Flash of lightning! Rumble of thunder! Assorted skeleton and pumpkin noises! Dormant since Halloween 2020, the GamEir Halloween Recommendations Article has risen from the grave to haunt your backlogs!
The ghouls and freaks of GamEir have made a real Monster Mash of games for our loyal readers to try this season (disloyal readers are welcome too) so roll up for an SEO-approved carnival of terrors!
NIALL
After my recent disappointing review of the Until Dawn remake my fellow writers at GamEir have recommended I try out the original game. While I may take a sabbatical from the Dawn universe for now, I have no shortage of horrific treats to sample at the moment around Halloween. I’m hoping to use this season to finally check out the acclaimed Resident Evil 2 Remake and the Dead Space re-do, both courtesy of Playstation Plus. The Playstation’s new golden boy Astro Bot will provide some Halloween fun when I revisit the haunted house themed levels, worth it for the cute-as all-hell Bot version of Pyramid Head alone!
Though not a horror title, I’ll also be revisiting Batman: Arkham Knight. The finale of the Arkham trilogy, Knight takes place on Halloween as Batman’s spookiest foe the Scarecrow has taken Gotham hostage. Batmanning around the city with the wonderful seasonal vibes is a great way for the more timid to digitally enjoy the season and enemies such as Man-Bat, Professor Pyg and the Scarecrow are genuinely creepy and unsettling enough to make for a fantastic horror-lite experience. The game still looks incredible and with the new Pattinson suit you can recreate that film’s great Halloween opening for yourself.
LEWIS
Playing a horror game is usually a solo experience. The terror rising through your body, anxiety filling you up as you slowly creep through the halls of whatever ghost house you’ve chosen to explore that night (or day if you’re scared.) Getting to share that experience with a friend in real-time is a fantastic treat to enjoy and The Outlast Trials provides just that.
Running through a series of manmade murder mazes, you and [up to] three friends navigate your way through underground labyrinths contained in warehouses lined with booby traps, mentally unstable patients who sole order is to hurt you and the “prime”, a big bad son of a bitch who hunts you down throughout the entirety of the trial.
At first, the trials are pressure inducing and challenging but after a few hours, some upgrades and grandfathered knowledge of the map layouts. A ninety minute skirmish can be trimmed down to twenty minutes but it’s the random contents that keeps the scares fresh. A random patient who has snuck around the map behind your back and hidden themselves in a locker or barrel just to jumpscare you as you run for your goal. A door with a trigger attached leading to a pickaxe to the chest if you run through a door without paying attention. Or the random “players” who appear in the map. They look like your friends and have the same names bar a typo in the spelling. A combination of these as they pop in and out of each map keep the screams coming down the headset and the laughs between friends in between frights constant.
Solo horror is great don’t get me wrong but team horror is a whole other level of fun and you know what they say, “Scream work, makes the dream work”.
GRAHAM
Eldritch horror, it is perhaps one of the darkest and most intense subgenres within horror. Within gaming it can be utilised to tremendous effect. When it comes to Soulsborne games it is a beast you must master.
I am an absolute scaredy cat. I can just barely handle Resident Evil games, and that’s only because I play the titles that give you a lot of guns at certain points. With Soulsborne titles I’ve had a love/hate relationship with them. I love the lore, I hate the aesthetic. It’s always so unnerving and grimy and the monsters that inhabit these many worlds are incredibly memorable. My fear has kept me away from them for so many years. That was until I played and finished Sekiro. It had an advantage the rest of the titles did not have. It was a love letter to Tenchu.
So, after finally sheathing my blade with Sekiro, I prepare myself and headed into The Lands Between. I became a Tarnished and I wanted to become an Elden Lord. What I saw there will haunt me, but it will stay with me because of the absolute horrors within. There were demi-gods devoured by monstrous serpents. There were undead dragons that rained lightning upon me. Worst of all, for me at least, there insectoid devotees to an Eldritch god of rot. These things genuinely made my skin crawl when I saw them. Every aspect of Elden Ring was unnerving, stupefying and treacherous. I loved it, but I was terrified.
Thankfully, giving me a blade gave me what I needed to conquer The Lands Between. With my journey in The Lands Between ended I have decided I will pick up other Soulsborne titles, because this kind of horror now fascinates me.
Aaaagh! Well that was a terrifying Halloween feature, so we at GamEir hope you have a nice time unwinding with some videogames after braving such an ordeal!
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