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.”
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.
Have you ever wanted to play a game about dissecting consciousness that starts off under the guise of a Doom clone? Me either! But I’m glad I did.
This Strange Realm Of Mine’s Steam page describes it as “a First Person Shooter mixed with poetry and psychological horror.” but I’m not sure even that prepares you for what you’re in for. You’ll start off shooting at spooky monsters through some dark corridors with nothing but a pistol and a torch, solving a few simple (but well done!) puzzles. After escaping, you’re dumped into The Limbo Tavern and are told that there is still work to do.
This tavern is where you’ll spend your time in between each of the game’s stages. NPCs eventually gather here as it becomes a haven for those lost, and you’ll get to know these people before jumping back into These Strange Realms. Where you jump back into, though, is what makes @Encaved‘s latest project so unique.
If you’re wanting to go in blind, I suggest you stop reading here. If not, well, it’s about to get weird.
I had expected that first stage to set a precedent for what’s to come. Nope, not at all. The next stage is familiar enough, you find out that you have to bust into a gang of rat’s headquarters to get to your next objective. After you start popping off rat heads in the alley is where the game shows a bit of its hand. Graffiti is painted all over the walls of these streets that the rats call home. You follow the story of them coming up with a name for their gang, how they feel bad about picking on certain members of the group a little too much, and more. This fleshes these characters out… but only after you’ve smeared that flesh all over the walls with your handgun. Once you break into their tower it feels like a page was taken directly out of the Hotline Miami handbook. You brutally take down scores of these people as you climb higher into their base, eventually finding their boss and, if you choose, splattering his brains all over his room after you get what you want.
And that’s just level 2.
Each time you complete a mission, you head back into your safe haven, have a chat with everyone hanging around, and then head back out to see what could possibly be next. And trust me when I say I don’t think you’ll be able to guess. You’ll go through Minecraft parodies, explorations of social anxiety, and entire genre-shifts. I was glued to my screen as I stayed up into the wee hours of the morning just to see what they might have come up with next.
This game sounds perfect right? Uh, well…
If you’ve played the game already or paid attention to the word “poetry” in the game’s description, you might notice that I’ve neglected to mention a pretty core tenant of the game. That’s because I think a bunch of it isn’t any good.
This isn’t to say that the writing is a total loss, though. There are bright spots in the dialogue that legitimately hit points of shocking poignancy, but they come in between literal name-checks of Rick and Morty characters (it’s a good show with some bad fans) and 2deep4u discussions of religion. Those aforementioned discussions coming from a guy sitting in a cell with some Suicide Squad level of “deep thoughts” scribbled all over the walls. There are moments in the game’s story where I couldn’t figure out if the developer was making fun of people like this, or actually was one of them.
These instances of annoying writing are luckily limited to only about two of the game’s characters, and the rest of the cast is allowed to have some surprisingly thoughtful expression. One of my favorite characters is a girl who fights against her anxieties to be an optimist, and shares some personal stories with you along the way.
Personal is a word I keep coming back to when trying to describe this game. For better or worse, This Strange Realm Of Mine feels like a deeply personal work of an artist. It just happens to be really fun to play.
If you’re ready to jump into someone else’s mind and shoot some monsters, check out This Strange Realm Of Mine on the game’s Steam page.
So I went into The Tomatoes are OK knowing… not really much of anything at all. I hit the strange landing page after hearing that it was little unnerving, and jumped straight in. I suggest you do the same.
I’m back, you’re back, and The Spooky is back. Welcome to the Sixth Edition of Getting Spooky. Glad you could make it. Yes, I have seen David Pumpkins. It was good.
I’ve never been a huge fan of text adventures. I didn’t grow up with them, and I end up getting frustrated after I feel like all of my options are exhausted. Hell, I didn’t finish Frog Fractions (A game that I adore) for the longest time simply because I couldn’t force myself through the text section. The House Abandon is different.
Admittedly, I don’t play a ton of this kind of thing, so I’m sure something like it has done before. The House Abandon feels surprisingly modern in comparison to staring at a black and white screen inputting WEST and EAST over and over. The text adventure game itself resides on a desk inside The House Abandon, and you’re playing a game within that game. And no, the potential of this idea does not go untapped.
As an Interactive Fiction newbie, I appreciated the limited range of actions you’re forced to take throughout the adventure. The House Abandon pretty clearly lays out what you need to do so you’re not tossing a dozen things into a parser just to get a result. The flow isn’t broken after getting stuck on a puzzle for so long that you forget you’re wandering a dimly lit abode. And as a game created by an Alien Isolation designer and Co., this team knows how to keep the tension going. You’ll just need to see for yourself how they do it.
The game ends with a promise of the No Code team making more short stories like this, and that’s a promise I want to hold them to. Hopefully we’ll see another one of these around Halloween time…please?
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If you’re curious about The House Abandon, check out the game’s wonderful trailer…
…and go play it here, because there’s no way you don’t want to after watching that.
hippochippies 