We’ve got another free horror game to discuss today, this time an adventure game called Elevator Hitch.
It’s your first day of work, but when you get into the elevator with one of your new co-workers, it gets stuck before you can reach your destination.
What follows is a highly surreal and often unsettling horror experience.
It’s a point-and-click adventure game, although the controls are a little unusual, using a combination of keys and the mouse. (I also spent several minutes at the start trying to figure out how to move the camera up and down, since the instructions said to use the Fn key and I thought my keyboard didn’t have one. It turns out it does, but anyway, PgUp and PgDn also work.)
The first thing I discovered once I figured out the controls was that I could call for help with the elevator. They said help would arrive, and a countdown appeared. Curious, I let the countdown run out, at which point help arrived… and killed me. Game over within minutes of starting. I then clicked “New Game” and found myself already in the elevator, with the protagonist struggling to come to grips with the memory of dying.
That sets the tone for Elevator Hitch. There are numerous ways to die, each of which counts as a separate ending, but anything you’ve picked up or unlocked before your death stays with you when you start again.
Beyond that unique approach, the gameplay is standard enough for an adventure game. As you check each floor the elevator can reach, you’ll encounter puzzles to solve and obstacles to overcome. Little by little, you uncover more secrets of this definitely-100%-normal elevator and office building.
Elevator Hitch only takes about an hour to complete, but it’s a surreal and inventive horror game well worth experiencing.
A few days ago, I saw an article about a newly-released free horror game called The Night is Long, so I decided to check it out.
The Night is Long begins with a fairly stylized opening cutscene in which a man suffering from grief sees a woman in the road and follows her into a strange mansion.
The rest has a more standard graphical style, and you play in the first-person as you explore the mansion.
Exploration has a somewhat linear approach, as most parts of the mansion are locked until you follow the path the game wants you to follow. This was most noticeable in the second that gives you a series of keys, most right ahead of reaching the door each unlocked. There are a handful of puzzles, however, and I did spend a little while wandering around trying to figure out what I’d missed.
There is a sanity system, although it only affects the number of supernatural incidents you encounter. While nothing stood out too much, it has some nicely atmospheric creepy moments and a couple of well-timed jumpscares.
It describes itself as having Lovecraftian inspirations, but it felt more like general supernatural horror to me. I enjoyed the story’s gradual development through discovered notes, even if the plot itself didn’t stand out much.
The Night is Long is a short horror game that takes under an hour to finish, and while it might not do too much to stand out from the genre, for a free game it’s an enjoyable enough addition to this year’s October lineup.
Not to be confused with Corpse Party (although the name did throw me for a loop the first few times I saw it), Corpse Factory is a visual novel I’ve been curious about ever since it came out.
It recently had a good sale on the eShop, so I picked it up to play this October.
Corpse Factory is about a mysterious website where it’s claimed you can submit someone’s picture and phone number to request their death, and not only will they die, but they’ll also receive a photo of their corpse first.
That sets up what sounds like an eerie urban legend with the hint of something supernatural at work… but that’s not really the sort of game this is. After the prologue, which sets up the concept, the game switches to the viewpoint of Noriko, the woman running the site, and we learn she uses incredibly realistic photo manipulation to create the corpse photos in the hopes of shocking/scaring the target into suicide.
It’s clear pretty quickly that Noriko is… somewhat unbalanced. Her viewpoint, her visceral glee at the thought of indirectly causing people’s deaths, and her occasional breakdowns create an unsettling and often macabre atmosphere.
I also absolutely love the eerie song used for the intro.
Eventually, she realizes she’ll need help if she wants this to be as successful as possible, and so she forms a team with a couple other characters willing to assist her questionable operation.
For quite a while, Corpse Factory has an intense atmosphere due to following characters whose goals are so disturbing, with a persistent sense that things could come crumbling down at any moment.
Unfortunately, in the later parts of the story, it doesn’t hold up as well. Some plot points feel a bit too contrived, and some twists seem almost like they were added to solely be a twist, without enough care taken to make sure they fit with everything else.
Click for major Corpse Factory spoilers
Aoi being behind Corpse Girl’s successes just felt weird. It’s an interesting twist that Noriko was just delusional about her success even back then, but it takes something away from those early parts of the story. And if she and the Human Removal Service are basically just hitmen, how do they stay undetected for so long?
In general, the early parts have a sense of paranoia that Noriko will slip up and bring the police down on her head, but in later parts it seems like they can do just about anything without the police figuring it out. How did Junpei steal all the corpses from the morgue without it leading to a huge investigation? For that matter, once Noriko & co started leaving the corpses at the scenes, how did the police not determine the identity of any of those bodies and trace them back to the morgue?
Speaking of bodies not being tracked down, how did Kojiro drag his girlfriend’s body through the street back to his apartment with numerous witnesses seeing them, and yet no one ever investigated what happened to her body?
And speaking of Kojiro… I liked the epilogue twist that he was Nobel Sinclair, but making him the leader of HRS felt unnecessary and confusing. It doesn’t make sense that he was their leader during the main events of the game, so if this is a recent development, who was in charge before?
(Despite those criticisms, I liked Kojiro quite a bit… even if I felt the story started to fall apart a bit in the second act, I enjoyed getting his point of view.)
While I have some criticisms with how the later parts of the story turned out, I did enjoy the journey there. It’s worth playing for the early parts of the story and the characters, if nothing else. Three choices during the game determine which ending you get, although I was able to watch all the endings from the menu after I finished.
In short, Corpse Factory falls apart a bit in the latter half of the game, but it’s an eerie visual novel worth checking out nevertheless.
We’ve got another free horror game to discuss today, this time an adventure game called Elevator Hitch.
