to be made by the people who know the series best; its devs. "The team is always the first to react to some of these ideas," Morin says. "So sometimes if people feel like it's alright, let's keep pushing in that direction until like maybe the reaction becomes a little too strong.

"I remember discussing at some point when we went from 20 people to 30-40 people, because most people on the team were not with us for Outlast or Outlast 2, so we had to have a little chat about what kind of conversations are necessary to create this kind of content?

"And sometimes, yes, it might start with a very juvenile, gratuitous idea, but then you have to let it evolve, and be willing to talk around it to come up with an approach that feels scary and satisfying. You gotta be able to have those conversations. We often joke about that at Red Barrels. There are many conversations that would take you to an HR office in other studios, but here it's just part of our daily routine."

The Outlast series has been providing horror fans with some of the most grotesque and outrageous scenes for 13 years, and to over 50 million players. The most surprising thing about all of that, though, isn't how it's able to keep players terrified, it's that no one else has tried to capitalise on its success.

Sure, there've been games which have had their fair share of gore involved, Resident Evil 7, Harvester, or Agony are just a few that come to mind. But none of them have either managed to top the gore seen in Outlast and also achieve its continued success.

I decided that no one else would be better to ask about this strange phenomenon than Red Barrels' co-founder Philippe Morin, but he seems just as confused as I am that Outlast hasn't had any imitators: "Honestly, I don't know. Sometimes I ask myself the same thing, but I'm glad that we're still different from other games because it can be so hard. There's thousands games coming out on Steam every year. So that's a lot of other games people can decide to spend time with."

But that doesn't mean the Red Barrels team doesn't get a scare every now and then. "Sometimes there's a game coming up, and we're like, 'alright, this one is probably gonna be the next Outlast'," Morin says. "But so far [nothing's come of them]. It's maybe a combination of different things. The fact that there is no combat or the gore [is lacking]."

My working theory as to why no one has attempted to ride the coattails of Outlast is simply because it's so hard to find the edge of what's acceptable in those kinds of games. Red Barrels has always managed to walk the razor thin line of outrageous horror while managing not to tip over into gratuity that's no longer fun to watch or be a part of. It's a hard task, and one that a mainstream game may not want to gamble with, or a newer studio may not get right the first time around.

Red Barrels has managed to find itself in an incredible circumstance of being experienced enough to truly understand how to push gore to its limits while also being a small enough studio that it doesn't need to break into a mainstream market.

"We're happy to be part of a niche and be successful within that niche," Morin adds. "We don't try to, or I should say, it's not part of our internal dialog that we need to make this more mass market or we need to reach a wider audience. Obviously, we want as many people as possible to play the game, but we don't want to let that dilute or become something that takes our focus away from what makes an Outlast game. If we ever decide that we need to be more mass market, then we'll just come up with a different IP or call it something else."

I like to manifest Halloween year-round, what with my favourite pastimes being horror games, movies, and books—oh, and Dressmaker currently. So when Halloween actually falls upon me I like to make it something special—crack out the real horrifying stuff that'll hit even harder. One series that's always on my list is Outlast thanks to its next-level gore and perfect scares, plus if I want to drag my friends into a shared nightmare there's The Outlast Trials for all to enjoy.

"Halloween has always been—even going back to the first Outlast—one of our biggest months, and it definitely kickstarts the biggest part of the year, which is October, November, and the holidays," Red Barrels co-founder Philippe Morin tells me. "Those are usually the best months of the year in terms of sales. We don't control what other studios do, obviously, but we act as if Halloween is ours."

This year Red Barrels decided to celebrate the spooky season with a huge sale to encourage new players to enter the Sinyala Facility and give The Outlast Trials a try over the spookiest month of the year. And it worked, way beyond what they'd hoped for: The game's concurrent player count on Steam ended up capping out at 147,955 players, a hugely impressive feat for a horror game that's over three years.

"We knew with that 90% sale we'd get a lot of new players, but we didn't expect that many," Morin says. "That first week of October was pretty insane. Every day I was waking up checking the numbers, thinking okay, that's probably going to be the top, and then it's gonna start to go down, but every day it kept going higher and higher.

"Obviously after the sale it trickled down a little bit, but hopefully it's gonna stabilise at a much higher level than what we had before. But yeah, it's pretty satisfying to see that after being out for more than three years, the game still finds a new audience. And it's very satisfying to watch all these people play the game and suffer."

That they will. The Outlast Trials is still the scariest multiplayer horror game there is. Usually adding other players to a horror game will dampen the experience, whether that be because it becomes simply too funny to jump at or things just aren't as scary when you have your friends by your side. And while I've certainly laughed in The Outlast Trials it's usually a frantic nervous laugh that's triggered when I see some naked goliath barrelling towards an unsuspecting teammate.

But experiencing collective trauma with your friends isn't the only reason to play The Outlast Trials over Halloween: there's also a new event. The whole gist of The Outlast Trials is that you and your mates are stuck in a Murkoff testing facility, the Sinyala Facility, where everyone is forced to undergo weird and painful experiments. The goal, naturally, is escape, which is usually impossible—but right now, in this new event, it's actually attainable.

"There's the escape going on," Morin explains. "So for the first time in like a year, I think, there is a way to escape the facility—we made a communal event. People had to help out our character Amelia make the escape happen, and that's happened. I think on Sunday night they completed the task, and so since Sunday night, players have been able to escape. So now's the time because it's not going to last forever. Murkoff is always watching."

Last week, I asked PC Gamer readers to nominate the scariest PC games they could think of. I collected the top 16 submissions from that comment section (with some editorial discretion) and randomly seeded the bracket below.

After three rounds of voting, we're down to the final two games: Amnesia: The Dark Descent and Alien: Isolation.

To get here, Alien: Isolation beat SOMA, Darkwood, and Silent Hill 2, all by a decent margin. Amnesia: The Dark Decent was also a powerhouse, plowing through the acronym division—S.T.A.L.K.E.R. and F.E.A.R.—before facing off against one of its own, Amnesia: The Bunker. That was a closer race.

I know some of us at PCG consider The Bunker to be the scariest of the Amnesias, but the game that started it all is both more influential and a scary-ass game in its own right, and a strong competitor going into this final round.

Scroll down to cast your vote. Voting will be open until 9 am Pacific on Saturday, after which the winner will be crowned.

The bracket

The final poll

For a lot of people, the appeal of horror is being surprised and disturbed by something they've never seen before. In recent years, I've sourced this rare feeling from movies like Obsession, where the gender dynamics of that story made it feel a bit dangerous, or Speak No Evil, which has one of the most shocking and nihilistic endings that I can recall. I even find that freshness in a modern classic like Pearl, which isn't really scary, but contrasts a technicolour old Hollywood style with a singularly unsettling Mia Goth performance to great effect.

Fear of the unknown is more valuable to me as a viewer than seeing a really good version of something I've experienced before. In games, it's largely the same—I crave new places and themes above all else. It's why Silent Hill: Townfall, Mouthwashing, Dredge, Silent Hill f, and Still Wakes The Deep all succeeded for me. They're all set in locations or timeframes I've never seen anywhere else in games. I step into those worlds not knowing exactly what I'm going to find, and come out the other side feeling exhilarated in a profoundly nasty way. That's horror, baby.

From this decade, however, nothing in the horror genre has upended my expectations like MyHouse.wad. Everyone who plays this Doom 2 map seems to have the same experience: they know there's something weird about this mod set in a seemingly normal suburban home, but they spiral once they start playing it and realise how many secrets are impossibly embedded within its walls. They then become obsessed with trying to understand exactly how the house works. I consider it a modern horror classic because it's able to take players on this ride.

If you missed its release in 2023, the 'backstory' behind MyHouse.wad is that its creator had recently lost an important friend. Among his friend's belongings was a floppy disc containing an incomplete Doom map recreation of his parents' house. Since they both shared an interest in Doom mapping back in the '00s, the creator decided to honour his friend's memory by finishing his work. Except, of course, this story is all fiction, and the Doom map in question turns out to be a hellish labyrinth disguised as a lovely home. Its real creator? Still officially unknown.

On the first run through MyHouse.wad, it does indeed look like a normal suburban house, albeit one filled with Doom monsters. After killing the patrolling enemies, you exit the house, look in from the outside, and realise it's somehow filled with monsters again. You go inside to gun them down and learn the house has subtly changed: new doors appear, leading to rooms that weren't there before and architecturally impossible spaces. Key visual details have been altered. Crucially, too, the sound design begins messing with your head, resetting and then distorting Doom 2's classic Running From Evil music, or playing the Discord notification sound as a jump scare. No matter where you go, too, the general shape of the environment somehow still looks exactly like the house…

The unsettling details of the spaces you're exploring just pile up—MyHouse.wad is relentlessly tense, and punctuated by a series of 'WTF' moments that keep you wondering what evil thing you've downloaded. There's no question that the choice of a simple family home as the backdrop contributes to how disturbing it is.

Bless this mess

The first thing that very online people will tell you about this mod is that it's inspired by House of Leaves, an experimental novel by Mark Z. Danielewski (which has also been cited as an influence on Remedy's Alan Wake and Control). The mod shares the premise of a house that's larger on the inside than it seems from the outside, with the interior undergoing constant bizarre changes. There are several direct references to specific details from the book.

But while reading House of Leaves these days feels like work—I got the distinct impression I'd have appreciated its experimental structure and overwrought style much more if I'd read it at 21, rather than my late 30s—MyHouse.wad is just as mischievous as it is scary.

I feel its anonymous creator chuckling darkly at me as I see the house refill with monsters, or when I shoot a horrible giant fish guarding a swimming pool and see it explode into tinier evil fish that are much harder to kill. The creator is definitely laughing at me as I fight an evil version of Shrek outside a nursery. While the story of the mod gestures at darker themes, it's almost like the creator is playing a series of pranks on you, subverting your expectations of Doom as they go (illustrated by John Romero himself streaming it multiple times and frequently stopping to admire its tricks).

My relationship with MyHouse.wad is similar to how I felt about Kojima Productions' PT. It's not something I necessarily play for its mechanics—even though it's still Doom, of course. You're more focused on unpicking the 'how did they do that?' factor of its impossible architecture, the nightmarish logic of how the different areas link together or why its more novel monsters are even there. It's one giant mystery with a load of little mysteries buried inside it.

Another thing it has in common with PT is how scant details are on its creation, which feeds into the overall legend surrounding it. As mentioned, we still don't officially know who made MyHouse.wad—the creepypasta-style files in the mod's Google Drive folder don't give anything away. Its credited creator is Steven Nelson, AKA Veddge, but that's just a pseudonym. Veddge's Doomworld account was active until 2006, at which point they took a hiatus until they started posting again in 2022. That too feeds into the wad's myth. Veddge has not posted once since the mod was released in 2023, either.

I'm almost too vain to accept the idea that someone could create something this good then disappear into the wilderness without taking credit for it. But this confidential origin story is a key part of MyHouse.wad's creative identity. Anyone with a search engine and a spare hour can piece together who the creator almost certainly is (and in-game credits shed light on who else contributed to the project), but I wouldn't give that much thought. The intention behind the mod's creation is to blur fiction and reality in this way that enhances the experience. Let the mystery be.

House secrets

Replaying it now, what is staggering about MyHouse.wad is that it's packed with the kind of moments or clever twists that would become iconic if they featured in full games. People still talk about Psycho Mantis reading your PlayStation memory card in Metal Gear Solid almost three decades later. But this mod has maybe four or five moments that evoked a similar 'no way…' response from me as a player, all happening inside this single map.

The rub is, finding your way to those moments is not for the faint of heart—MyHouse.wad is deliberately obtuse and tough to figure out. But what you're doing in the map is fundamentally the same thing you do in all Doom maps: shooting monsters and looking for items or interactive parts of the environment to forward your progress. It's just that you're being asked to do so in an impossible, ever-changing space that never allows you to be comfortable.

I keep encouraging my normie friends to get over the hump of MyHouse.wad being a mod so they can discover its magic for themselves, but no one in my life has played it so far. Despite its continued popularity as a topic on YouTube, MyHouse.wad's reach is still limited to anyone who can be bothered to mod Doom 2 on PC, a process that takes all of two minutes.

If the same idea was packaged up into an indie game that took place inside a fake retro FPS wrapping (like No Players Online), maybe it would find a slightly different audience, but seeing something this inventive running in ancient Doom with a few bells and whistles is undoubtedly its special sauce. This house, as a feat of level design inside a decades-old game, is that fresh element I crave from all the horror I love.

Last week, I asked PC Gamer readers to nominate the scariest PC games they could think of. I collected the top 16 submissions from that comment section (with some editorial discretion) and randomly seeded the bracket below.

After two rounds of voting, the field has been narrowed to just four games. This vote will determine which two games face off in the final battle on Friday, which will leave us with just one scariest game on PC, to be announced on Halloween.

Scroll on to see where the bracket stands and cast your votes in the semifinal round. Voting for this round will close on Friday at 9 am PT, and the final round will start shortly after.

The bracket

Both Amnesias made it far enough to wind up fighting each other. The deciding factor may end up being which of them has been played the most. If you want to do some research, Amnesia: The Bunker is $5 on Steam and GOG right now, and The Dark Descent is just $4.

Meanwhile, Silent Hill 2 just barely beat out Dead Space for the privilege of battling tournament heavyweight Alien: Isolation. When I say 'barely,' I mean it: I had to check the vote count in the backend of our polling software to learn that Dead Space received 602 votes, and Silent Hill 2 received 614 votes.

Amnesia: The Bunker vs Amnesia: The Dark Descent

Silent Hill 2 vs Alien Isolation

Silent Hill 2 can refer to the PC version of the original, Silent Hill 2: Restless Dreams (2002), or the recent remake, Silent Hill 2 (2022). We'll say that Silent Hill 2 is a vote for either or both versions; you can specify in the comments if you like.

The second scariest thing about any haunted house is always the bathroom, with the first obviously being closet doors that are ever so slightly ajar. Public restrooms are scary in general, but homes always have some manner of bathroom cryptid playing peekaboo with the shower curtain, and I can't handle that.

It's also where a lot of horror games love to send us, whether it's for a good ol' fashioned jumpscare from apparitions in a mirror or just a particularly unsanitary commode. There's also the underrated sink baby gag from P.T., so you can't even wash your hands without developing a complex.

You've got 12 minutes to identify the 14 horror games these gross restrooms are from. When you're done, let us know how you did! If you get a perfect score, I promise to start calling you 'bathroom boss,' but anything less than that and I'm flushing you down the toilet.

Last week, I asked PC Gamer readers to nominate the scariest PC games they could think of. I've collected the top 16 submissions from that comment section (with some editorial discretion) and randomly seeded the bracket below.

Yesterday, readers voted to pick the first round winners, narrowing the field to eight games. Now it's time to half the competitors again with another vote-off. We'll select the final two games on Thursday, and then they'll face off on Friday, with the winner crowned on Saturday morning.

The bracket

Nothing too unexpected so far. The winners by the biggest margins in the first round were Alien: Isolation, which defeated SOMA with 85% of the vote, Dead Space, which beat out Fatal Frame 2 Remake with 78% of the vote, and Amnesia: The Dark Descent, which beat S.T.A.L.K.E.R. with 79% of the vote.

Amnesia: The Bunker vs Cry of Fear

F.E.A.R. vs Amnesia: The Dark Descent

Silent Hill 2 vs Dead Space

Dead Space refers to the 2008 original. Silent Hill 2 can refer to the PC version of the original, Silent Hill 2: Restless Dreams (2002), or the recent remake, Silent Hill 2 (2022). We'll say that Silent Hill 2 is a vote for either or both versions; you can specify in the comments if you like.

Alien: Isolation vs Darkwood

Last week, I asked PC Gamer readers to nominate the scariest PC games they could think of. I've collected the top 16 submissions from that comment section (with some editorial discretion) and randomly seeded the bracket below. Now it's time to battle them, democracy-style.

This is round one, where we'll whittle 16 games down to eight with head-to-head votes. On Wednesday we'll cut the list in half again to four games, followed by the semi-final on Thursday, and the final vote-off between the last two games on Friday. The winner will be revealed on Saturday—a blessed weekend Halloween!

We got a lot of great suggestions, but ultimately had to start with a manageable number of games. Condemned: Criminal Origins, Call of Cthulhu: Dark Corners of the Earth, Alone in the Dark, and Skifree (that Yeti definitely scared me) are a few submissions that didn't quite make the cut.

The bracket

We're moving fast with this one: Voting for this round will be open until 9 am Pacific on Wednesday, October 28. Round 2 will be posted shortly after. We'll keep going at that pace until the final face-off on Friday.

Amnesia: The Bunker vs Outlast

Cry of Fear vs Clive Barker's The Undying

F.E.A.R. vs Subnautica

S.T.A.L.K.E.R. vs Amnesia: The Dark Descent

Silent Hill 2 vs Resident Evil 7: Biohazard

Silent Hill 2 can refer to the PC version of the original, Silent Hill 2: Restless Dreams (2002), or the recent remake, Silent Hill 2 (2022). Since more people are likely to have played the remake, but some might prefer to cast a vote for the original, we'll say that Silent Hill 2 is a vote for either or both versions.

Fatal Frame 2 Remake vs Dead Space

Dead Space refers to the 2008 original.

Alien: Isolation vs SOMA

Thief: Deadly Shadows vs Darkwood

Halloween is almost upon us, and if you're looking for some suitably spooky videogame fun then allow me to direct your attention to Playable Archive, a free "micro psychological horror experience" from Darkstone Digital, the solo studio behind The Mortuary Assistant.

As you might expect, given the title, Playable Archive bears a number of similarities to PT, the 2014 "playable teaser" for a cancelled game in the Silent Hill series. It takes place (almost) entirely within a single home, the situation starts slow and escalates quickly, and it's the product of a game that was ultimately cancelled and will never see the light of day.

"Releasing Playable Archive is really exciting, and it feels like some form of personal healing," Darkstone Digital owner Brian Clarke said. "After working for so long on something I cared so much about, it felt wrong to leave it sitting on the shelf like some cursed item.

"Although the full-scale game this demo was built for will never see the light of day and many pieces of it had to be left on the cutting room floor, I feel like it’s important to honor what was built. Immortalizing the project's memory with Playable Archive is my way of doing that while offering something new from me for horror fans this Halloween as I get to work on new projects."

I took Playable Archive for a spin, and it is creepy. I'm keeping things vague to avoid spoilers, but it's a found-footage game about a young couple who purchase a dilapidated home and set about renovating it, leading to an unfortunate discovery and rapidly deteriorating circumstances. A big mid-game twist elicited a genuine wtf from me, and things went downhill even more quickly from there. The more I learned the worse I felt, and the more I wanted to know: What the hell is really going on here?

I had a similar meta-feeling about the demo itself, which made me wonder: Is this slice of a never-to-be-released game actually part of a feeling-out process, to see if maybe the game it came from should be released? So I asked—and the answer came back a firm 'no.'

"I loved the project, but I spent such time and effort on it that it would simply be too much to try to toil away on it again for who knows how long," Clarke told me. "I have no desire to revisit it at this point other than for inspiration. From the very beginning it was designed with Paranormal Activity in mind, so I'd rather spend my efforts creating something new than trying to force something new from an existing project."

Hunter Bond, director of publisher DreadXP, said effectively the same thing: "Brian was still haunted by the game he worked on for years not being publicly playable in any form. I asked if he agreed that it would both be a cool and amusing thing to do to just release it into the wild for free so that people could experience it. We feel good about the choice we made to support Brian and cancel it when he wasn't going to be given enough time to get it to the level it deserved. We all hope people enjoy it, but I wouldn't ask him to retread this ground. Instead I'm excited to see what he works on next now that he can have some closure with this."

Playable Archive doesn't have a save function, which should be fine for most people—it's a "micro" horror game, remember, with an estimated running time of just 30-60 minutes. I actually hit a snag near the end of that window, which I unfortunately didn't have time to figure out because I had to work. (Life is so unfair.) But it's interesting enough that I'm going to jump back into it tonight and take it all the way through to whatever end awaits: I know the mystery won't be resolved, but it's enough fun, in the horror game sense of the word, that I want to get as far with it as I can anyway.

Playable Archive is available now on Steam, and in case you didn't see it the first time—that happens sometimes, in horror games—it's free. Once you've got it wrapped up, be sure to check out our Halloween guide of other games to play, shows to watch, and costumes to wear to properly celebrate this year's spooky season.

The ghouls and goblins are out, but you've heard enough about the US midterm elections already. Let's talk about something fun: Gruesome horror!

Did you know? It's perfectly acceptable to buy Halloween candy and eat it all yourself while drowning out the plaintive knocking of trick-or-treaters with surround sound headphones. See below for a selection of horror game deals and lesser-known staff picks, plus a handful of scary movies we think you should put on your to-watch list.

If you're making the effort to actually go out on Halloween, you'll also find a selection of last-minute costume ideas that'll have people saying "did you come up with this on your own?" in a way that suggests they'll lose respect for you if you say yes.

Halloween deals

A selection of deals from this week's Steam Scream Sale and beyond.

• Amnesia: The Bunker | $4.99 (80% off) on Steam and GOG
• Hunt: Showdown 1896 | $11.99 (60% off) on Steam
• No More Room in Hell 2 | $22.49 (20% off) on Steam
• The Outlast Trials | $11.99 (70% off) on Steam
• Grim Fandango Remastered | $2.24 (85% off) on Steam and GOG
• Resident Evil Requiem | $48.99 (30% off) on Steam
• Resident Evil Village | $9.99 (75% off) on Steam
• Sons of the Forest | $8.39 (72% off) on Steam

Staff picks

A selection of lesser-known horror games to check out this Halloween.

Last-minute costume ideas

Need a costume fast? Here are four ideas for outfits that are technically costumes.

Note: Someone who sees the above AI joke may stop to tell you that, actually, AI has improved a lot recently and you should try it. If this happens, simply leave and go to a different party.

Scariest game vote-off

Help us determine the scariest PC game ever

Last week, I invited PC Gamer readers to nominate scary games to pit against each other in a series of polls. I've put 16 of those games into a tournament bracket, and we'll battle them each day this week, starting Tuesday, with reader polls. Here's the schedule; I'll add links here as each article is posted.

• Tuesday: Round 1 — 16 games
• Wednesday: Round 2 — 8 games
• Thursday: Round 3 — 4 games
• Friday: Final — 2 games
• Saturday: The scariest game revealed

What to watch

Scary, gory, or creepy movies we think you'll like.

Zombies quiz

How well do you know your videogame zombies? Test your undead expertise below!

Penguin Colony is a work of cosmic horror that I would recommend to anyone with even a passing interest in scares from the beyond, even though its unique penguin platforming can be frustrating to wrangle. It's a radical recontextualization of an H.P. Lovecraft classic with a clear affection for the writer's storytelling, but also scathing contempt for his racism.

For my money, it's not October without a weird-ass new indie horror game leaving a lasting impression on me, and Penguin Colony has satisfied my annual craving. You are a penguin witnessing the events of the Lovecraft story, At the Mountains of Madness. Your powers are honk, slide, swim, and hop.

Rather than being limited to a specific bird, you are able to possess any penguin you come across, theoretically using different species' abilities to tackle different movement challenges. Aside from using little baby penguins to squeeze into tight spaces, I was almost exclusively a Rockhopper main: Their impressive vertical jump was a boon in many areas. They shoulda hooped instead of investigating The Strange.

The GOAT, PC Gamer Tales from The Hard Drive host Lenval Brown, narrates the adventure from the perspective of a customarily neurotic and verbose Lovecraft protagonist. Brown's delivery lends everything a similar emotional weight to his iconic performance in Disco Elysium, and he makes for a comforting, familiar presence⁠ even as things go all nasty crazy style.

Waddle on

I remain conflicted over Penguin Colony's movement and mechanics: I didn't find them especially fun, they got in the way, but that also felt weirdly appropriate. As a penguin, waddling around is kinda shitty and sluggish, particularly as the levels shift away from their native habitat.

Most charitably, there's a Foddian (Getting Over It, Baby Steps) quality to the mechanical exploration. It got me to really lean in for some tricky traversal as the atmosphere reached its most suffocating and intense in the caves and structures deep under the arctic ice⁠. I felt frustrated and restless as Penguin Colony's coolest levels opened up before me, held back as I was by this little penguin body. But that dovetails quite well with Penguin Colony's whole premise: that you are an inhuman observer of a human (and something else) story.

A more clear-cut negative was an inconsistency with a mantling (do penguins mantle?) feature (was this intentional?) that felt more like a clipping glitch, letting me clear some ledges but not others. Penguin Colony's appropriately minimalist UI has one glaring exception: A Shadow of the Colossus-style circular stamina meter that appears only when your stamina is depleting. It is distractingly massive and neon-colored, and it usually wasn't clear what the relationship was between what I was doing and the stamina bar's drain. It had a mind of its own, and was never a welcome sight during my playtime.

At its best, though, the penguin parkour contributed to this feeling that I was a small, insignificant thing skirting the edges of a drama I only partially understood. We as humankind are effectively unknowable elder gods to the rest of the animal kingdom, and Penguin Colony largely succeeded in evoking a one-of-a-kind sense of dual-layer cosmic horror through its mechanics.

Side stories

None of what follows is an explicit "Vader is Luke's da" spoiler, but this is definitely a game that thrives on surprise and interpretation. If you are already convinced you'd like to play, please leave the browser tab open⁠—ideally on multiple devices and refreshing regularly⁠—until you've completed Penguin Colony. Then come back and finish reading.

Penguin Colony is not a 1:1 retelling of At the Mountains of Madness. Lenval Brown voices a new character named Howard Blakely⁠—as opposed to the original story's William Dyer⁠—and the passages he narrates are a pitch-perfect imitation of Lovecraft's distinctive prose.

Each level ends with a brief interlude where you control members of a party of Māori warriors who inherited a tradition of fighting and containing the evil at the south of the world. Blakely is a sympathetic American working with an expedition of Nazis, specifically their famous division devoted to finding The Ark of the Covenant, Thor's Hammer, the Easter Bunny, etc. The warriors are on a quest to stop the Nazis and suppress the outer evil they inadvertently awakened.

The war party interludes gradually built up the feeling that I was getting dispatches from another, "better" game. And I love that: I don't think I've ever played a game like Penguin Colony before, one where it feels like the full story is happening in another room, and I only get a keyhole view of what's really going on.

You get out what you put into this cryptic mystery: It's suffused with unique, cursive hieroglyphs, and I eventually realized that they're a replacement cipher for the alphabet. It pays to play with a notebook and pen nearby⁠—cracking this code was a rewarding little side activity that added to my understanding of the deeper plot.

The back half of Penguin Colony takes place among the twisting megastructures of an alien city under the ice, and Origame Digital manages to evoke an incredible sense of scale and ancient, terrible purpose with these levels: They reminded me of 2022's criminally underrated Scorn, as well as the stunning Ash Lake in Dark Souls' deepest depths. You don't fully understand what you're looking at, but you get that it is of a staggering profundity.

Case of the vapours

I notice a tendency in cosmic horror writing to shy away from the more unseemly aspects of H.P. Lovecraft's legacy, this instinct to say "Thank you for the outer horrors and cyclopean ruins, H.P., I'm going to tactfully gloss over what you named your cat, as well as your assorted thoughts on untermenschen, as though you are my least favorite uncle cornering me at a family gathering."

Penguin Colony proverbially says "fuck it, we ball" in this regard, making Lovecraft's racial fixations a very real, very impactful part of the horror. Blakely is an "enlightened" man of modernity who gets along just peachy with his expedition mates from the Third Reich. He is the neurotic, asylum-bound Lovecraft protagonist at his most cowardly, self-indulgent, and contemptible, and very much feels like a stand-in for old Howard Phillips himself.

The Māori warriors are everything Blakely is not, with minimal dialogue compared to Blakely's voluminous narration. Their laconic characterization is instead delivered through their actions and fellowship with each other. Their camaraderie stands in contrast with Blakely's solipsistic navel-gazing. They are proactive, and oppose the influence of outer beings rather than waiting to be changed by them. They are motivated to protect others, even to the point of self-sacrifice, in contrast with Blakely's vulgar, "scientific" curiosity or the Nazis' brutal nationalism.

It rules that this is all roiling just under the surface of Penguin Colony. It invites you to draw your own conclusions about what you're witnessing, rather than didactically explaining a point of view. The only times it indulges in explicit political messaging are with a land acknowledgement and content warning at the beginning of the game, then a blistering indictment of the industry's inaction regarding the genocide of Palestinians by Israel after the credits. I found these direct addresses of the player to be all the more impactful paired with Penguin Colony's otherwise cryptic delivery.

Even with its rough edges, I love Penguin Colony: It's a rich, multilayered piece of interactive storytelling in an impressively compact package. It's a unique exploration of cosmic horror, one that rebels against genre grandaddy H.P. Lovecraft's signature 19th century freak boy racism with a tale of indigenous revenge. One you observe through the eyes of a penguin.

There's a recurring motif in Alan Wake which isn't played for laughs, yet is pretty funny nonetheless. Whenever the alcoholic FBI agent has a chance to peacefully capture our fugitive novelist, he blows it by firing his service pistol wildly through the air. The local police chief tells him to cool his jets; the late night radio host wants to know what's the matter with him. But Agent Nightingale can't help himself.

It's as if the pressure of having a target in his sights is simply too much. He flips the board, all the pieces fly everywhere, and Alan Wake is lost amid the trees. "I'll get you yet," Nightingale hollers into the dark. "Even if it kills me, y'hear me HP Lovecraft?"

Wake, meanwhile, remains impervious to the man's vendetta. "I'd fallen off so many cliffs it was ridiculous," he thinks to himself as he slides on his arse down a steep embankment, escaping Nightingale's clutches once again.

It's all a little embarrassing. But I do sympathise with the humiliated drunk behind the badge. There's something about aiming a gun in Bright Falls that messes with your head and gets the better of you. And I've identified precisely what that thing is: a missing reticle.

We don't talk about reticles a lot—in the same way you don't tend to notice your own nose, even though it's bang in the centre of your vision. But they're a standard of the third-person shooter genre: a way to indicate what direction you're firing without literal crosshairs. More broadly, they're part of how you orient yourself in a 3D world; some players find that without a reliable point of focus in the middle of the screen, motion sickness gets the better of them.

Given that reticles often didn't feature during the shooter boom of the '90s, you can think of Remedy as early adopters. The studio equipped Max Payne with one in 2001, and stuck with the idea for the sequel two years later. The implementation of the reticle in those games was minimalist—a single, unchanging white dot—but it kept us steady. Steadier than a diet of painkillers did, at any rate.

Alan Wake, though, messes with the fundamentals. Its combat is rooted in a supernatural one-two punch. First, you direct your torch at the shadowy silhouettes that assault you to make them vulnerable to ballistic fire. Then you reach for your revolver or shotgun and shoot them in the head and torso until they burn up like a waste paper basket exposed to a cigarette. "I'd never fired a gun outside a shooting range," Wake narrates. "And now I'd just killed someone, or something." Typically for the genre, though, he soon gets over it, and starts shooting shadows in their dozens.

The torch is the closest thing Wake has to a reticle—a beam that roughly hits the spot your bullets are likely to land. But of course, the torch's light isn't painted on the screen as a fixed point; it's shifting constantly within 3D space. Any time Wake passes in front of a pile of logs or a fence post, the beam's length is cut by half or a third. If it's shining on a wall close to his face, the radius of the beam expands dramatically, becoming taller and wider than any enemy he might face.

You can pull the left trigger to focus your torch, in a move analogous to aiming down sights. But that comes with a complication: aiming drains your battery, and batteries are relatively rare in the forest that surrounds Bright Falls. Resource scarcity is one of the ways Remedy flirts with survival horror throughout Alan Wake.

What does all this mean during a fight? Usually that you're conserving energy. That you focus your beam only so long as it takes to break through the shadow armour of a charging opponent. Once they're weakened, you're incentivised not to aim down sights while firing your gun, in order to preserve battery life. As a result, you find yourself squinting at ghouls in the foggy mid-distance, attempting to put holes in them without any zoom or assistance from a reticle.

It's an unnerving feeling—as if the training wheels have come off and tripped you up in the process. And perhaps it's unworkable for those susceptible to certain kinds of nausea; it's notable that Alan Wake 2, launched in a more enlightened era of accessibility considerations, does have a traditional reticle that pops up when wielding your pistol.

But there's no doubt that the original's approach is effective, too. It lowers your confidence in your aim, heightens any panic you might be feeling, and tangibly plugs you into the game's atmosphere of unravellment. It's a quirk that elevates Alan Wake, even when it begins to repeat familiar patterns in its combat design.

The rather uncertain quality to Alan Wake's shooting is mirrored in its level design as well. Remedy spent three years grappling with open world tech before finally resolving to build the game as a set of linear levels, and that initial ambition is still reflected in the geography of Bright Falls. There's enough room between checkpoints to wander from the path, and at times, the route ahead is distressingly vague.

On top of that, Remedy literally sprinkles non-linear storytelling—scattering pages from the game's manuscript throughout its levels, so that descriptions of fights to come become foreshadowing, and pages from previous scenes induce lingering guilt.

In one instance, a waitress who is infatuated with Wake becomes possessed, drugging the writer with tainted coffee. After coming to, Wake is furious, and leaves her rocking back and forth on the floor of her trailer. Only later does he find the sheet of paper that lays out her haunting perspective. "Rose was smiling so hard it hurt her face," it reads. "She crushed a bottlefull of sleeping pills into the coffee. Deep down inside, she was screaming in terror."

Remedy has made more sophisticated and varied action sequences since Alan Wake. But the woozy fear of its first-ever horror game has no handrails, and that's what makes it distinct. By ditching the reticle, paradoxically, the studio achieved its aim.

Bloody hell, that monster with the metal stakes for arms and legs is quick. No matter how fast I run or how well I hide it'll be right where it needs to be, on time and ready to impale me. Don't get me wrong, I actually quite like coming face to face with a de-fleshed monster— especially when it looks this cool—but I'm not a fan of being funneled into the same set pieces over and over again.

Clive Barker's Hellraiser: Revival does a lot of things right; its body horror and gore is top tier and some of the puzzles really grew on me towards the end. But its action and horror didn't manage to hit the same highs no matter how many grotesque monsters it threw at me.

I played Hellraiser on its standard setting—I find it's a good way to get a baseline—and while I didn't have a massive problem with how easy that was, I didn't gel with how inconsistent the fights were and how, ultimately, nothing I did mattered.

Take the final fight scene with our aforementioned monster with stakes for arms and legs, otherwise known as Charlotte, for example. After being chased through the cult's HQ and the woods she finally cornered me in a clearing in the woods. I used everything I had against Charlotte, going through all the ammo and healing items I had diligently stacked up all while sliding and dodging out of the way of incoming attacks, but she just wouldn't go down. Finally, when I had nothing left, she got me. And then the realisation set in as a cutscene played out; I was never meant to win this fight.

This happened a couple of times throughout Hellraiser, an action set piece in which your actions didn't really matter. One segment felt like a poor man's COD zombies that saw me nailing planks of wood to the windows in a futile attempt to keep those pesky brain-eaters out. It's not my first rodeo so I was on it. But ultimately I chewed through all the ammo and other resources I had yet again. Soon after a flood of zombies invaded the small cabin I was in and pushed me into a corner where I was trapped by the horde's flailing arms.

I actually managed to get out of that situation thanks to some well placed crouches but I didn't last much longer. Eventually one dropped from the rafters (don't ask me how he got there), and I crashed through the floor boards in another short cinematic. Ah, this was all part of the game's plan. It's fine for there to be an outline of how the action should play out, but when the guard rails are this obvious it can be suffocating.Why not make it all into a cinematic if my actions have so little consequence?

I may have even been able to excuse the strict script if killing enemies were satisfying enough for the journey to outweigh the destination. But the kills are just sort of okay. Enemies' torsos randomly detached from their legs when I threw a saw blade at their head, zombies fell to the floor as if playing dead only to then bite at your ankles, and fighting the guys in full suits of armour is far less epic than it sounds; you just have to hit them over and over with a blunt object.It's very tedious.

My favourite part of the action by far had to be using the genesis configuration box, an item that bestows the user with limited telekinesis. In fights you can use it to throw deadly items that are helpfully highlighted in blue, like nails or even fire. But this played less of a part than I would've liked with pistols, shotguns, and assault rifles carrying the brunt of the action.

Something's wrong

So the action isn't all there, but what about the horror? Well, unfortunately I didn't find Hellraiser scary at all. The jumpscares were predictable and I quickly learned that most of the time when a monster scuttled across a gap in the wall or stabbed the log I was crawling through, it was all just for show; it couldn't kill me and therefore wasn't scary.

You get haunted by a monster riddled with flowing veins stretching out of its body that looks so cool while in the Labyrinth but it never really amounts to anything, none of the horror in the Labyrinth does. Occasionally, the extra-dimensional sadistic cenobite Chatterer will chase you around the maze but he walks pretty slow so he was never much of a threat. At one point I literally ran circles around him while using the genesis configuration to solve a finicky puzzle.

I will admit, though, I may be slightly numb to jumpscares and horror at this point, so take this with a grain of salt, but while my tolerance may be higher than most, a well placed scare can still get through. Silent Hill: Townfall and Amnesia: The Bunker are just some recent examples that come to mind.

Wasted potential

It's all a bit of a shame because the look of Hellraiser: Revival is great. I loved all the guts and gore, and every single one of the major monsters looked so awful I couldn't tear myself away. Charlotte may have been an annoying boss fight, but it's been a long time since I saw a monster that was designed so brilliantly that I felt the odd mix of impressed and horrified.

The puzzles were another highlight. I found using the genesis configuration to solve them to be intuitive and rewarding. It actually had me wishing that this game was solely set in the Labyrinth. I think a stealth horror game where the protagonist has to sneak around the maze while solving puzzles would have been much more satisfying and scary. It could have also made the cenobites seem a bit more intimidating, because instead they came off as a bunch of kind of chill alien things who were just into some kinky stuff. They kept their word, helped guide you, and occasionally followed you around the maze.They seemed alright to me.

Ultimately, Clive Barker's Hellraiser: Revival was simply okay. It's not particularly innovative and the action isn't massively satisfying. But when you stack it up against the greats of the action horror genre like Resident Evil 4, The Last of Us, or even Alan Wake 2 its pitfalls become even more apparent. The gore is cool and all the BDSM is certainly eye-catching, but a fetch quest for the biggest dildo available isn't enough to bump this game up into a must-play for a fan of the genre; you can get better elsewhere.

We've been having fun pitting FPS modes and RTS units against each other with brackets and reader polls, and now I want to determine the scariest game of all time.

Rather than seeding the bracket with classic horror games solely of my choosing, I'm opening up nominations to everyone. Here's how to get a game into the fight.

How to nominate a scary game for the scariest game bracket

• Leave a comment on this article that begins with the title of the game you want to nominate
• Before commenting, check that your submission hasn't already been nominated
• To support an existing nomination, give the comment a thumbs up
• You can nominate multiple games, but please only nominate one game per comment
• Nominated games should be playable on PC
• Games that don't quite fit into the horror genre are fine, if they're scary

Next week, I'll randomly seed a bracket with the top 16 submissions (with some editorial discretion) and we'll begin the multi-day vote off, with the final 1v1 showdown on Friday, October 30 and the winner revealed on Halloween.

Joke submissions will be excluded, unless I think it'd be really funny to include them.

Three of the most influential games from my childhood were Pokémon HeartGold, Amnesia: The Dark Descent, and Outlast. Knowing this, you could probably piece together the kind of person I have become—let's just say it explains a lot. So it brought a smile to my face when I learned that without one of these influential games, I wouldn't have had the other—no, Pokémon HeartGold has nothing to do with anything—it's actually Amnesia which helped bring Outlast to the world.

Red Barrels, the Outlast devs, already discussed how difficult it was to pitch Outlast to publishers in an interview with GameSpot. But they also mentioned how Amnesia: The Dark Descent was something of a lodestar for the team.

Not only did the success of Amnesia reassure Red Barrels that there was in fact a market for the kind of game they were trying to make, but the fact that no one else had really tried to ride its coattails meant there was a space left wide open for them.

Some of the Red Barrels devs even sat in on a conference talk where Frictional Games co-founder Thomas Grip revealed that Amnesia: The Dark Descent sold an impressive 400,000 copies in its first year. This quickly became Outlast's goalpost.

But when sales for Outlast began to die down, Red Barrels co-founder Morin decided to reach out to Grip for some advice in how to navigate the changing tides of Steam: “He explained to us the dynamic of Steam, and when you do promotion, it spikes back up, [then] goes back down, and basically your sales curve becomes like a roller coaster.”

Everything worked out in the end thankfully. With Outlast going on to meet its initial target and earning enough money to pay the team "pretty significant bonuses". The Outlast series would eventually smash that target, selling millions of copies with its Whistleblower DLC, sequel, and multiplayer game all proving successful in their own right.

Outlast has long since established itself as a horror gaming staple with an impressive track record of two mainline games, a DLC, and an online multiplayer game that still scares the bejesus out of me. So it's hard to believe that there was a time when developer Red Barrels was unsure whether or not it'd even be able to get it out of the door.

After trying and failing to convince Ubisoft to let him make a horror game and just generally feeling like it was time to move on, Philippe Morin, co-founder of Red Barrels decided to leave and form a small 10-person team with developers from other big-budget studios. Their first pitch: a horror game.

“We thought at first that we’d come up with the pitch within three or four months and shop it around to a few publishers," Morin says in an interview with GameSpot. "And we’d find out pretty quickly if it works or not." Unfortunately, it turned out to be the latter, at least at first.

Morin explains how many of the publishers they approached would “rather invest $50,000 in 10 mobile games than $500,000 in [Outlast].” This was likely equal parts because of how obsessed everyone was with mobile games back then and thanks to how niche the horror genre was perceived as. 13 years later the horror genre is still perceived as one of the smaller areas of interest in gaming, despite all of the amazing games released and the revival of two staples, Silent Hill and Resident Evil.

“We were experienced game developers,” Morin says. “But we didn’t know much about that side–publishing and marketing and sales and all that. So we had to learn on the fly.”

Red Barrel finally had to turn to a publicly funded investment program, the Canada Media Fund (CMF) to finance Outlast, with a whopping $1 million dollar investment. But even that wasn't enough. The developers had to take money out of savings, credit cards, and leverage home mortgages to get the project over the line; a huge financial risk. “Everything was pretty much on the line,” Morin recalls. “Of course, it meant working very long, long hours. We were in a sprint to release the game before running out of money.”

Luckily this story ended well, very well actually. After just five months Red Barrels managed to hit the goal of 400,000 copies sold and while not all of them were at full price after sales it was still enough for the team to get some "pretty significant bonuses."

Outlast would go on to sell 15 million copies as of 2018 and spawn three other games, the final being the recent multiplayer horror game The Outlast Trials which achieved an all-time concurrent player count peak just 11-days ago of 147,955. Pretty solid for a multiplayer survival horror game.

Gamedev may as well be conducted in a black box as far as many players are concerned, so it can be easy to think of a good game as one where development went smoothly and a bad game as one where things went terribly awry. But in the case of The Outlast Trials, making something sickeningly good took a lot of struggle.

As Red Barrels co-founder Philippe Morin told Gamespot in a recent interview, it took six years to turn the vague notion of a co-op Outlast game into something ready to launch via early access. It was "a fucking long time," as he recalled it, and the product of "a shit-ton of prototypes."

"[The Red Barrels team] went too far trying to make [The Outlast Trials] systemic, random, and trying to reach our ultimate goal of infinite replayability," he told Gamespot. "We needed to come back to something that maybe added less replayability, but definitely felt more like Outlast." The article notes that a seemingly shippable build was produced within four years, but playtests went poorly enough to send the team back to the drawing board.

I suppose concerns about replayability have been put to rest now that it's mutated into a sizable live service game with around 20,000 people playing as I write this, though the game's ongoing development isn't entirely free from strife—as the article points out, players are mixed on its use of AI-generated imagery, and Outlast 3 was seemingly put on the backburner after Trials proved a huge success.

Hellraiser: Revival's commitment to being both gnarly and horny has already been thoroughly documented, with PC Gamer's Wes Fenlon describing it as "nasty nasty" in his preview . This uncompromising attitude to both gore and kink went down well with fans, but it has also been celebrated by Hellraiser's creator, Clive Barker.

In an interview with horror site Dread Central (via FRVR), Barker admitted that he had concerns about the project going into it, but was thoroughly impressed by the final product. "I'm proud as f**k at the end result," he said. "I was fearful at one point that the game would be overly censored, but I'm genuinely astonished by how far they've been able to push it."

Barker, who worked closely with developer Saber Interactive to shape Revival's world and to advise on the game's story, reckons that Saber Interactive's work on the game is a prime example of how to approach adapting a license. "I think what was achieved in the game is a wake-up call to anyone who's been involved in the making of a franchise like Hellraiser," the author and director explained.

Barker reclaimed the American franchise rights to Hellraiser several years ago, and Hellraiser: Revival is written as a legacy sequel that ignores the trajectory of the films after Hellraiser 2. "There are many of the Hellraiser movies that were made by the Weinstein brothers that were created simply to hold onto the rights," Barker explained, pointing out that "less and less" money was spent on those films over time. "It's not the fault of the writers and directors, but just the way the system works in some cases."

But it seems the experience of working with Saber on Revival has whetted Barker's appetite to further explore the universe he created. "I have many ideas that I'd like to see realised in the Hellraiser universe, and I'm planning to keep my fingers in that pie," he said. For now, these ideas are being explored in a new series of comic books, but Barker says that he'd "love to go further in the movies."

Barker also strongly implied that Hellraiser: Revival does not represent the end of his collaboration with Saber. "I'm looking forward to working with them again on some other projects." It isn't clear whether this would be a sequel to Revival or an adaptation of a different work by Barker.

The positive reception to Hellraiser: Revival will likely be a relief to Saber Interactive too, following this summer's Rideshare Stimulator controversy. In August, Saber CEO Matt Karch denied accusations that the company had replaced Rideshare Stimulator writer Stella Sacco with ChatGPT, then issued an apology to Sacco for the way he publicly spoke about her following the allegation. Alongside all this, Saber admitted to using generative AI in a general sense, but the company's CCO Tim Willits assured players the tech is not used in Hellraiser: Revival or ongoing projects like Jurassic Park: Survival and Space Marine 3.

Red Barrels' Outlast series has long held a reputation for pushing the envelope further than most horror games, with depictions of violence, gore and nudity that can be shocking even within a medium well versed in delivering scares. But it isn't just audiences who have found the studio's games shocking beyond the virtual horror norm. As co-founder Phillipe Morin recently revealed, there have been numerous instances where people in and around the studio have found working with the material frightening to the point of being traumatic.

In a chat with Gamespot, Morin discussed the studio's unflinching approach to horror, explaining that it wasn't a deliberate attempt to court controversy, and was simply a "personal preference" on Morin and the other co-founders' behalf. "We didn't start like 'Oh, we've got to make the goriest game out there'" Morin explained. "It was just, 'we're making a horror game, so obviously we'll make it gory. I remember even the scriptwriter early on was saying, 'There's never too much blood.'"

Nonetheless, the intense and graphic nature of Outlast' horror has proved triggering within the studio. During the interview, Morin recalls one incident involving an individual associated with Red Barrels—possibly an employee, though Morin doesn't state this explicitly. "We started pushing and pushing, and you know, I remember there was a playtest, and somebody, after a couple of hours, basically ran out of the studio to go cry outside." Apparently, this person never returned to the studio.

Morin says that Red Barrels is not oblivious to the potential effect of its games on people, and that this informs how the studio approaches recruitment. "When we do job interviews, we always make sure that people are fully aware of the kind of content we create and the kind of conversations needed to create that content," he explains, adding that "People have to be comfortable with that because obviously you hear stuff in the studio that [if] you said the same thing in a different studio, you'd end up in a meeting with HR."

Yet these attempts at transparency with potential employees have not always been successful, as Morin explains. "We had one case of somebody who started working with us on Monday, and then on Thursday they resigned because even though they knew about the gore and the violence, they had a blind spot for other things, more so about religion, and they were not comfortable with that." While Morin doesn't specify when this occurred, it's likely that it happened during the development of Outlast 2, the story of which revolves around a violent Christian cult.

Yet while some people may have found Red Barrels' horror to be too much, the broader audience has absolutely lapped it up. The most recent game in the series, The Outlast Trials, sold half a million copies in its first week of early access, while the series as a whole has attracted a whopping 60 million players since 2013. Hence, if Red Barrels ever does make Outlast 3, it's unlikely the studio will soften its approach.

I am a stakhanovite, a hero-worker. My productivity is not measured in grams but kilos. My working hours have been divided and subdivided into ultimate efficiency: not a nanosecond is wasted.

That is, in Flesh Grinding, whose demo I've been mucking about with. Not in real life, where my working hours consist mostly of staring at a blank Google Doc and wondering if I'm a moron who could never actually write at all.

Anyway, Flesh Grinding, which releases in Q4 2026—not to be confused with Fleshgrinder, which releases in Q1 2027; good luck—is a labour simulator. It's also one of those PS1-style horror games that are so fashionable right now. But mostly it is a game about working.

Working, specifically, with flesh—great, distended chunks of the stuff that plop down from the ceiling and amass in shiny piles. You must pick them up, walk them to your grinder, then turn them to mince. You must do this until your IV drip runs out of fluid, at which point it is time to return to your home and upgrade yourself, spending the millilitres of blood you scrounged from your grinding on upgrades.

Hit your goal (a kilo of meat at first, then five kilos, and so on) and new areas open up with new machines—feed a lump of flesh to this thing and it will spit out IV-replenishing potions, that kind of thing, which add entirely new aspects of the fundamental flesh-grinding loop to think about and strategise for.

You're no longer just trying to run as quickly as possible between your flesh pile and your grinders. Now you have to figure out when in the process to stop at the new machines, how to run a perfect loop that wastes the absolute minimum amount of time you get each day on the factory floor.

In this way, it is exactly like real life.

No, really. Or, well, sort of really. I've definitely worked jobs that felt as grey and arduous as standing at Flesh Grinding's, uh, flesh grinder and attempting to maximise the return of each stifling second—to cram as much compensable work into every fragment of time I had before the inevitable burnout set in. It wasn't quite an IV drip of unknowable motivating fluid or an endless parade of shapeless flesh: it was writing freelance marketing copy, which was worse.

I'm rather impressed by Flesh Grinding for condensing this experience down into its sickly gameplay loop. It's a laborious work sim that nonetheless feels quite moreish, that tempts you to return day after day to make some new tweak to your routine or to test out a new machine.

That's what's really horrifying, I say. I mean, sure, the blood and strange ethereal figures and creepy grandmother and ever-multiplying religious icons are also, probably, scary to someone, but surely far less than the constant reminder that the trade you make for being alive is selling eight hours (at least) of your day, every day, to distant and unknowable forces, and all the wear on your body and mind that entails. And then you spend your off hours trying to compute how to come in the next day and do it all even more efficiently. What a horrible scam we've played on ourselves. What a, um, grind.

Silent Hill's resurrection is one of the happier stories to emerge from the games industry in recent years. After spending roughly a decade locked in a Konami cupboard, Silent Hill has received three new entries published by Konami in as many years, all of which arrived to positive reviews and, seemingly, healthy sales. But if Silent Hill 2 Remake, Silent Hill f, and Silent Hill: Townfall still haven't satisfied your craving for allegorical horror in foggy towns, fret not, because Konami has plenty more plans for the series' ongoing revival.

In an interview featured in Famitsu (via IGN), Silent Hill producer Motoi Okamoto explained that Konami is "relieved" by both the critical and commercial reception to the aforementioned three games. "All three titles we initially announced were able to be released successfully," Okamoto said, adding that, "they've also received high praise, and we are satisfied with it."

Okamoto went on to say that the games released so far only represent the "first wave" of Konami's planned games for the series, and that there's not one but two additional waves on the drawing board. "Successfully launching this 'first wave' comes with great relief, but we're not stopping here; we must think of the second and third waves," Okamoto stated. "We can't share specific details, but we're currently looking at a number of projects."

It's a very different situation from where Silent Hill was only a few years ago. During the chat, Okamoto revealed that persuading Konami's executive to pursue new entries in the series has been challenging, especially after the cancellation of Hideo Kojima's Silent Hills in 2015.

While Okamoto eventually got Silent Hill 2's remake greenlit, he was convinced that "just one remake is not enough". According to the producer, his reasoning was "if there were only one release, wouldn't people think that the development is going to be cancelled again?"

While Konami is keeping details of its future Silent Hill projects under wraps, we do know about one of them already. After its excellent remake of Silent Hill 2, Bloober Team is turning its attention to the 1999 original. Remaking the original will represent an interesting challenge, considering how much simpler its narrative is compared to its legendary sequel, and I'm curious to see how Bloober Team will approach it.

As for whether NeoBards Entertainment and Screen Burn Interactive will return to the series after their takes on Silent Hill, this is yet to be confirmed. But according to our resident Silent Hill expert Elie Gould, both developers certainly have what it takes. In their Silent Hill f review, Elie described the Japan-set action-horror as a "true return to form". As for exploring the Scottish town of St Amelia, Elie wrote that Screen Burn "absolutely understands what makes a great Silent Hill game" in their Silent Hill Townfall review.

One of the most beloved horror games (demos?) of all time is finally free from the shackles of the PS4. Hideo Kojima's P.T. has been natively ported to PC by programmer Lorean Xavier, who made the project public this week. Not an emulator nor a remake, the native PC client does not contain any copyrighted materials—it requires a dumped copy of P.T. to function—but instead translates the original code into something that'll run on Windows and Linux.

That distinction not only sidesteps potential corporate scrutiny, but also allows Xavier to add modern graphical features and mod support to the PC version. It's an impressive effort that, according to the creator, has been in the works since 2024.

"I wanted to make the version of P.T. that my younger self always wished existed," Xavier, 21, told PC Gamer over email. "My attachment to the game goes all the way back to my childhood. I remember watching videos of it on my phone, wishing I could experience it myself. I didn't have a PS4, so playing the original was never really an option for me. I never imagined back then that I'd eventually be the one bringing it to PC."

The window to play P.T. "legitimately" was famously brief. Kojima surprise-dropped P.T. on the PlayStation Network in 2014 as a "playable teaser" for the Silent Hills reboot he was making with Guillermo Del Toro. When Kojima and Konami had a falling out, Silent Hills was canceled and P.T. got caught in the breakup, being delisted in early 2015. The horror classic has persisted only through emulation and preserved PS4 hard drives—until now.

"The idea that something so influential could eventually become practically unplayable never sat right with me," Xavier added.

"There have been several PC remakes over the years, and I appreciate that people tried to preserve the experience, but none of them ever really satisfied me," Xavier said. "Something always felt off, whether it was the lighting, the atmosphere, the interactions, or the way certain events played out. They could resemble P.T. visually, but they never truly felt like the original to me.

"And that's exactly why I wanted to do this differently. I didn't want to make another interpretation of P.T. or recreate it approximately in another engine. I wanted the actual experience, with its original assets, sounds, animations, and behavior, running natively on PC."

While the project is "not a modified version or fork of [PS4 emulator] shadPS4," the emulated version was an "extremely valuable" reference to compare the original game's behavior to the port.

We're in weird and wild times for the recompilation scene as gen AI has accelerated the creation of console-to-PC ports, often with janky, hastily-vibecoded results that make good preservation more difficult. Xavier is open about using AI in his workflow, but believes it's no replacement for "actually knowing what you're doing."

"I think there's an important distinction between using AI as a development tool and blindly relying on it to create an entire project you don't understand. In my case, I use AI to help with debugging, identifying issues, testing code, and working through problems when I get stuck. It can be incredibly useful for accelerating that process, especially when you're working alone on something this complicated.

"But I'm still the one responsible for the architecture, the implementation decisions, writing and reviewing the code, and understanding how the different systems fit together. My years of experience with reverse engineering and P.T. are what allow me to direct that process in the first place."

In terms of faithfulness, the port has the seal of approval from at least one person who would know: Lance McDonald, the Australian creator who datamined P.T. and discovered many of its secrets back in the day, is impressed by what he reckons is a "1:1 port of the entire codebase."

You can check out the "PT-PC" project for yourself on GitHub.

Amid celebrations for Resident Evil's 30th anniversary, executive producer Jun Takeuchi revealed what future plans Capcom had for the Resident Evil series, including what will happen after the devs run out of games to remake.

"The current 'Resident Evil' series is being developed along two tracks: the numbered titles allow players to experience the ongoing story of the series, while the remake series allows them to experience the past," Takeuchi says (via RENEWS). This isn't new information as Capcom has begun its huge remake project in 2019 (with the Resident Evil 2 remake) and has since gone on to give Resident Evil 3 and Resident Evil 4 facelifts as well, with the next scheduled to be Code: Veronica.

It seems that Capcom is planning to finish remaking all the older games, perhaps pre Resident Evil 7 which Takeuchi deems as a "turning point" for the series. So if that's true we may expect to see the following:

• Resident Evil 0: A yes from me, just to see Billy Coen again.
• Resident Evil: Will this be the first remake of a remake?
• Resident Evil: Revelations: This could go so hard in the hands of the RE remake team.
• Resident Evil: Revelations 2: I'm in just so Moira could get a better backstory.

And then there are the big two, Resident Evil 5 and Resident Evil 6; it was bound to happen eventually. It was perhaps wishful thinking that Capcom was going to let these games slip into distant memory. While I think there is a world in which Resident Evil 5 and 6 could actually be redeemed, both games will need a hell of a lot of work and reshaping for this to happen, and I'd hate to see the series falter on these two games yet again.

Let's just say Capcom does successfully remake all of these games and the world doesn't completely implode. All of these remakes will buy the studio about 12 years, with Capcom's current schedule of releasing a remake once every two years. Now, 12 years is a long time, but it's not forever, and I think Capcom intends to carry on forever. So what will happen when everything is remade? The cycle could just carry on with a Resident Evil 7 remake, it'd be about 21 years old at that point, or Capcom could have something else up its sleeve.

"Someday, the remake series will catch up with the era of the numbered titles, and we are already thinking about what we will do when that happens," Takeuchi adds. "In fact, we have been gradually preparing for that since around 'Resident Evil Village.' The appearance of names such as Umbrella and Spencer, as well as the return of Raccoon City in 'Requiem,' are also in preparation for a 'crossover'.

"One of the reasons we regard '7' as a turning point for the series is that it was also the title where we began working on this kind of setup. At first, we included these elements with the sense that they were fan service, but users were far more delighted by them than we had imagined, and they even began analyzing the thoughts that the development team had privately kept to itself. So, as a series, we decided to respond to users’ expectations and pushed this setup further in 'Village' and 'Requiem'."

While I appreciate getting to experience older games and get a hit of nostalgia, I'm far more interested in what Capcom has got on the drawing board for its new games. Requiem managed to free the series from the shackles of Umbrella (kinda, sort of, it was good enough for me). But I would love to see more twists, new plot threads, and new characters. The world of Resident Evil is far too interesting to get bogged down in remakes.

Silent Hill: Townfall is a suffocating experience, especially if you're like me and love tormenting yourself with stealth, limiting the use of any kind of weapon. I spent almost all of my first playthrough forgoing any pipe or plank, or even pistol in favour of my trusty CRTV and top-notch strategy. But my pacifist run stopped dead in its tracks when I got my hands on the shotgun.

Silent Hill: Townfall spoilers ahead

Every horror game fan will know the liberating power of getting your hands on a shotgun in a game where you've done nothing but cower and run from danger—finally, you get to be the danger. Turns out the horrors are trapped inside this game with you, not the other way around.

I may have embodied this a bit too much when I got my hands on the shotgun in Richard's section of Townfall. Tasked with making it to the top of a 10 story office building, you need to solve puzzles and clear the way all while fending off a new kind of Silent Hill monster: the widow.

These are bloodied creatures with shrouds of flesh covering their faces. They'll hide behind doors, under desks, or just anywhere that's a bit shadowy. They'll jump out at you, stab you with a knife, and then run off to yet another hiding place. It didn't really bother me at first, their attacks don't deal a massive amount of damage, so I just kind of decided to live and let live, for a short while at least.

Before I knew it I couldn't take a step without one of these widows hurling themselves out of the shadows and attacking me. The final straw was when they interrupted my loot hunting—a precious pastime that I hold very dear—so I decided to make use of the shotgun and the very large stock of ammo I'd built up.

Eventually I'd cleared out every floor. I actually went out of my way to ensure I could walk freely around the office building without being pestered. But then I looked closer at the piles of dead bodies lying at my feet. Uh oh, I have succumbed to my inner rage and have perpetrated the same cycle of anger and death that got us stuck in this situation in the first place, becoming the true monster of Silent Hill again. Whoopsie.

On further inspection these widows had the photos of their deceased loved ones stapled to their bodies. Precious people that my character had indirectly, but essentially killed due to his own greed and hubris. No wonder they're angry.

On reflection I did also notice that some of the monsters were perhaps hiding from me. And hunting them down with a shotgun probably wasn't the most empathetic thing to do to people who were simply enraged by the loss of a loved one. Dammit—this is why I keep getting the bad ending.

Apart from the fact that this section made me question all the morals I thought I had, it was one of my favourites because of how well Screen Burn was able to craft and convey who Richard was in such a short amount of time. Yes, he's clearly evil, like pantomime levels of evil. But I didn't really mind that because by the end of this section I was genuinely convinced that he thought he was doing the right thing for the good of the town as well as himself.

Complex characters like this who aren't built to be liked but appropriately examined do so well in Silent Hill because of the nature of the curse. Richard has enough turmoil, inner strife, rage, and regret to power like three different Silent Hills simultaneously. While I would've loved to see more about how his twisted mind would've warped St Amelia, this section is enough for me. Though, I don't think I'll be able to look at a shotgun in a horror game the same way again.

Silent Hill: Townfall is a suffocating experience. Monsters around every corner, limited supplies, and a whole lot of puzzles. But that all changed when I got my hands on the shotgun. Now I am the danger and these monsters are really bad at hiding.

It's been a while since I set foot nervously inside the Playtime Co. factory, but last time I was there I was hounded through the halls and air vents by a towering blue plush toy that wanted nothing more than to hug me to death.

I played a bit of the multiplayer prequel to Poppy Playtime this week, and I can now report that there's something even scarier than that giant Huggy Wuggy doll roaming the factory. Her name is Miss Delight. You can meet her yourself because the Escape from Playtime open beta is now live on Steam and you can try out the game all weekend long.

This time you're one of the cute little Playtime toys, like a plush bunny, a cartoony cat, or a fluffy unicorn, and your goal is to escape the accursed factory with your pals by skittering through the dark corridors and shadowy rooms collecting supplies. Fill a cart with enough useful junk and you can advance to the next shift. Complete all the shifts and you're free. But it's not gonna be easy.

In my session we were stalked by progressively more monstrous toys each shift we completed. There are toy robots who speed toward you when detected and explode on contact, though if a teammate bonks them in the back of the head with a thrown object first, they shut down. There's also a Cat Bee (it's a cat dressed like a bee) that latches onto players and poisons them until, again, another player knocks them off with a thrown object. You can already see the purpose of sticking together.

Then there's Miss Delight. You'll know she's around by the clicking of her high heels echoing through the factory. She, like Huggy Wuggy, is tall, towering over you (especially since you're just a little stuffed toy) and insta-murdering you if she catches you. Thing about Miss Delight is that it's simple to stop her in her tracks: just shine a flashlight in what's left of her face.

But somehow Miss Delight standing there staring at you is worse than Huggy Wuggy chasing you down. Turns out there's something worse than an unstoppable monster, and it's a monster that stops. And stands there motionless. Staring at you. With bright, shiny dead eyes a gaping, hungry mouth. Just standing there, completely still, staring… right up your flashlight battery dies.

That's not the only warning about Escape from Playtime. Mob Entertainment has one too:

"We want to emphasize that this is very much a playtest looking for your feedback," the developer says. "This build has many work-in-progress aspects, experimental features, experiments with balance, and locked away features. Your feedback from this Beta Playtest will greatly aid in the development of the launch build and beyond!"

There will be a survey after you play if you'd like to give feedback. The open beta runs until 6 pm PT on Sunday, October 4, and supports up to eight players (with at least groups of four recommended). Find the full beta details here.

I was brought up with the mindset that when you start something you should see it through to the end, even if it gets a bit tricky. So perhaps that's why Resident Evil dropping its in-built Roman numerals irks me so.

It all started with Resident Evil: 7 Biohazard where the Roman numerals for seven were shoved into the 'Evil' and then continued with Resident Evil: Village. So, in the lead up to Resident Evil 9 I was on tenterhooks, eager to find out how Capcom was going to incorporate IX into its title.

I had my own theories, settling on Helix or Appendix as my favourite options. It made sense in my head, what with their respective links to DNA as well as the T-virus, and an icky body part that simultaneously means something that comes at the end of a story—I really liked appendix.

Alas, we didn't get either or those—we didn't get an IX at all—we got Resident Evil Requiem.

I made my peace with Requiem, it has cool connotations for the game, referring to a prayer for the soul of the deceased or a general act of remembering someone who has died. I also saw one promotional image that turned the 'q' in Requiem into the number nine, so that's something, maybe. But wait, there's more.

Resident Evil's executive producer Jun Takeuchi has revealed in chat with Japanese press for RE's 30th anniversary (via GamesRadar) that the name Requiem holds much more than just the above, bog-standard meaning:

"Let me give you a hint: 'Requiem' isn't just a title chosen for its meaning of 'requiem.' The spelling of Requiem (REQUIEM) contains not only the 'RE (response)' mentioned earlier, but also a 'Q (question).' In other words, this 'Requiem' presents both an 'answer' and a 'question.' I will explain the meaning of that at some point in the future."

Yeah, I don't think I'm entirely on board with this breakdown of Requiem. I guess it makes sense but it's also giving off GCSE English blue curtain vibes. I am, however, intrigued to find out more about this in the future, and perhaps we can also discover what the rest of Requiem stands for. Who knows, it could go something like: 'U' for you the player, 'I' for me, the player, 'E' for evil residents, and 'M' for me, the player, again (I get two because I'm special).

Log this under "Mods that I'm glad exist but, just being honest here, I will probably never actually install it": Bryan, the dope from Zach Cregger's Resident Evil movie (which is great, btw) has been modded into Resident Evil 2. This is the everyman more games need: not a cop with nerves of steel but a screaming dope who can't hit the broad side of a torso monster with a full clip. Grab it on Nexus Mods.

Holy [BLEEP], they got [BLEEP]ing Peaches to do [BLEEP] the Pain Away for the Hellraiser game. Most opportunistic promotional crossovers leave me cold (or annoyed) but I have to admit, this one, to borrow the words of PC Gamer hardware writer (and Peaches fan) Jess Kinghorn, is legit a banger. Originally released in 2000, Fuck the Pain Away was Peaches' big hit, and it's been used in numerous movies and TV shows in the years since. But what makes it work so well here is that this remix and video doesn't come off as forced or awkwardly shoehorned in: This is pretty much (warning, NSFW) what Peaches would do anyway.

The new Fuck the Pain Away video for Hellraiser: Revival is also extraordinarily NSFW—so much so that it's not embeddable here. You have to go watch it on YouTube.

Today's basically a national holiday for Resident Evil fans. September 30 marks 28 years since the day the cop inside Leon S Kennedy died, the day he'll never forget; when Raccoon City was wiped out by Umbrella's classic mishandling of bioweapons in Resident Evil 2.

So to celebrate the day that made Leon S Kennedy who he is, I've collated all the most traumatic experiences I've had in Resident Evil games:

But enough about me and all my trauma, what about you guys? I'd be morbidly interested to know what your most traumatic memories from Resident Evil are. But please, no more chase scenes, my heart can't take it.

Like many people, I'm a big fan of quickfire submarine horror adventure Iron Lung. Yet despite receiving rave reviews and spawning a film adaptation by Markiplier, surprisingly few games have picked up its baton of vehicular terror. There are other submarine horror games like Barotrauma, as well as job-based horror games like Klekta and Shift at Midnight. But the former has quite a different vibe, while the latter pair seem more inspired by Lethal Company than David Szymanski's 2022 horror.

Which is why I'm so intrigued by The Temple, an upcoming Half-Life 2 total conversion that likewise lets players pilot a terror submarine. But the temple ups the ante by adapting the scares into two other forms of transportation, taking players out of the depths all the way up into space.

The Temple is set on an aquatic planet dotted by strange, concrete megastructures, which you're tasked with exploring using three separate vehicles. One, as mentioned, is a submarine that will take you into the depths of its ocean. The others are an airship for exploring its skies and abandoned towers, and a space shuttle that lets you travel to asteroidal moons that orbit the planet.

The Temple was originally released as a pair of maps for MapLabs, a mod that collects together maps from various Source engine modding competitions. While that initial version was fairly short—around 20 minutes in length—the total conversion will revamp and expand those two existing maps, while also adding a third map for over two hours of exploration-based sci-fi horror.

There's a trailer for the mod that you can watch above, which shows all three of its vehicles in action. For a short Half-Life 2 mod, it looks pretty accomplished, with a real eye for colossal structures. The mod also features Amnesia: The Dark Descent-style invisible water monsters, and a talking crow (or at least, a crow whose corvid language you can understand), which will help guide you through the experience.

That alone is sufficient to convince me to check The Temple out. While there's no specific release date for The Temple yet, its creator, who goes by Klems, says that it will launch "very soon, possibly next month".

Opening the auxiliary lines at the end of Part 6 in Silent Hill: Townfall is perhaps its most complicated yet simple puzzle. By this point in the game my brain was completely fried and my nerves were shot. So in case you're also in a bad spot, here are some tips to point you in the right direction.

Spoilers ahead for Silent Hill: Townfall

How to get to the Auxiliary Room

Before you head to the elevator and go up to the auxiliary room, you'll need to get the key. This can be found in the command centre, and the code to get into it is 0825. Inside, you'll find the key to the auxiliary room. Now you can head downstairs to the elevator, but be warned—this is where The Weight and other monsters are lurking, so you need to be cautious. You can make a mercy dash to the elevator as the doors close quickly, but it'll be tight.

Once you've made it to the next floor, there'll be a couple of smaller monsters who you can easily circumvent. Make sure to close the door to the auxiliary room once you're inside.

How to open the auxiliary lines

Here you'll find a pipe running across the walls with levers at various intervals. There's also a locker and a desk with a terminal. The first step is to open the locker and find the floppy disk. Then, head to the terminal and use the floppy disk to get your clue: a bunch of lines.

At first glance, this could look like morse code or some other cipher, but actually it's much simpler than it seems: It shows whether each lever needs to be horizontal or vertical. But not every lever is included: only the ones which are adjacent to one white line for the first row, two lines for the second, and three lines for the third.

Auxiliary Line 1

Auxiliary line 1 solution: | _ | | _ | _ | |

The first line starts on the wall next to the locker, just by the white arrow at the bottom of the wall, and includes all the levers which are next to the singular white lines on the pipes. The pattern goes like this:

1. vertical
2. horizontal
3. vertical
4. vertical
5. horizontal
6. vertical
7. horizontal
8. vertical
9. vertical

If you've done it right the light next to the last lever should turn green.

Auxiliary Line 2

Auxiliary line 2 solution: | _ _ _ | _ _ | |

The second line starts on the wall next to the locker by the middle white arrow. The pattern should be:

1. vertical
2. horizontal
3. horizontal
4. horizontal
5. vertical
6. horizontal
7. horizontal
8. vertical
9. vertical

Again, if you've done this right, then the light next to the last lever should turn green.

Auxiliary Line 3

Auxiliary line 3 solution: _ | | | _ | _ |

The third line starts on the opposite wall to the other two, above the second light that just turned green and the pattern should be:

1. horizontal
2. vertical
3. vertical
4. vertical
5. horizontal
6. vertical
7. horizontal
8. vertical

Again, if you've done it right the final light will turn green. That's the end of that, and now you can leave the room (be careful of the creepies), head back to the elevator, and make your way back to the control room (avoiding The Weight and other monsters) to wrap up your segment in the command centre.

I've played enough horror games at this point to wonder whether I'd be any good at actually surviving one. While some games are simply out of the question after finishing Silent Hill: Townfall recently I came to the conclusion that yes, given the right circumstances I'd probably make it to the end. But what about the rest of the PC Gamer team? Well I have an answer for that as well.

I've played enough horror games at this point to wonder whether I'd be any good at actually surviving one. While some games are simply out of the question after finishing Silent Hill: Townfall recently I came to the conclusion that yes, given the right circumstances I'd probably make it to the end. But what about the rest of the PC Gamer team? Well I have an answer for that as well.

We've got a good amount of horror aficionados on the team which helps, and I've given extra points to those of us who've either played Townfall or Silent Hill games similar enough to know what to do in the distressing scenes ahead. But I have to admit most of the list was vibes-based research.

There were only three coworkers I couldn't rank and therefore put them in the 'Wild card' category because they are so utterly unpredictable that they'd either fly through the game or be unable to get out of the water. Or as our own Joshua Wolens put it: "me, Kara, and Andy are about to die horribly in the zombie apocalypse* or prove a very important point."

While I'm positive that every single person on our team could breeze through Townfall's tricky puzzles, the deciding factor are its monsters which start out rather tame but then take a steep difficulty curve towards the end of the game. Even still, I'm fairly confident that about half of the team could make it to the end of the game. As for the rest? Godspeed soldiers.

*Josh thought we were talking about Resident Evil.

Like it or not, Zach Cregger's Resident Evil film has been a critical hit. It reached universal acclaim on metacritic and was a smash hit among the PC Gamer team. I wasn't as fond of it as I hoped to be, but even still I loved the ride and appreciated its faithful adaptation of the videogames.

After all this time, I never thought a Resident Evil adaptation could be as good as this. Now, its success is mostly thanks to Zach Cregger's genuine admiration and great knowledge of the games, but some accolades also needs to go to Roy Lee, the film's producer and the person who secured the rights to Resident Evil after Cregger expressed interest in it.

Lee has also worked on other videogame adaptations such as A Minecraft Movie and (as reported by the Wall Street Journal) he currently has 20 movies and TV shows in development and production, which are based on games like Battlefield, God of War, and—my god: Silent Hill.

I am even less sure of someone being able to pull off a genuinely good Silent Hill adaptation than I was about Resident Evil, so I am morbidly intrigued to know more about this venture. But sadly that's all we know so far, there's no word on whether this will be a film or a TV series, so we'll just have to sit and wait for the fateful day when more is revealed.

But that won't stop fans from speculating or, more realistically, fearing what we now know to be the inevitable. The top comment on a Reddit thread discussing this adaptation simply reads: "For the love of James Sunderland keep Christophe Gans away from it!"

Yeah I get it—Gans' 2006 Silent Hill film adaptation leaves much to be desired. While I'll always defend the beautiful cinematography of Dan Lausten in this film, its writing and plot is convoluted and pretty confusing. Nostalgia has done that film a world of good for me, in so much that I look back on it kind of fondly now, appreciating the love that the people who worked on it clearly had for the games even if they didn't stick the landing.

Unfortunately, Return to Silent Hill is simply too bad and too recent for any kind of nostalgia to ease the pain. I'm not sure why Gans is completely opposed to staying true to the complex, vulnerable, and unlikable qualities of its male protagonists, but it's done nothing but hurt the adaptations. So I too will echo the above sentiment of: please, for the love of James Sunderland, do not let Christophe Gans anywhere near this upcoming project.

Silent Hill: Townfall has a different kind of resonance if you grew up in the UK. Its Scottish island of St Amelia is already my favourite video game environment of the year for how it evokes the atmosphere and time of a place—specifically 1996—and captures the specific details of small town life.

From the video rental shop to the bunting sadly hanging from the buildings, it's the kind of run-down fishing town you never normally see in a video game. That's probably because it's not as glamorous as somewhere like Kamurocho in Tokyo (St Amelia regrettably lacks a Sega World) or New York, and not as dreamy as the Stephen King-inflected small town settings of games like Alan Wake or Silent Hill 2.

Using the Silent Hill franchise as this trojan horse to smuggle in a location that's clearly of interest to the Glasgow-based development team at Screen Burn was a marvellous idea: given the state of the games industry, it's unlikely that anyone will ever again be given the budget or time to craft an authentic British newsagent or storefront for a fish and chip shop.

Still, as eerily authentic as St Amelia's exterior details are, like the telephone boxes and road signs, it's the interiors that I find uniquely settling. Here's why: my grandparents basically lived in the houses in this game.

The kitchen tiling, the heaters, the wallpaper, the appliances—it's so forensically accurate to a certain type of house. The kind of places that were last renovated in the '70s or '80s and haven't been touched since, maybe because the residents were too old to want to redecorate or because they couldn't afford to do so. When I step into these homes in Silent Hill: Townfall, my gut response is, "I've been here before and I hate it."

'70s chic

The artists at Screen Burn didn't just capture 1996 in some of these homes, they pinpointed the environmental details that were old even then. That's next level visual craft, assisted by things like ancient Argos catalogues.

"Some genius out there had scanned every Argos catalogue for the last 30 years," game director Jon McKellan told us at Gamescom, "and we were like looking at them and finding out, OK, if we need a TV in '90s, let's look at the catalogue from the '90s and find out which one would be more appropriate."

I sent the above screenshots to my mum. "That is my parents’ house," she confirmed about the first two images, talking about a terrace house somewhere in the midlands. "We all huddled round that gas fire."

To me and many other British players there will be an extra nightmarish layer to the game because of this familiarity. Seeing a world that you know you've visited before but that is now totally lost is uniquely unsettling.

Why am I fixated on this? Well, I have encountered this feeling of nostalgic spookiness before when I've watched old British TV stuff like the ultra-cursed Tales of the Unexpected or Threads, but never in a game.

Maybe the game's 1996 setting is just to satisfy director Jon McKellan's love of analogue tech, which is similarly front-and-centre in the likes of Stories Untold and Alien: Isolation, but these interiors feel like the result of a hundred artistic choices.

That specificity in the environmental design, to me, is quietly the best thing about Silent Hill: Townfall (with apologies to the actual game bit, which I am enjoying even if I'm swearing at the stealth sections a whole lot).

Even the likes of Everybody's Gone to the Rapture or Atomfall tend to romanticise elements of British life in their countryside locations. Silent Hill: Townfall blots out any potential warmth of these empty houses by surrounding them with fog, towering walls and monsters, and making them the backdrop for a gnarly psychological horror story.

Still Wakes the Deep got a bit closer to this feeling, being a '70s period piece set off the coast of Scotland—but that took place on an oil rig, and living on one of those isn't exactly a universal experience.

The thing is, to my parents' generation, the types of houses you explore in Townfall are just the places they grew up in. My mum says she finds '70s interior design quite warm and comforting. This clicked something else into place for me about why I find these details frightening: it's probably just an age thing.

When I watched this year's mega hit film Backrooms, I came out of it wondering why the children all found it so frightening. I'm doomed to know the concept of a 'liminal space' from the amount of time I spend online, of course, but what they seemed to be afraid of was basically an empty Woolworths retail unit.

I get that any empty space that's supposed to have people in it can be quite eerie, but the basis of an entire online mythology and $400 million movie? That was strange to me. But that's really a younger audience's version of what I'm experiencing here.

My theory is, whatever ordinary place seems old to you is inherently unsettling. The things that we find normal now will seem otherworldly, grim and strange to future generations.

One day, someone will make a horror game set in a strip mall with a gorgeously rendered bubble tea shop, vape shop and Apple Store. And to me, it won't be a horror game at all. It'll be a documentary.

You may have qualms about my top picks for changeable Resident Evil villains, but I will die on this hill. Let me tell you why.

Donna Beneviento would be the easiest to change, for sure. I could already tell in Resident Evil Village that her heart wasn't in it, and I think all I'd have to do is say some nice things about her dolls and then bingo, she's on a better, healthier path.

Surprisingly, I think the same goes for Alex Wesker. Yes, she's got a god-complex, but I think I could use that to my advantage, because at the end of the day all a god-complex is is a need to be liked mixed in with some good old fashioned narcissism, and I've managed a fair few people with that. Plus I have low blood iron so she probably wouldn't want to snatch my body.

Then we get into trickier territory. Albert Wesker and T-00 (Mr. X).

My first step with T-00 would be to ditch the rocket launcher. I know this is risky, but fear is not a healthy emotion to build fruitful discussions around, and trust is a two way street. The next course of action I'd take would be giving him a real name. Mr. X is cool if you're a villain in a '90s Saturday morning cartoon, but it's a bit too formal. I think he looks like a Jeff and suspect he'd appreciate being humanised.

When it comes to Albert Wesker I have nothing else to back up my claim that I could change him other than a feeling in my bones that I could do it and the fact I have a winning smile and a can-do attitude.

But I'd like to hear from you guys, too. Do you think you could change any or all of the Resident Evil villains for good? And if you'd even want to talk to Salvatore Moreau (aka fish boy from Resident Evil Village)—it's a no from me.

My God, they've done it. We're finally in the era when videogame movies can actually be good. Not just good for a videogame movie, or "It's good, but here are 50 caveats." It's simply brilliant. And Resi's lovably feckless protagonist Bryan is the primary reason. But before I dive in, I need to warn you about something.

Yep, this is going to be spoiler city. Spoilers for days, folks! Spoilers as big as your head—if your head is exceedingly large. So I'm going to give you ample time to stop scrolling. I am here to protect you.

You must have stopped scrolling by now, right?

OK, this is your last chance to avoid spoilers, folks!

OK, great, I am now free to spoil the heck out of this excellent movie. Hurray!

The best thing filmmaker Zach Cregger did with Resident Evil was leave the heroes in the games. Bryan is not a hero. He's not skilled with firearms like Leon, nor does he have huge, rock-punching arms like Chris. He's just a tired dork trying to complete his last job of the night.

Bryan is not some stand-in for the protagonists we know and love—he is effectively a Resident Evil player, transported into a Resident Evil crisis. He's a more specific kind of everyman, one who reflects Resi fans.

His ear-demolishing screams, his silly mistakes, his complete lack of knowledge about firearms (he has used them in videogames), his cowardice and ineptitude—all of these traits transform Resident Evil from the over-the-top action movies we're normally stuck with into a survival horror romp that you can laugh at.

His cowardice and ineptitude aren't even that noteworthy, in that it's how most of us would react in this situation. He's as cowardly and incompetent as the average Resident Evil player would be if they were thrown into an actual apocalypse. This means his mistakes and near misses aren't frustrating. We're not sitting there thinking, "I could do better". Instead we empathise. I'm not judging you. I'd suck at this too.

That said, he does fuck up a lot. For your convenience, here's a list of his dumb mistakes:

• He lies about having tire chains so he can make a quick buck, inadvertently putting the whole world at risk.
• Instead of focusing on the ice-covered road, he keeps looking at his phone, leading to his first accident.
• He shoots at a t-Virus victim, but instead hits his own vehicle several times, stranding himself in a field.
• He drops a ladder that he needs five seconds later, resulting in a nasty fall.
• He taunts an aggressive dog, which then reveals itself to be a mutant.
• He wastes ammo on a padlock even after realising it can withstand a blast from a shotgun.
• He totals his stolen vehicle seconds after getting it by trying to ram a gate.
• He tries to pick up a mutated child even after he's seen a lot of shit. It ends badly.
• Instead of shooting the gestalt t-Virus mutant, he shoots the ground right next to his feet.
• He fails to load a clip several times, and once he finally does it, he shoots his new gun inside a vehicle.
• He accidentally shoots an Umbrella employee in the leg instead of saving him.
• When he finally, miraculously, makes it to the Raccoon City hospital, he gives up because the lifts don't work.
• Even after being told to use the stairs, his laziness gets the better of him after four flights. He finds a working lift and uses it. Again, it ends badly.

Damn, Bryan, you are bad at this. Cregger said he had to cut out a lot of the humour because test audiences found it too funny, but Resident Evil still left me laughing constantly. Not because it's full of incongruous gags. It's a pure horror movie rather than a comedy-horror romp. But the situations Bryan finds himself in, and the way he keeps fucking up, it's a gas.

Resident Evil is at its best early on, and I know it lost some folk when Bryan started to transform into a badass. He survives a collapsing lift, weaponises an acid-spewing mutant, deftly makes it across a vertigo-inducing chasm, and then he uses his final bullet in the coolest way possible. He becomes an absolute boss.

But I'm convinced this is in keeping with the movie's tone.

This is what it's like to play Resident Evil—at least if you're me. I tend to spend the first couple of hours jumping out of my skin whenever I see a shadow or hear a footstep. I'm a wreck. My shooting is panicked, my screams are frequent, and I spend a great deal of time hiding. But by the end of these games I am able to embody Leon, Chris, Jill, Ethan and all the rest. I am a grizzled survivor pulling off impossible stunts.

Resident Evil doesn't just ask, "How would a Resident Evil player handle a real t-Virus outbreak?" It also attempts to capture the actual experience of playing the games. And it does so incredibly skillfully.

This is why it's the best videogame movie. Even though it features none of the familiar faces and takes plenty of liberties, it ends up feeling more authentic than a movie that's aiming for a 1:1 recreation of Resident Evil 2. It tries something different, and in doing so it ends up being a canny recreation of the Resi experience. And on top of that, it's simply a great horror movie. If you don't care about Resi, it's still going to be a hoot.

Walking up to the old town of St Amelia for the first time in Silent Hill: Townfall, I was greeted by that familiar thick fog and eerie quiet—an omen of the horrors to come. I know what kind of monsters are waiting for me beyond the fog and I am painfully aware of just how unprepared I am for it—with no flashlight, healing items, or weapon on hand. But weirdly enough none of that matters, because for the first time in a Silent Hill game I feel content.

St Amelia is a fictional town, but as I'm sure many players based in the UK will soon discover, developer Screen Burn breathes so much life into this sleepy fishing village that I could've sworn I'd been here before. It's certainly a strange feeling to have in a game like this, but with Konami opening Silent Hill up to the world it's now the UK's turn to have our sense of home toyed with.

Here to suffer

The story follows Simon Ordell, a man unknown to us and himself. The only sense of person he has comes from a medical bracelet with his name, date of birth, and blood type written on it. I watched as he dragged himself up from the waves of the North Sea, onto the docks, and headed into St Amelia seeking help and answers as to why he's here on this cold foggy island.

A Silent Hill game is nothing without its setting and St Amelia delivers. I spent more time than I'd care to admit reading info boards about the history of fishing on the island and peeping over fences to see how the locals had done up their gardens. The more I explored, the better sense I got of the kind of people who lived in this town and what had happened to them.

Simon also sees more than just the old town as he ventures to a hospital, a corporate office, your classic Silent Hill supernatural 'other place', and, brace yourself, some new builds. My time in St Amelia flew by rather quickly, with just 13 hours spent in total, but that was more than enough to be rewarded with heaps of brilliant visual storytelling and the usual gift of stressful encounters.

St Amelia has its fair share of gut-wrenching horrors lurking around each corner, though—you don't spend a grand total of 35 minutes and five seconds hiding in lockers unless there's something pretty bad waiting for you on the other side. But even still, I found myself drawn to exploring the fog because my curiosity outweighed my fear.

But the further I progressed the less content I became. Not because there were more faceless and bound monsters stumbling around (although that didn't help), but because there was more to the island than St Amelia's historic old town. There was a side that was painfully familiar—cobblestone streets shifted into tarmac roads and cottages were turned into flats for better efficiency. The island changed as Simon moved away from the heart of St Amelia and towards the parasite which had latched onto it.

The town itself felt alive more than just lived in, and if that doesn't tick all the boxes for a world-class Silent Hill setting, I don't know what does.

Try to B positive

A good rule of thumb in Silent Hill is to approach its puzzles with lateral thinking, and Townfall is no different. They start fairly easy, coaching you in the art of taking in absolutely everything from your surroundings, digesting it, and then stitching together an answer from what has been gathered. It's the classic case of finding the combination to a lock by sifting through letters conveniently left scattered around the near vicinity.

But as I spent more time in St Amelia, my brain gradually got the hang of looking at things from a Silent Hill perspective. And although the puzzles got harder it didn't feel like a noticeable difference. Hell, the first thing I thought when stumbling across a bunch of blood types scribbled across the wall was "This is a puzzle and it wants me to figure out how to create blood type A+". If it weren't for the 7+ hours I'd already spent in Townfall I doubt that would have been my default response.

There were a few exceptions towards the very end of the game, however, I think a fresh brain would have had far less issues. Take the dreaded pipe room for example, where I had to use what looked to be morse code to twist a room full of levers in the right direction. After bashing my head against my desk my synapses sparked, a thought was formed, and I figured it out—I wish you all the best of luck with that one.

The puzzles aren't the only smart design features in Townfall, though, with the best and brightest being the handheld CRTV. This quickly became my closest companion as it allowed me to see the creepies through any wall or obstacle. It may seem like a bit of a cheat code getting to know where the monsters are but there are some limitations.

It's not always crystal clear where the monsters were, sometimes the CRTV could be a smidge off or it wouldn't relay that a monster is actually further away than it first seemed. It also can't show multiple enemies on one frequency, which means I had to toggle between several to see all the monsters that were close.

I wouldn't say I'm much of a pacifist but I opted to forgo the planks of wood, pipes, and firearms for most of the game, instead favouring the CRTV as my weapon against the monsters to help me stealth around them. I played on the normal difficulty and I didn't have a run in with a monster until quite far into the latter stages of the game. They're not blind, I was just able to move around them with some ease if I used the CRTV correctly and was cautiously optimistic about how fast Simon could run.

Even with all its finicky buttons the CRTV may be the most creative, fun, and useful puzzle solving tool I've ever had the pleasure of playing with. It turned navigating Townfall into one big scary puzzle, which is exactly what I look for in Silent Hill.

You can't change

But all of these amazing puzzles and fantastic world building would be for nought if Townfall hadn't also been able to pull off the kind of beautiful and psychologically jarring storytelling we've come to expect from the Silent Hill series.

To say there's something wrong with Simon would be to state the obvious. We're in a Silent Hill game after all, and no one in their sound mind would hallucinate grotesque faceless monsters which shoot needles out from their abdomens. But the fact that there's something off about Simon isn't what interests me—the fun part is finding out what he did to end up like this. It's clear that people in the town are angry, that some awful disaster happened on this island which rocked its community to its core. What's unclear, however, is why it involves some seemingly random American dude with induced amnesia.

But Simon's not on his own. There are two other characters who also inhabit this liminal space with him—Zoe and Richard. At first I just thought these to be your typical filler characters but as it turns out these two are perhaps the most interesting characters to have ever fallen into the fog.

Zoe and Richard portray different sides of the same disaster that Simon's caught in the middle of, with one being wrongfully guilty and the other willfully ignorant. Both have their own playable segments within the game in which their characters are explored in depth alongside the roles they played in the catastrophe, and through this I began to piece together Simon's story.

My favourite sequence in all of Townfall was actually Zoe's part. In this she relives the aftermath of the disaster as a nurse and a first responder to the victims as she tries to save the life of an unknown patient.

I am not a trained nurse so taking the patient's readings, running tests, and ultimately medicating them was probably one of the more stressful experiences I've had in a horror game. But it was worth it because through the stress I understood her guilt and trauma with painful clarity. It also made it clear why she's found herself wrapped up in this mess.

Then there's Richard who is an opposite to Zoe in every sense of the word. He's not blameless or caring; he's an asshole. But boy, is he an interesting character study. I won't go into too much detail concerning Richard as his story is one that is better experienced firsthand. But, like with Zoe, after playing through his sequence it became clear to me what this game's curse is. While the answer seemed simple at first examining the curse through the lens of three different characters adds enough diversity for an incredibly rewarding story and analysis of its characters.

My only issue with Townfall was that I didn't get to spend more time with Zoe and Richard, because in comparison Simon is just a little boring. His role as a blank template for players to print themselves onto worked wonders for immersion but ultimately his character suffered for it. I found myself drawn more to Zoe and Richard, two characters who had more invested in this community from the get go.

That's not to say I dislike Simon. He's a fantastic character who comes into his own during the latter stages of the story and is someone who will grow on me the more time I spend mulling Townfall over.

After all was said and done and I'd finally reached the end of Townfall's brilliant story, my overwhelming feeling was one of relief. Like Silent Hill f before it, Townfall had some monumental expectations to live up to and the unenviable task of proving that yet again the mystique of Silent Hill is not limited to one mountainous town. But it's now clear that Screen Burn absolutely understands what makes a great Silent Hill game and the series is better off for it.

"Oh man, can't wait to fly this plane through the fog around these spooky towers. I sure hope I don't lose my mind like the guy who did this job before me." That's what I imagine the protagonist of The Hollowing thought right before he climbed into the cockpit and promptly started to lose it.

We just saw the world premiere trailer for The Hollowing at the PC Gaming Show Tokyo Direct. It's a first-person horror flight sim made by Rubeki, developer of Lorn's Lure, and this is even set in the same world.

The Hollowing has the same signature PSX aesthetic, which I'm a big fan of for horror games. It's also great for speed, because this new project has been revealed barely two years after the dev's previous game came out.

In The Hollowing, you've got to fly between towers in a huge megastructure, fixing them up as you go so that the settlements in the place can stay in touch with one another. It's just you, your plane, the fog, and a voice on the radio.

Throughout the trailer, they give snippets of what happened to the previous pilot. Apparently they'd hear strange interference on the radio, and "spore toxicity" gave them visions. Maybe that fog is even more ominous than it seems.

By the end of the teaser, it's obvious the same issues are affecting our new pilot, Phil. I guess they're not built differently after all. There's no release date for The Hollowing just yet, so if you want to stay up to date with the game, wishlist it on Steam.

Check out our Steam page with all the games, updates, and DLC featured in the show. You can also read our roundup article which includes every announcement from the show in the order it aired.

At first glance you could be forgiven for thinking Dust till Dawn was a simple cleaning game. Early into the World Premiere trailer, showing the game off for the very first time during the PC Gaming Show Tokyo Direct, it seems very mundane at first glance as you clean your way around a Japanese apartment, little cash amounts floating off of each item as you scrub it and put it back in place.

Then, it twists and music from Akira Yamaoka, composer of the Silent Hill games, kicks in and you see the dual nature of Dust till Dawn, which is not just a cleaning game but also a horror, somehow. Don't worry though, you'll still be asked to clean to the best of your ability, even as everything goes to hell around you.

I find eyes unspeakably creepy, despite having several of them tattooed on me, and as a result Dust till Dawn's trailer, which is pretty big on spooky peepers, terrifies me. I'm quite a big fan of the game's aesthetic, which has twisting geometry and early 90s stylings that make it feel like the classic Japanese horror movies of yesteryear. Not that I'll be able to play it, because in addition to being terrified of spooky eyes, I'm also scared of horror games in general, and this looks to be a fairly effective one.

Dust till Dawn comes from Mac n Cheese Games, also developing the "nuns in space" survival horror Void Martyrs. With Dust till Dawn, with an elevator pitch of "Spooky Clean 'Em Up", Mac n Cheese seem to be nailing the one sentence reasons to play its horror games.

If the trailer for Dust till Dawn has whet your appetite, you can wishlist it on Steam here, or check out everything in the PC Gaming Show Tokyo Direct on the Steam page. You can also read our roundup article which includes every announcement from the show in the order it aired.

There is, you must admit, something a bit disconcerting about children's toys. The sightless eyes, the static expressions—it all combines into a hollow unpersonhood that triggers some ancient, primeval fear in the low regions of your brain. Something that also doesn't help: the unslakeable lust for murder.

Alright, that last part maybe does not apply to my childhood teddy bear, but it does apply to the nightmarish denizens of Escape From Playtime, which just announced it's accepting playtest sign-ups at the PC Gaming Show Tokyo Direct.

Set in the Poppy Playtime universe—one of those things which is quietly wildly popular—Escape From Playtime bills itself as a 1-4 player co-op survival horror that puts you in the shoes of the setting's Smiling Critters. These are A) haunting and B) probably relatively benign, as inhabitants of this world go. Your goal is to explore an abandoned toy factory at the behest of an ominous voice, who tasks you with finding building materials and other resources with which to do… something really benevolent, probably.

We get a glimpse of the game's creepy puzzle-solving, traversal, and hiding-from-dread-beasts-beyond-comprehension action in the trailer. The Smiling Critters are very small, which means you are even more defenceless than you might have thought possible, and also navigating a lot of environments designed for full-size people as not-full-size animal facsimiles.

It's a whole lot to process, really. You're gonna be making a lot of regrettable decisions about when to split up with your friends, when to hide, when to run, and when to greedily run back to that one room to gather up a resource you missed. This will not end well for you, I think, but I suspect it will be rather enjoyable, if you're the kind of person who enjoys holding their breath in a closet while a murderous beast passes by mere inches away. Who isn't? Find out more on Steam.

Check out our Steam page with all the games, updates, and DLC featured in the show. You can also read our roundup article which includes every announcement from the show in the order it aired.

I don't know if you've ever watched an Argentinian horror movie. I have, and they're damn scary. I had to watch the PC Gaming Show Tokyo Direct 2026 minidoc with one hand over my eyes, because Tenebris Somnia blends 2D survival horror gameplay (which I can handle) with live-action cutscenes made by an award-winning Argentinian film crew (and the make up and effects are so good they terrify me).

Tenebris Somnia expertly blends a retro 2D style with filmed cutscenes. One moment you're walking through a creepy, colourful hallway, the next you're watching an actual person's face distort in a way that defies all logic and reason. Dave Oshry, CEO of New Blood Interactive, the publisher of the game, hypes up the practical effects crew, but I'm pretty certain they just cast real demons.

Executive producer Airdorf says it "feels like you're playing through someone's nightmares," and I agree. One creature has an extra face underneath its face, connected via one mouth. That's horrifying. Those effects are mostly made with practical materials, too, which is why they look so damn good. "AI could never make Tenebris Somnia, let's just say that," says Oshry.

So that's the horror, but what about the survival aspect of the game? Well, that sounds like it's going to be pretty good, too. "You will only ever have just enough health," Oshry says. "You will only ever have just enough ammo. You will very often have to resort to a wrench or a pipe." He's wielding a wrench in the video while he explains this.

As for the story. Well, it's described as being relatable to anyone who's been in a troubled relationship. "You'll laugh, you'll cry, you'll call your ex," Oshry says. That's the scariest thing about Tenebris Somnia so far.

If this sounds like you're kind of horror, wishlist it now on Steam. Tenebris Somnia launches October 16, 2026, just in time for Halloween.

Check out our Steam page with all the games, updates, and DLC featured in the show. You can also read our roundup article which includes every announcement from the show in the order it aired.

I hate flying. Crammed into a tiny metal tube with 100s of other people, 1000s of feet in the air, unnaturally defying the will of God—it's awful. I don't know how flight attendants stay so calm and professional the entire time. At least in the real world they don't have to contend with shape-shifting demons like they do in Night Plane, the upcoming horror job sim from Liquid Static Studio.

In a new trailer unveiled during the PC Gaming Show Tokyo Direct, things get spooky real quick. A deer just stands there, menacingly staring at the flight attendant before they board the Plane Airlines plane, and we see a bloody handprint smeared on the emergency door.

There's also a smattering of eerie shots throughout the airport, looking like something out of The Backrooms. But it's not just the airport and plane, oh no. We catch a few glimpses of a cave and forest, so it looks like the plane crash lands at some point.

And with what was occurring on board, I'm not surprised. Passengers levitating in the air, deer demons charging down the aisle. Awful stuff. On top of all that, you actually have to work.

Night Plane is, at its core, a job simulator. You'll need to check tickets, attend to the needs of the passengers, and try to eject non-human visitors. How you do that without them eviscerating you, I don't know.

It sounds a bit like Papers, Please, only with the added element of my deathly fear of flying, so it seems like a strong horror game. If you want to try it out for yourself, you can download the demo now. And you won't have to wait long for the full release, as the game is coming out October 26, 2026. You can wishlist it on Steam.

Check out our Steam page with all the games, updates, and DLC featured in the show. You can also read our roundup article which includes every announcement from the show in the order it aired.

Amnesia: The Bunker is without a doubt the most frightening horror game I've played this decade. Its terrifying tale of being chased through a crumbling French bunker by a monster has the darkest, thickest, most unnerving atmosphere of any horror game I've played since Alien: Isolation. It's so intense that it's hard to imagine anyone making something light and airy out of its subterranean warrens, and it's downright inconceivable that someone might, say, turn Amnesia: The Bunker into Mirror's Edge.

And yet, that's exactly what modder TiMan has done. Created for Frictional Games' 2026 modding jam—which ran with the theme of 'What is reality?'—Bunker's Edge sees the base game's protagonist Henri transported through a portal from the trenches of war-ravaged France to the pristine skyline of EA's free-running classic.

The change of scenery alone is remarkable. The Bunker's HPL engine is purpose built to deliver darkness, shadows and murk, so seeing it handle such a bright and colourful environment is mightily impressive. But what's really interesting is how TiMan has implemented all of Mirror's Edge's free-running mechanics. Mantling, sliding, wall-running, pipe-climbing, runner's vision, that 180-degree wall-jump that I always struggled to perform in the base game, it's all here.

Despite the breezier setting, Bunker's Edge is still a horror game. The Bunker's monster has followed Henri through the portal, and chases him across the rooftops just as relentlessly as it stalks him through the base game's subterranean fortification.

All told, it's a snazzy bit of modding showmanship, though there are a couple of points to be aware of. First off, Bunker's Edge is (very understandably) not as slick as actual Mirror's Edge. Some of Henri's parkour moves, like sliding, are a little awkward, and more than once I clambered straight through a wall and found myself trapped inside the world geometry.

The other thing to note is that Bunker's Edge is very short. You can blast through the whole thing in about 15 minutes. The ending is also extremely weird, not what you'd expect from either The Bunker or Mirror's Edge.

Nonetheless, Bunker's Edge is a fun diversion for a Sunday afternoon. Alongside hosting modding jams, Frictional is also working on its next horror game Ontos. The sci-fi adventure has more in common with 2015's Soma than The Bunker, but it's still one of my most anticipated games of 2027.