13 Horror Games That Need a Remake
Ted Hentschke
|
10: Dark Seed
I struggled to decide if I should include this on the list or the similarly styled Harvester released a year after Dark Seed 2. I ended up going with Dark Seed because I have an inherent distaste for smug self-satisfaction, and Harvester is so smug that it’s just one bad hairpiece away from asking a sitting president for his birth certificate. The Dark Seed saga is split into two parts. This was an era where characters were voice-acted by developers and motion captured by their immediate family so Mike Dawson just said fuck it and cut out the middle man, making himself the protagonist. The premise was kind of clever, as Dawson’s adventure saw him flipping between the real and “dark” worlds. Objects in one would often have a counterpart that would be likewise affected. The environments and characters in the dark world were the product of legendary horror artist H.R. Giger, which alone is enough to make the game a classic. Overall the puzzles are a bit nonsensical at times, but as far as adventure game moon logic goes, it’s no Phantasmagoria.
Then Dark Seed 2 comes along and treats the franchise poorly. The developers created the game as a christening of the S.S. Logic’s maiden voyage in a heading towards Alpha Centauri, in hopes of setting up a new society free from the constraints of human concepts of sense. Though no longer a developer on the project, Mike Dawson is still the protagonist. They do not treat him well. His new voice actor seems to be a man doing a 90’s style joke about what a computer game developer starring in his own game would sound like. Mike Dawson is such a pussy that he lives with his mom and is afraid to open the closet because when he was a child, he thought there were monsters in it. He is so whipped that his sole motivation is solving the murder of a woman who very explicitly slept with everyone in the town but him. He is such a massive bitch that after using an alien magnet gun to win at ring toss at a carnival, he tries to give the prize teddy bear back. Dark Seed needs a new installment, if only to return Mr. Dawson a shred of his dignity.
9: Bad Mojo
Originally I was going to fill this slot with Hunter: The Reckoning, but seeing as how I refused to include Zombies Ate My Neighbors for it being technically not horror, it felt dishonest to let what was clearly a party-action game on the list. So down I went into the trenches of weird, and from the deep troughs of hipster consensus known as my friends, they came up with Bad Mojo. I was afraid of including too many adventure games on the list for the fear of sounding like a person that would make a list of 90’s adventure games he likes, but Bad Mojo stands out amongst its contemporaries. You play as a man turned into a cockroach and must avoid dangers like spiders, mice, cats, and pilot lights in order to return to your body and burn down your home. The whole game takes place in the bar you work at and sees you going from room to room trying to solve puzzles in a timely manner.
Seeing as how you are a cockroach and do not possess pants with which to hold 6 different classes of assault rifle and 4 different rocket launchers, there is no inventory in the game. Rather, puzzles are solved intuitively and on the level, a lesson that wasn’t taken seriously until Telltale Games noticed no one likes being forced to restart a game because they forgot to give a rat some cheese in the opening cutscene. Bizarre premise, disturbing visuals, and innovative gameplay make this esoteric entry very compelling.
8: Call of Cthulhu: Dark Corners of the Earth
Combining the pants-shitting run away and lock doors tension of Amnesia with a minimalist HUD and realistic shooter mechanics, Call of Cthulhu: Dark Corners of the Earth is the kind of horror game that’s often dreamed about and rarely realized. It seems that not even a major developer with the backing of Bethesda can survive making an innovative horror game that marries combat and stealth in a Lovecraftian setting so I guess half a million now abandoned Kickstarter projects aren’t really at fault after all. Published at a time when iron sights were just being introduced, the shooter landscape was moving from the more bombastic Half-Life 2 and Doom 3 era into the modern brand of more reality-focused shooters.
Dark Corners of the Earth was perfectly positioned at the time to build on this trend, creating a more realistic damage system where individual limbs would take damage and require specific kinds of treatment (bandages for cuts, splints for breaks) to heal. There was no active HUD, and ammo had to be kept track of in the inventory. Guns could be fired from the hip but required stationary aimed firing for full effect. Tense chase sequences and a door locking mechanic that smacked of Amnesia before Amnesia existed gave the game some uniquely frightening and exhilarating moments. Unfortunately, the game suffered from a confusing ending and many unresolved bugs due to the developers shutting down soon after the game’s release. Hopefully some new developers will hear this game’s distant and dreamlike call, summoning this elder spawn to earth once more. For remember, that which scares may never truly die, when on Steam we may still eternally buy.
Categorized:Horror Gaming News
