Operation Backlog Completion 2026

Celebrating All Things Spooky: The Children of Clay

 Celebrating All Things Spooky, Reviews, Video games  5 Responses »  Tagged with:
Oct 172025
 

Today we’re going to talk about The Children of Clay, a very short horror adventure game that came out earlier this year.

You play an archaeologist studying a strange artifact. After a brief bit of text to set up the premise, you’re given control to start investigating.

You have a magnifying glass, a collection of reference books, and a few other tools. With only a bit of guidance, it does a good job of making you feel like a detective. To use the reference books, for example, you have to type in the key word you want to look up.

It also uses stop motion animation, which is interesting.

Now, when I say it’s very short, I mean it takes less then 15 minutes to complete. However, it packs an impressively creepy atmosphere into those 15 minutes. Without being a truly Lovecraftian game, it captured that sort of essence of investigating the unknown. I’d love to see what this developer could do with a full-length horror game.

The Children of Clay is short, free, and creepy. It’s the perfect game to check out this October.

Celebrating All Things Spooky: ZENO

 Celebrating All Things Spooky, Video games  9 Responses »  Tagged with: ,
Oct 132025
 

Earlier this year, I learned about a short horror game called ZENO, so I decided to play it this October!

(I mistakenly thought it was an RPG because of the way it’s described, but it’s really more of a horror adventure game. It was just made with RPG Maker.)

Two young men wake up together in a mysterious facility, with no memory of who they are or how they got there. The door is locked and won’t open until they’ve been handcuffed to each other, after which point they leave and find files telling them who they are – and one of them is a genius psychiatrist while the other is a homicidal maniac.

They have to work together to get out by solving puzzles to unlock each new floor of the facility.

There are threats in the facility, as well, so from time to time you’ll be chased and need to run from screen to screen until you lose your pursuer.

While not excessively dark, the story deals with horror themes like murder and cannibalism. It has some interesting twists and quite a few endings. After I finished the game with the normal endings, I used a guide to get the true ending (although there are still several endings I didn’t seek out).

My one criticism of Zeno was going to be the English translation, since a lot of lines were awkward or used abbreviations (“sth” for “something” was a common one, but a character responding to a very serious revelation with “I C” made me laugh out loud), but after finishing it I learned that in the time since I downloaded it, a newly proofread version was made available. That’ll teach me not to download a game months ahead of time and not check the page again before playing it! I haven’t tried the proofread version, but it should be an improvement.

Anyway, ZENO is an enjoyable short horror game that I was already going to recommend playing despite the translation issues, so now I’m even more confident in my recommendation. It seems there are also some side games, so I may check those out sometime as well.

Celebrating All Things Spooky: Elevator Hitch

 Video games  8 Responses »  Tagged with:
Oct 102025
 

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.

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