Operation Backlog Completion 2026

Celebrating All Things Spooky: 5 Spooky Games You Can Beat in 15 Minutes or Less

 Celebrating All Things Spooky, Reviews, Video games  10 Responses »  Tagged with: ,
Oct 192022
 

Instead of talking about a single game today, I want to take a look at five short ones.

And by short, I mean short.

Each game on this list can be finished in 15 minutes or less.

So let’s take a look at five bite-sized spooky games you can play in between longer titles!

Grime House

The sole traditional survival horror game on this list is Grime House, a horror game that appears to have been designed in Paint.

You have a top-down view and walk over items to use or interact with them, and you find a gun that lets you engage enemies in simple combat. Although the house you’re trapped in is small, it makes the most of its few environments to set up a classic survival horror gameplay loop of exploring and backtracking to gradually unlock more rooms.

The movement controls occasionally gave me trouble, but overall I had a lot of fun with this one.

10mg: Sealed Estate

Apparently there’s a whole collection of games out there called 10mg, or 10 minute games. One of these titles is a horror game called Sealed Estate. You become trapped inside a mysterious estate, being hunted by an unknown monster, and must find a way out.

The controls are very simple. You can walk and sometimes click things, and you eventually get a flashlight.

It feels more like a puzzle game than anything else, as you need to use your flashlight to get past obstacles (mainly creepy eyes), while scattered notes tell the story. Near the end, the mouse controls stopped working properly for me, which made it frustrating, but overall it was a decent atmospheric experience.

Prison of the Magi: Chapter 0

The next game I played was Prison of the Magi: Chapter 0. This one is a first-person adventure game with cosmic horror themes.

It makes good use of lighting, with a very pretty (although grayscale) visual style. There isn’t much to do in this chapter, though. You collect items, but I couldn’t find any way to do anything with them. Maybe they’re intended to be used in the full game.

Unfortunately, a good portion takes place in a maze. It was annoying, particularly since I managed to reset my progress a couple of times. I’m not sure how the save system works, since it seemed to me hitting the save button never showed any effect, but sometimes it saved and sometimes it didn’t.

According to the demo page for the full game, Prison of the Magi will be an open world horror game, so I don’t think this is one I’ll play.

Vampire Night Shift

On the lighter side of spookiness is Vampire Night Shift, a short game about a vampire working at a convenience store.

It’s designed to look like a Game Boy game, and you can even download a copy to play on a Game Boy emulator.

You walk around, talk to people, and complete simple tasks during your shift, like stocking shelves or helping customers. It’s a cute game. That’s the main appeal here. It’s just cute.

There Are Ghosts In These Stalls

Finally, I checked out a horror game shorter than any other on this list: There Are Ghosts In These Stalls, written for a two-minute horror game jam.

It took me slightly longer, closer to five minutes, but this is a tiny one nevertheless. You are in a haunted bathroom, and your goal is to focus on symbols in order to mark them on the inside of the stall.

Despite its extremely short length and simple premise, it has an unsettling atmosphere that made its ending so much more effective. It’s only a few minutes long, but it got me good in the end.

Conclusion

So if you’re looking for something shorter to play this Halloween season, these are a few you might want to keep in mind. I especially recommend Grime House and There Are Ghosts In These Stalls.

Meanwhile, we do not have Ace Attorney news to take an emergency break for (much to my disappointment), but we should end today with actual legitimate Silent Hill news thanks to a Silent Hill broadcast tonight. I am filled with fear.

And don’t forget that you can win a prize at the end of October just by leaving comments all month long, as explained in the Celebrating All Things Spooky contest rules here!

Celebrating All Things Spooky: ITYH: A Horror Otome

 Celebrating All Things Spooky, Reviews, Video games  2 Responses »  Tagged with: ,
Oct 172022
 

Today we’re talking about an otome, but don’t worry, I haven’t gotten the month wrong.

ITYH: A Horror Otome is a creepy, unsettling visual novel that involves both horror and romance.

It follows Camille, a teenage girl intent on finding love, who sets her sights on the mysterious loner Osgoode. Despite him coldly rebuffing her at every turn, she persists in her attempts to get him to notice her.

And then things go terribly, terribly wrong.

ITYH is set in modern times but has a gothic horror feel throughout. It’s a wonderfully disturbing read with a growing romantic progression that often had me thinking it was sweet despite being uncomfortable at the same time. Both main characters feel flawed and realistic, and the unsettling atmosphere always had me on edge.

Click for implied ITYH spoilers
It’s wonderful at creating sympathy for a monster without losing the sense that he is a monster and maybe you shouldn’t feel too much sympathy.

There is one main ending, with early bad endings you can get along the way. Additionally, completing the main ending unlocks one more ending that branches off early on.

That ending and part of the main ending leave some details unexplained, but it seems these come from a cut route the developer plans to use for another story, so that should be interesting to see.

I know I haven’t gone into a lot of detail here, but that’s because ITYH is fairly short and a lot of impact comes from the surprise and anticipation of what might happen next. It should take a couple of hours to finish, depending on how fast you read.

So if you like horror and dark romance stories, ITYH: A Horror Otome is definitely one you should consider.

Celebrating All Things Spooky: Alone in the Dark

 Celebrating All Things Spooky, Reviews, Video games  4 Responses »  Tagged with: ,
Oct 142022
 

Following the Alone in the Dark reimagining announcement earlier this year, Steam had a fantastic sale on the earlier Alone in the Dark games, so I picked up the bundle (four games for $1.49) and decided to play the original Alone in the Dark this October.

Alone in the Dark is one of the earliest survival horror games – possibly the earliest.

So as a game released in 1992, it feels… old. I got used to the tank controls quickly enough, but I had a hard time adjusting to double tapping up to run. Actions are also a bit clunky, as there is only one key for actions, so you have to open the menu each time to choose which action you want to perform (ex. search, fight, push).

I never quite got the hang of combat, but that’s not too bad, because combat is fairly de-emphasized. In fact, monster encounters felt like puzzles more often than not, as many have a trick so that you can avoid fighting.

You play either Edward Carnby or Emily Hartwood investigating the strange mansion called Derceto after the suicide of its owner Jeremy Hartwood. I played as Emily, a decision motivated by not realizing I was on a character select screen when I started the game. It doesn’t matter much.

Exploration and puzzle-solving are central to the experience, in true survival horror fashion. So if you like that sort of gameplay loop of backtracking to solve puzzles to unlock more areas, that aspect of Alone in the Dark still holds up.

Saving often is important, since you can die easily, but you can save whenever you want. You also have limited inventory space (determined by item weight) and no storage box, so I got used to dropping used items everywhere.

There are plenty of notes and books throughout the mansion that shed light on the story. I’d somehow forgotten in the time since the reboot’s announcement that Alone in the Dark is Lovecraftian, so it was a pleasant surprise when the game started dropping names from Lovecraft. These documents you can read are also fully voiced, which was entertaining.

Alone in the Dark only takes a few hours to beat, and it definitely shows its age, but it was fun to see such an early example of survival horror.

Speaking of which, don’t forget you can win survival horror games and other great prizes in this year’s contest just by sharing your thoughts on games like Alone in the Dark! Check out the contest rules for more information.

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