SPOOKWARE from Adam Pype and Viktor Kraus is a gift to a broken world. Easily gaining Halloween Classic status, SPOOKWARE imagines if WarioWare’s namesake was less of a stinky capitalist and more of a Jigsaw.
It’s one game of WarioWare with a high score of twenty, with one speed up at halfway. It’s tough! The microgames all only use the four arrow keys, but when you’re slamming all of them to rotate a garage door to stop THE GRUDGE from getting in, things start to get tricky. The horror inspirations range from Slenderman to your standard cow abduction, and after playing for an hour I laughed when I realized on their website there’s only ten in the mix. “10 BLAZING FAST MICROGAMES. EACH ONE SPOOKIER THAN THE LAST ONE!” as game’s page boldly states. I still haven’t been able to beat it.
Look at that little guy!
Adam Pype is currently teasing a follow-up to be featured in the Dread X Collection 3, so as SPOOKWARE’s protagonist so often rumbles, “hellll yeaahhhhh.”
So uh, the last month has been… a lot! Between the plague and the politics, it’s not looking great out there folks. But instead of turning into absolute despair hour (for that, check my Twitter), what if we talked about some video games for a second?
Doom Eternal is mere hours away at this point (UPDATE: it’s out! I have it! I lived!). Animal Crossing’s tonight. It’s time to put February to bed.
1. Scourgebringer
Is it time to call our Game of the Year yet? Because right now, it’s Scourgebringer by a country mile.
Without Flying Oak Games’ instant , February would have been a relatively unmemorable month. There’s still good stuff to find, sure, but this one’s in a league of its own. Scourgebringer is still only in Early Access, but wow what a showing. I know now the game’s been in alpha for a year. I wish I had known! The game’s Steam release has blown me away. Action as tight as Doom 2016’s with as many variables and options but on a 2D plane? What a weird, wonderful idea.
ScourgeBringer is fast. Like, blink while you’re watching someone play and you’ll miss them clearing a room, fast. And for me? The faster the roguelike the better. You enter a room full of enemies, figure out the most efficient way to obliterate them in five seconds, and move on to do it again. It’s not the most original idea, but the execution is done so well it’s been hard to tear myself away. And when I’m not playing, I’m wondering what next week’s content update might bring. It’s real, real good.
Go play Scourgebringer for yourself it looks or sounds remotely interesting to you. It’s quite difficult to convey just how good the game feels in your hands until you’re dashing and slicing and blasting through the hordes for yourself. Combine that with the game’s combo system and skill tree, and you’ve got yourself a game to return to again and again.
For a game that seems roughly halfway content complete, a bunch of full games have a lot to compete with already. Expect to be hearing about this one for a while. That’s assuming we survive the next handful of months, of course.
2. WORLD OF HORROR
What if the world was a terrible hellscape and only your wildest imaginations could predict what awful thing would happen next? Also, did you hear about this spooky new Junji Ito inspired game? It’s good too!
WORLD OF HORROR is a solo effort from @panstasz about surviving an onslaught demons and monsters that have been unleashed. While I haven’t put as much time into this one as I plan to, early signs are good. I participated in an eldritch ritual. I fought a demon. I got my face permanently sliced open by an evil scissor lady and lived… for a while. It’s cool! The one thing I don’t have a great grasp on so far is the combat. As an adventure game it’s all menu based, and the combat is turn-based from said menu. But there’s a bit of complexity there involving what order to take certain moves, when to defend or attack or whatever. It’s all gone over my head a bit, and I’m playing mostly to see ghosts and non-euclidean monstrosities, not to learn a light combat programming language. But, like I said, the good parts are super good.
3. Mission Zigloton
A weird platformer that I found had launched on itch.io to little fanfare: Mission Zigloton by Ben Lega! Have you been looking for a pretty simple way to kill an hour or two? Ben’s got ya.
Mission Zigloton rarely pretends to be more than just a solid platforming adventure. You’ll collect doodads to open up areas which you’ll then run and jump through to collect other doodads. Towards the later half of the game, you’re introduced to a couple of boss fights and stealth sequences that feel a bit out of place but aren’t unwelcome. It’s neat!
Again, this was a super light month in terms of releases, but this was just the kind of appetizer I was looking for before the big big big stuff starts hitting and doesn’t stop. It’s also completely free!
Honorable Mentions
Escape Vauban
A very good, very quick escape room game.
Balavour
A sad short horror story about a girl, a dog, and a flower.
The Convenience Store
Decent on its own, but pales in comparison to its clear inspiration – Puppet Combo’s opus, Night Shift.
In seven days, The Ancient One is going to mess you up. Bad. The only way to stop him? Fight the lesser minions of hell and eat their entrails to gain their power. Duh!
SACRIFIGHTS is FrankieSmileShow’s entry for Ludum Dare 44. And while I don’t think it nails the theming (Your life is currency) as successfully as safecrack, it’s a pretty fun time regardless.
You offer some blood, or guts, or uh, batteries and staplers that the bosses drop to the sacfiricial altar and fight whatever monstrosity is summoned. Clowns, spiders, demons and secretaries take shape and are quite angry with you. Thankfully, a magic seal keeps them in place for you to get some potshots in before they wreak havoc. Your first run through the game will almost inevitably go like this: Summon a bunch of monsters, maybe kill one or two by the skin of your teeth for some sweet loot, and then die to the final boss when he shows up and you’re absolutely unprepared. The second run is where things… kind of fall apart a bit.
Once you’re familiar with how the game works, you’ll try to min/max your process through the monsters. Eat what’s edible, summon what’s not, and grow incredibly powerful as events progress. You’ll eventually learn that most monsters can be decimated before the seal is broken, and they never even have a chance to move before they’re sent back to whence they came. The game is still fun to play because the monster designs are neat to see and each of them have unique quips, but once you see the seams there’s no challenge whatsoever.
And that’s cool, I guess! I had a pretty great 20 minutes or so between both of my playthroughs. I just wish I had been able to have a fair fight with more of them. There’s definitely more that can be done here, and if SACRIFIGHTS 2 came out tomorrow I’d be down immediately. Just maybe give the hellspawn a headstart when you try to take them on yourself.
If you’re up for meeting the minions of the abyss, check out the game on its Ludum Dare page.
Need to get spooky and you’re somehow not in 2018 yet? Maybe this just wasn’t enough spookin’? I’ve got you covered. On with the show!
Halloween is almost over! The spookiness has nearly headed out for another year! I couldn’t find my laptop charger to finish this post earlier this morning! Ahh!
Go ahead and throw on that Rockwell x MJ classic, and let’s do the dang spooky thing.
Welcome to a brand new Getting Spooky! It feels like the world around us is too spooky all the time these days, but now it’s time for a fun kind of spooky, if you have the mental capacity left to do so.
If this isn’t the best kitten since that angry banana baby… I don’t know who is.
Okay, now that we’re all spookily warmed up, it’s time to get genuinely unnerved.
Hereditary is one of my favorite movies of the year so far. I can’t remember the last time a movie put me on edge as this one did throughout the entirety of its runtime. Watching this in a crowded theater of similarly uncomfortable people for two hours is an experience I’m super glad I was able to have. I hope the lady who stood up during the credits and proclaimed “I need to talk to Jesus!” ended up okay.
Enjoy scrolling through @BrianLeeWow‘s tumblr of mirrored photos of Halloween costume models. It’s… something.
On my way home last night (OCTOBER 30th!!!!!!) I saw a brightly lit Christmas tree in someone’s window. That truly instilled horror in me in a way I didn’t expect. Yikesabunga.
You goottttaaa watch Mandy.
The less you know going in, the better. Just know that it’s a VERY hard R rating, and it will make you squirm in your seat. And then… only after you’ve paid your dues, Nicolas Cage delivers his best performance in years.
Oh right, video games.
September 1999 is a short story told in about five minutes. I very much enjoyed those five minutes. You’ll put the pieces together as the scenes progress, if you can focus on something other than just how incredible the visuals are. Seriously, you need to see it for yourself and decide whether it’s real footage or not. Maybe the most exciting thing about September 1999 is that the developer, 98DEMAKE, has spoken about plans to continue making stuff like this. I’ll be right back on day one for whatever comes next.
Another in 2018’s incredible run of horror movies is Annihilation. While not exactly a “horror movie” through and through, there’s enough spooks to go around in this one to qualify.
It’s one of those movies where people obliquely refer to “that scene”, but there’s actually a handful of different things they could be talking about. And they’re each as weird and innovative as the last.
Horror anthologies are one million times my jam, and the finding out that Supermassive is diving into the genre gave my hopes for 2019’s horror output a huge bump. The first one’s on a spooky boat! Sure, why not!
Berat Pekmezci’s art is at its best when his skills with color are used to their fullest. This is one of my favorites.
What a vibe! I love it very much, and you should check out the rest of his stuff. Fall rules.
Here’s your reminder of some of my favorite weird movies you should absolutely watch if you wanna get all spooked and have a fun time:
The Invitation
Pontypool
Creep
It Follows
The House of the Devil
The Ritual
If you haven’t played Just Shapes & Beats, first off, go do that because it’s one of the best games of 2018 by faaaaaaar.
Second, gosh I’m super upset that these aren’t actually in the game now! Ughhhhhhh. They’re beyond excellent.
Hey, you. Yeah, you with the thing. You should totally have a short horror film watch party.
Anthologies are my favorite horror for a reason: they are made to not give you time to get bored. Lots of horror movies drag on too long, or just barely have anything to say in the first place. With short films, though, even the bad ones only waste like 12 minutes of your night!
For starters, check out:
Don’t Look Away, and The Smiling Man are both also pretty weird and good. There’s dozens and dozens of creepy short horror things on YouTube, and the quality ranges pretty wildly. It’s a ton of fun to spend a couple of hours in the dark with friends just blasting through them though.
Fair warning, you’re gonna stumble across Still Life, and it kinda sucks. So maybe go ahead and skip it.
(If you watched it anyway… man, what was up with that ending? I was waiting for some cool twist the whole time, and that was it? Of course they were SPOILERS people. How else was that gonna play out? I feel like I had a dozen better ideas just while watching it.)
Was that spooky enough for you? No? Well… what about…
…
…
NOW!
See it got scarier because I made you wait and then yelled it.
Okay it’s 11pm on Halloween and the spooklocity is leaving my body to build back up through another year.
I’m listening to the Monster Mash while I write this, so you have to go find some spooky music, too. I’ll wait.
Okay hi. Boo! Gotcha. Boo again but it’s invisible. Oooohhh.
For the newcomers: Hey there. Let’s get spooky. If you aren’t satisfyingly spooked by the end of this, scoot on back up and check out these links to previous Getting Spooky posts.
These first two are archived from a friend’s site I used to write for, so maybe skip these if you’re not into some wonky formatting from Wayback Machine’s retrieval process:
uh. Just kinda skip around the first 30 minutes of that video for some treats. The haunted ABCs nightmare song with the girl’s possessed friend was a highlight. Oh yeah it’s 45 minutes long bye.
~Spooky Thought 0129: That feeling when it’s 4:09pm the day before Halloween and you haven’t gone out to look for a costume yet. Spooky.~
Oh you want an actual Spooky recommendation? I got you.
Have you ever wanted to feel genuinely unsettled for, oh, let’s say, 100 minutes? The Invitation is a true slow burn, and you’ll be coming up with your own theories about what’s happening long before it decides to offer any answers. Believe me when I say it’s worth the wait.
Guys. I'm here to red-pill you all.
You've never heard the actual Monster Mash. You've just heard a record *about* the Monster Mash.
And while we’re on the topic: Have you ever seen the video of Bobby Pickett lip-syncing Monster Mash? Go watch it, it’s wild. Tell them Boris sent you.
Alright, I can’t look away from the faces. I can’t believe I hadn’t seen him do this until 2017.
Junji Ito rules and I had nightmares the first time I read anything by him.
If you’ve never read anything by Japan’s horror manga master you should do yourself the favor. Feel free to jump in anywhere, but my starting point was The Hanging Balloons. Have fun sleeping!
~Spooky Thought 0088: Here’s a fun game. Hit up this Wikipedia page and watch Halloween episodes of shows you’ve never heard of before. It’s fun! At least, theoretically, it is. I haven’t done it yet. Get back to me and tell me if that was a fun game please.~
2017 has been a good year for horror games!
First up, if you haven’t checked out The Bathroom demo (or now, Gloomy Room) go do that.
Use a translator app on your phone for the Japanese text
Hang around in the opening room for a while
Cry
Next up is Resident Evil 7, which, when played in VR, is the most exhausting horror experience I’ve had with any piece of media.
If you’re not down with possibly literally dying of fright and you want to play as far away from the screen as possible, that’s fine too. I still haven’t finished it because I’m a tiny baby but it’s great and I’ll push my way through before the year’s end.
The Evil Within 2 is cool! I know I’m in a very small camp in thinking that the original Evil Within is a kind of flawed horror classic, but people seem to be liking the second one a bit more. Good!
I’m still in the early chapters, and even though there’s some open-worldiness in this one, the sequel still plays like a tightly scripted action horror game. I stand by saying that The Evil Within is the first game that felt like a true sequel to Resident Evil 4. Hopefully this one lives up to that standard.
Just, uh, don’t pay any attention to the story. It’s utter nonsense. The first one SPOILER ended with you in the back of a truck flying around in a tornado while you mount a turret and shoot a zombie brain monster. This one is somehow dumber.
These are short 20ish minute audio dramas, framed as documented interviews about strange events. A dude reads scary stories for a half-hour, basically. Ever wished The Twilight Zone was an anthology podcast? Your dreams have come true. It creeps slowly into a more interconnected storyline the further you get, but the one-off episodes remain consistently excellent throughout. Some of my favorites are Episode 2: Do Not Open, Episode 10: Vampire Killer, and Episode 34: Anatomy Class. If you aren’t hooked after though… maybe you just don’t like good horror?
One of my favorite short horror stories ever written.
Aaaaaand I guess that’s it? Today’s Halloween and I love it so much but it’s more for me about the general vibe of October it brings than the holiday itself. The 31st is still pretty sweet though. Time for me to put on another weirdly specific costume that I have to explain to everyone who hasn’t made it to New Donk City in Mario Odyssey. Check you guys next year for another one of these.
hippochippies 