Indie horror's "the weirder, the better" approach is effortlessly pulling focus from triple A games this summer – but why?
Jun. 17, 2024Opinion | The biggest horror games of Summer Game Fest have proven to me that indies still run this scene
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To say that I wasn’t expecting much in the vein of horror games atSummer Game Festis putting it very mildly. The items on my list ofSGF horror predictionssaw varying degrees of success – I calledSlitterheadand the firstAlan Wake 2 DLCshowing face, but I should have known better than to jinx my Resident Evil hopes and dreams by typing them into existence.
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As if it needed to be said,we owe much of the current horror boom to indie game devs. Ever since the days of Slender: The Eight Pages or Hotel 626, indie developers have known that you don’t need a huge budget to scare huge swathes of people. Creativity, a low price tag, and a heavy dose of true-blue weirdness are more than enough to charm me into trying out your game these days, but you know what helps even more? The internet.
If you make a bitesize horror game that has the potential to go viral, as well as a unique little gameplay quirk that people can react to differently, you’ve already done more than half the work. Think of flash player browser games like Hotel 626, for example, that could only be accessed between 6pm and 6am. It’s not 2008 anymore, and the game is sadly no more, but Hotel 626 is one of the first games I remember going to school and hearing every single person talking about.
Indie horror fans are constantly looking for shareable ways to experience horror.
The same novelty factor can be said of the most successful modern indies, and Blumhouse Games understands that assignment. Balls to the wall oddity also happens to be something you don’t often see coming from the AAA titans. The reason? It’s difficult to say with certainty, but it certainly doesn’t hurt that a great many indie games are able to capture very specific brands ofweirdness, and that weirdness is so often drawn from unapologetic creative freedom – the ability to throw everything behind very particular niches.
You need only look at some of the horror demos doled out during last week’sSteam Next Festto see what I’m talking about.GreenColdBodyis a first-person horror game that “can only be played 2.5 times'';Tormentureis a pixelated horror puzzler where the monsters you encounter can interfere with the game itself;Grunnis an unnerving farming sim featuring ominous little garden gnomes, honing in on a disturbing atmospheric presence rather than concerning itself with ray-tracing or photorealistic human faces. With such a breadth of subgenres and gameplay quirks on offer, it’s unsurprising that blockbuster games and their current survival-horror-only trends are failing to grab me right now.
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I’ll probably still pick up Silent Hill 2 later this year, and truth be told, Iamstill keeping a candle lit in the name of Resident Evil 9. But until the big wigs can give me what I want, it’s good to know that there’s no shortage of excellent indie horror games skulking about on the horizon to keep me well and truly distracted for the foreseeable future.
There are so manyupcoming horror gamesto keep track of, but here are our top ones to watch.
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