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PAX West 2024 has come to an end, but spooky season is just around the corner--or it's already kicked off for the diehards. I love horror games more than any other genre, and Seattle's annual gaming expo hosted several interesting upcoming horror games I jumped into over the holiday weekend.
While some of these won't be out in time for Halloween this year, I wanted to flag them all as games to look out for in the future. From open-world zombie games to metafiction visual novels and PS1-style scares, here are 10 horror games I played at PAX and what you should know about them.
Slay The Princess has been on my list of personal shames for a while, as I've heard it's great but hadn't played it myself yet. With The Pristine Cut coming out and bringing what the developers called 30% more story content, including a new ending, it was time I finally caught up, and I'm glad I did.
The visual novel has a Stanley Parable-like premise, in which a narrator tells you to enter a creepy, isolated cabin, and kill an imprisoned princess before she is able to speak to you. From there, the game seems to account for seemingly any permutation you try. What if you don't enter the cabin? What if you do, but you leave the knife outside, or drop the knife when she asks you to, or you clutch it tightly but listen to her side of the argument?
I can see this one getting into some fascinating philosophical arenas while also being a fun unraveling of game design and storytelling. Slay The Princess - The Pristine Cut comes to consoles and PC this fall.
For many months after Slitterhead debuted its first trailer, players expected a Silent Hill-like experience, with all the tropes and appeal of a classic survival-horror game. But a recent gameplay trailer revealed this isn't actually the case. Instead, Slitterhead is an action game in a horror wrapper. In it, players take on the role of an entity seeking to destroy the titular monster, and as a means to this end, the entity can embody anyone in the game.
It's quite like Watch Dogs: Legion's central feature, or to put it more accurately, Driver: San Francisco. In third-person combat, you'll chain attacks and body-swap frequently as a way to stay alive. It's an interesting mechanic in a semi-open-world setting reminiscent of Yakuza.
Slitterhead is coming to PC, PlayStation, and Xbox platforms on November 8.
I have never grown tired--and likely will never grow tired--of zombie games. When I heard about a new one that's set in medieval Europe, I was invested right away. DayZ by candlelight? Count me in. The end result is effectively that, though it's worth mentioning what I played is a pre-alpha build, so it was essentially just a limited playground that tried to capture the eventual game's mood.
The survival genre's usual mechanics were there, like staying well-fed, healthy, and energized, and a rep for the game told me the plan is to add a crafting system in the future too. My favorite little detail, however, is the physics of the game. Running barefoot through a muddy village, dodging a half-dozen undead, I sought to hurdle a short fence, but I biffed it, clipped my shins, and tumbled over the structure. Getting up, I had to sprint away to give myself breathing room, and then I realized I'd dropped my pitchfork in the tumble. Oops. That took some time to recover, but it's these sort of emergent moments that make games like God Save Birmingham so much fun, and I'm looking forward to the full experience here too.
God Save Birmingham will debut first on PC, but there's no release date yet.
Probably the darkest game on this list, Mouthwashing's story actually opens with an attempted suicide, and only seems to get darker from there. Set seemingly in the not-too-distant future, you play a character who works for a space-faring delivery company--think FedEx on a spaceship--when one day the captain decides to take his own life, and those of everyone on board. He isn't successful, but he leaves himself badly injured and his crew stranded on a broken-down ship in the middle of nothing.
Solving puzzles and interacting with other characters, I started to uncover more about the macabre world, but I'll let those be future surprises for you, and near-future bad dreams for me.
Mouthwashing is coming first to PC.
Retro-style survival-horror games are very in right now, but there's some divide over whether a game is seeking to feel like a PS2 horror game, like Silent Hill 2, or a PS1 horror game, like the original Silent Hill. Heartworm is going for the latter, and it's nailing it, best I can tell so far. The atmosphere is quite thick, with a soundtrack from one of the game's developers who, to my surprise, doesn't have a music background. You'd never know; it's so good.
After playing two different demos this summer--the first was at Summer Game Fest--I'm eager to play the rest of the game, even as I know some of the game's puzzles will stump me just like they did when I was a kid.
Heartworm is bound for PC at launch in 2025.
Full-motion video (FMV) games had their time in the sun long ago, and recent attempts haven't tended to fare well, but Ghosts puts a clever spin on the format by blending a live-action horror game with traditional first-person gameplay. In it, you play a character from a long-running ghost-hunting reality show. Now in its 10th season and without much in the way of excitement happening in the first nine seasons, the cast and dwindling audience don't expect much to occur.
But that wouldn't make much of a game, would it? Naturally, on this night, things do go bump in the night. The live-action elements are always running in the background too, so depending on how you play, you may see different parts of the story in different playthroughs. With a script from the writer of 2020's viral horror movie, Host, this curious blend of live-action and video game visuals may have found the right ingredients for a novel horror experience.
Ghosts will launch on PC, Xbox, PlayStation, and Switch, though it's without a release date.
The RetroRealms games were announced a few weeks ago, but in my demo with the team behind these retro horror platformers, I learned two very interesting details. For one, the games are made by WayForward, which is quickly obvious when you play, as the game is mechanically very tight. Speedrunners are going to love these.
For me, the more exciting part is that Boss Team Games is treating RetroRealms like a horror museum, with a first-person hub world that lets you explore virtual props from the games inspired by their movies or shows. At the very least, two more horror properties are coming to the RetroRealms package in the future, with their arcade cabinets to be set next to others in the hub level.
Boss Team isn't ready to reveal what those properties are yet--my guess: Saw and A Nightmare on Elm Street--but I was told if these first four sell well, the plan is just to keep adding more licensed horror games to the RetroRealms universe, perhaps even expanding beyond horror eventually.
RetroRealms Halloween and Ash vs. Evil Dead are due out on October 18 for PC, Switch, Xbox, and PS5.
I've loved the Little Nightmares games since they first arrived, but I admit I was a bit nervous about the next one, Little Nightmares 3, because the development team has shifted away from Tarsier to Supermassive. Obviously, Supermassive is well-versed in horror itself, having developed horror games exclusively for the last several years. But could it be as dark and twisted as Tarsier made this series seem in the past? Trailers left me skeptical.
After my hands-on demo through what was called the candy factory, I'm not worried anymore. It does seem to be just as grotesque and nightmarish as ever, with unnerving audio design bringing to life a vile new enemy I won't spoil here, and the addition of two-player co-op makes it all feel like a foreboding shared hallucination. I expect if you liked the other games in the series and are on board to play it in co-op (or with an AI companion), you're going to enjoy this one, too.
Little Nightmares 3 is coming to PC, Xbox, Switch, and PS5 in 2025.
Omut is an 8-bit horror-themed boss-rush game and, as it turns out, I am awful at it. The brutal game is intent on making players suffer, and without a controller to use and being a player typically averse to games in which the point is getting beaten repeatedly, I drowned in death screens during my hands-on time at PAX.
However, for players looking to master its unforgiving systems, it has a lot of promise. The creepy yet minimalist vibe is great, and I'd be happy to watch someone else overcome its monstrous bosses so I could take in the story. Its title means "whirlpool," or "spiral," and in an Alan Wake 2 sort of way, I get it. Players are meant to fall down this rabbit hole and see if they can dig themselves out of it. I can't, but maybe you can.
Omut is coming to PC but has no release date yet.
For the last entry on this pre-Halloween round-up, I'm highlighting a game that is obviously not truly a horror game--and therefore it didn't as the title suggests, "creep me out." However, its premise, Animal Crossing but playfully spooky, is worth an honorable mention. The game's presentation looks a lot like Nintendo's life-sim powerhouse, only everything is shaded in purples and pinks, giving it a sort of Monster High aesthetic.
In a short demo, I got to complete crafting quests, decorate my neighborhood, and meet some other townsfolk. It seems to scratch all the usual itches of the genre, only with cutesy vampirism at its core. Lots of fans of this genre are always looking for the next good game in it, and I think this could be it.
