Update: A24 has confirmed on social media via a Backrooms film account that it "makes no claim of ownership over the yellow wallpaper, the original post referencing it, or any of the community works that have since been built around it." And explains that the takedown was an automated claim and "we immediately began the process to reverse it and reinstate the listings."

Kane Parsons' The Backrooms film was a huge success, which wasn't surprising given his history with self-made backrooms projects released on YouTube. But even so, it was fantastic to see a story which was born on the internet and celebrated by so many indie games get its moment in the limelight. Unfortunately, A24 is taking a hammer to all that good grace.

First reported by Reddit user GnarlyNet, A24 has apparently been going around and requesting takedowns of backrooms-inspired artwork, in this case a wallpaper pattern. A24 did release a special edition wallpaper for fans to buy which matched that inside the backrooms to celebrate the film release, but the problem is that much of the artwork being taken down is inspired by the original backrooms image that appeared on the internet years ago, before the film.

Creators, beware: A24 requested that my backrooms-inspired artwork be taken down from r/backrooms

"It is a recreation of the pattern from the well-known 2019 image who started the whole backrooms lore," GnarlyNet explains. "I find it disappointing to see a company attempt to claim such a broad connection to a concept that has been developed, shared, and loved by an online community for years. I would have hoped that A24 would celebrate that creative history rather than take action against independent artists who were, just like them, inspired by it.

"I respect the rights attached to any specific film adaptation, but those rights should not be treated as ownership of the entire Backrooms concept, its broader visual language, or the community lore surrounding it. I am sharing this because I think it raises an important question about what happens when large companies adapt community-created internet culture."

Apparently, the specific complaint was submitted "on behalf of 'A24 Films LLC'" but GnarlyNet cannot "independently confirm who submitted the complaint" beyond what information Redbubble provided them.

Regardless of the reason why the artwork has been taken down, John Backrooms himself, Kane Parsons has stepped in and confirmed that he will be looking into the matter: "I'm looking into this. Should not be happening." He said in reply to the initial Reddit post.

I very much hope this is an unfortunate misunderstanding. The backrooms has always been a community-led project which has massively benefited from all the numerous and varied contributions from fans. It would be a shame for a big company to step in and tread all over that tradition.

If you so much as flicked through a PC gaming magazine in the mid '90s, you'll probably recognise the name Ecstatica. Created by Londoner Andrew Spencer and published by Psygnosis, the series spawned two instalments: the first released in 1994 and is a medieval-themed survival horror. The second arrived in 1997, and while it's very distinctly an Ecstatica game by dint of its art style, it dialed back the horror elements quite a bit.

That art style is pretty crucial: instead of polygonal character models, Ecstatica's engine used ellipsoids, which are, well, roundish. Bulbous even. Rather than paraphrase the formula-ridden Wikipedia page for ellipsoids, it's probably easier just to show you this:

It's a pretty distinctive art style, and famously, Andrew Spencer wrote the engine himself from scratch. The ellipsoids are real as well: other games that have a similar art style, like Little Big Adventure for instance, implement Gouraud shading to create the effect of softness where there's actually a hard angle.

As Spencer told Next Generation in 1996: "The main advantage is the organic-looking characters. Triangles tend to make hard, robotic-looking figures, whereas ellipsoids can be used to create more rounded, human alternatives. Ellipsoids can also be more efficient because you can make a much better looking character out of fewer shapes."

I doubt many people would describe Ecstatica's characters as "organic-looking" from the vantage point of 2026, but I do remember being blown away by the look of these games in static magazine screenshots. Compared to, say, Alone in the Dark, it looked decidedly like a step up, even if in reality it was a step sideways.

I'm sure it's easy to find Ecstatica and its sequel online, but they've not been commercially available for decades. That's about to change: they're among a new round of SNEG reissues, which also includes the 2001 Dungeons & Dragons RPG Pool of Radiance: Ruins of Myth Drannor, 1997 3D action game Dark Earth, 2001 turn-based strategy Warlords 4, and 1998 military tactics sim Soldiers at War.

Obviously, as with the vast majority of early '90s PC horror, Ecstatica will probably feel stiff and unmanageable to most modern players. Like Resident Evil and Alone in the Dark, both instalments use tank controls, and their 3D worlds are viewed from fixed camera perspectives. Both also lean on puzzle solving and amusing instant death scenarios. Still, I reckon the occasional torment is worth it just to see the still-gorgeous ellipsoid art in motion.

Ecstatica and Ecstatica 2 will come to Steam and GOG later this year. For more, check out Richard Cobbett on the original Ecstatica.

If you've forgotten Silent Hill: Downpour it was the western-developed Silent Hill that went semi-open world and had a bunch of sidequests in it, but was still a bit too busy trying to retell Silent Hill 2 only with the villain in a different hat. It wasn't a disaster, but to say "at least it wasn't Silent Hill: Homecoming or the arcade game" is to damn it with such faint praise you may as well be whispering from the other side of the street.

Still, those sidequests were tasty. Ignore the main plot about a prison escapee being chased by embodiments of his own guilt—wow, a man in prison has a dark past, what a shocking development—and you could explore a town full of ghost stories and little mysteries. The one where you follow color-coded ribbons to find out what happened to a missing girl was a particular favorite, a reminder that Silent Hill can still be properly haunting when it tries.

Good luck trying to play it today, though. Downpour came out on the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 and absolutely nothing else, which means your best bet is probably to emulate it in RPCS3. Or to wait for a PC native port to come along, and what's that? Oh, it's a trailer for a PC native port someone's been chipping away at.

Indie_RU's port isn't just a way to play Downpour on PC with an uncapped framerate and higher resolutions, nice as that always is. It's also restoring cut content, letting us wield extra weapons like the Bogeyman's hammer and bringing back deleted cutscenes, notes, dialogue, and entire sidequests. It's also restored a boss battle seen in an early trailer where you fight the "Monocle Man" who was reduced to a cameo in the finished game.

Apparently we can expect the finished product around September/October, which is also when we're expecting Silent Hill: Townfall, Screen Burn Interactive's Scottish take on the series. I've got my fingers crossed that's going to push the series in an interesting direction, because all those arena battles in Silent Hill F weren't really my cup of rusty tea with mud in it, or whatever they drink in Silent Hill.

I've developed a bit of a reputation among my coworkers for loving niche, lo-fi indie games that make you feel bad and gross and weird on the inside. I'm flattered to stand out in such a way, but I also don't ever want to be typecast. Anyway, Brno Transit is a game about being trapped underground with your nasty, weirdly sexual boss and neurotic coworkers as reality disintegrates around you.

I loved developer Spytihněv's previous game, the Soviet boomer shooter Hrot, so I've been eagerly awaiting his next project. Much like fellow FPS designer David Szymanski (Dusk, Iron Lung), Spytihněv zigged rather than zagging, following up Hrot with a short narrative horror game rather than another shooter.

You're a novice train conductor learning the ropes under Brno, the second city of the Czech Republic. It's "the dampest subway east of anything that matters," according to Spytihněv, and I think it helps set the tone out of the gate to know that Brno does not have a subway system in real life.

What follows is a surreal, scatological (a Spytihněv signature), and homoerotic (that's new!) delve into guys being dudes on the job. For me, it called to mind Szymanski's Iron Lung (but more fleshy, sexual, and human) or 2024's breakout Mouthwashing (but not as character driven, and somehow even less life-affirming). The controversial Horses also sprang to mind, but with less explicitly harrowing subject matter⁠—and more explicit full-frontal nudity, let's go boys.

Even more than Mouthwashing, which portrays one of the most evil fictional workplaces I've ever seen, Brno Transit captured the feeling of starting a job where you matter so little as to want to die, while the apathy and neglect of your coworkers is somehow even worse than if they actively hated you.

This game runs on surprise, so I'll try to talk around the real zinger moments, but it's one long sequence of "Go here, do this. Why did you do that? Now you have to fix it. Embarrassing." If you've ever talked to a coworker at a shit job and felt like they were a space alien playing a prank on you with how they think and view the world, Brno Transit will speak to you on some level.

Your first day ends with you eating a tainted hot dog that gives you the runs and the voms, sending you scrambling for a bathroom as gurgles and whines fill your headphones. The doorless, exposed toilet in the employee area is indefinitely occupied when you reach it, while the bathroom in the station above is out of order. I don't know if there's another way of finishing this bit, but I had to take the train to another station to find an open commode. I haven't shared this exact stress dream or level of gastrointestinal distress, but it was still incredibly gnarly and relatable in the moment.

You black out and wake up on a dirty floor mattress in the conductors' area, with splotches of feces and a trail of brown footprints trailing backwards from your resting place. Out in the depot, an entire train is covered in crap, and the first order of the day is to hose it off, Powerwash Simulator-style. How could this have all been you?

Events only get stranger and grosser from there, and I was hooked. Brno Transit shares a brown, desolate, hopeless world with the preceding Hrot, despite being set closer to the modern day. It's a new standout of the mundane or on the job horror subgenre. I want these awful subway stations to get love like the Backrooms or Exit 8.

Model trains

Brno Transit is a medley of nastiness punctuated with surreal hilarity, and while much of the humor is front-and-center in the scripted story, one of my favorite moments was emergent: I had to do a double take out of the corner of my eye to notice a passenger randomly hanging off the end of a train as it left the station. The simulated little world of Brno Transit, which exists whether you're paying attention to it or not, is what really takes it to the next level.

Undergirding the scripted story stuff is a continuous simulation of a small subway system with two lines, one counter- and the other clockwise. It feels like zooming into someone's model train set, and does a superb job of evoking a much larger world than what's just in front of you.

A diverse array of NPCs mill about the stations or wander on and off the trains. They have this sense of anonymity and guarded hostility that really nailed the feeling of making eye contact with strangers on the subway⁠. You don't matter to them, don't bother them.

This effect, plus the the shifting and jostling of the train cars, the way the lighting changes as you pass through tunnels, as well as Spytihněv's excellent sound, music, and foley work add up to this uncanny feel of actually riding the subway. I was reminded of how no one's done nighttime better than Thief or Thief 2, even with their aged graphics. These three games are punching well above their weight in art and atmosphere.

You have to ride the train to start, but you quickly take control of your own engine, carefully adjusting your acceleration to avoid hitting stops too late or too early, doing your best to slot seamlessly into the pre-existing schedule of trains constantly running on this loop. It's a simplified approximation of a whole-hog train sim like Densha de Go!

A free ride mode unlocks after completing the story, and I feel like there's all kinds of weirdness left to discover under Brno. At one point in the story, I stumbled into a skull-filled catacomb attached to one of the stations, with unnerving music, a confusing, switchback layout, and a bumbling tourist snapping photos. I thought for sure this was part of the critical path, but it was just there. What other odd shit is waiting for me at all the stops I never explored on the critical path?

Brno Transit would have been an easy recommendation for me at $9 if it was just the standout surreal horror narrative adventure, but the fact that it's built on top of this little model train world truly sets it apart. I love this freaky little game, I love a Spytihněv joint, and I can't wait to see what he does next.

Isla de las Muñecas, the Mexican island that holds the Guinness World Record for largest collection of haunted dolls, served as the inspiration for Where Dolls Hang, a survival horror game where you play a detective searching for people who've gone missing in a particularly cursed location.

"Players must investigate missing person cases by examining bodies, collecting clues, placing evidence markers, and documenting crime scenes with an in-game camera," says developer Steelkrill Studio's press release, "all while surviving the dangers lurking within the woods."

One way those clues are found is via VHS tapes, which you can take back to your safehouse to watch. And that's where you can also watch public domain horror movies like Night of the Living Dead, if you want to take a busman's holiday from the horror of the game.

When Night of the Living Dead was released in 1968, US copyright law required a visible copyright notice. But though the movie had a copyright notice under its original title, when it was called Night of the Flesh Eaters, it was left off the screen when the title was changed to Night of the Living Dead before release. That's why it's in the public domain, and why you can freely download it from the Internet Archive or add it to your videogame.

I'm curious what other public domain horror movies will be included in Where Dolls Hang. There are plenty to choose from. Manos: The Hand of Fate, Plan 9 From Outer Space, The Screaming Skull, Maniac, The Brain That Wouldn't Die, Roger Corman's Little Shop of Horrors and The Wasp Woman, maybe White Zombie to stick with the theme?

Where Dolls Hang is scheduled for release this year. Check out its Steam page for more information.

Ahead of Carcass Clad's reveal at last month's PC Gaming Show, I had the chance to speak to Wrong Organ devs Jeffrey Tomec and Dave van Egdom about the studio's follow-up to its breakout hit, Mouthwashing. Carcass Clad is a very different sort of game, but with familiar themes and atmosphere. The bulk of our conversation, though, was about why the studio pivoted to co-op multiplayer, and how it feels to play.

It's a pretty warmed-over bias these days to assume any studio swapping from single to multiplayer is "selling out" in some way, but Tomec and van Egdom told me they hadn't even set out to make a co-op game initially⁠—Wrong Organ was just following the path of least resistance to the tank game it wanted to make.

"There was quite a bit of hesitation, but it also wasn't even the original premise for the game," Tomec said of the switch to co-op. "We had a cool idea for a tank game, and it was going to be a tank game where you control three people at once. Then we were like, 'That seems like it could just be a co-op game.' And now it's a co-op game."

"[The switch to co-op] happened very early in development," said van Egdom. "I think we first started talking about 'Tank Game,' as we refer to it, [around] July 2024. We did the first ideation stuff, and then it was only like three months later that Jeff pitched making it a co-op thing instead."

Tomec explained that, if the goal of Mouthwashing was to support its excellent script as much as possible through gameplay and visuals, the driving vision of Carcass Clad is to recreate the frantic, claustrophobic scenes from tank movies as emergent gameplay. Wrong Organ wants players to keep stumbling into scenes like the scripted one in Carcass Clad's reveal trailer.

"Our players have probably made a bit of a mistake in the trailer by getting jumped by an enemy tank around a corner, but we expect players in reality tend to make those kinds of mistakes pretty often," said Tomec. "It can be very stressful and very hard to see with how cramped the vehicle is, so things tend to find a way to sneak up on you."

Specialization

Each player has a specific, narrow role in how they contribute to the tank's success, with a team consisting of a driver, a gunner, and a commander. The first two are fairly self-explanatory, but both of those more hands-on play styles will be hampered by a lack of visibility and information, with the cramped, dark tank interior only providing narrow viewports to see outside.

Tomec told me that all three roles will be able to open a hatch and see outside the vehicle, but you don't want to do that during a fight. Hell, it might be a bad idea to do that when you're not actively fighting, lest somebody get the drop on you. "Up with miniskirts" indeed.

From our conversation and Carcass Clad's screenshots, drivers will be almost blind when piloting the vehicle⁠—they can't get a better view and move at the same time⁠—while it sounds like gunners will be limited to a super zoomed-in, scoped view unless they're poking their heads out. I'm picturing something like an FPS sniper who can't leave their aim-down-sights mode. That's where the third role comes in.

The commander gets the most complete set of information, but no direct control of the tank's function⁠—Tomec called it "the man in the chair fantasy"—and the core challenge of Carcass Clad seems to be the commander providing clear instruction and context to the other two, and them acting on it as effectively as possible.

"Being in a tank really just means you can't see shit around you," said van Egdom. "[Commanders] have access to a periscope, they can range find, they can do all of those things, make callouts, send drawings of the map and which route to take to their fellow crewmates, etc."

Tomec said Wrong Organ's goal is to "have everyone feel empowered in their own way, and really disempowered in their own way, where you feel like you're relying on each other, but also don't feel like it's just your commander yelling at you to do stuff."

Friendsweat

Tomec said that Wrong Organ took equal inspiration from military simulation games and the burgeoning "friendslop" genre of co-op multiplayer, but the final result diverges from both. Even though the co-op climbing game Peak, for instance, can have its moments of challenge and heartbreak, Carcass Clad sounds like it's in a completely different ballpark.

"We almost call ourselves a friendsweat game, if we had had to put a genre label on it," Tomec said. "We're definitely not quite at Peak, but we're not trying to make Arma either." He wants Carcass Clad to have a lot of what milsim players appreciate about the genre⁠—attention to detail, tactility, plus a high level of challenge and consequence⁠—but in a more fantastical setting divorced from high playercount PvP.

"My analogous example would be Helldivers," said Tomec. "The way that Helldivers explores a ton of military simulator mechanics in a framework that's very far from a milsim, and we'd like to be almost a tank equivalent of that."

I was very curious about those titular carcass clad tanks, and Tomec told me that this was largely something only enemy vehicles would be taking advantage of, mostly as a sort of improvised armor we'll have to chew through before damaging the tank itself. Having only enemy tanks be carcass clad was partially a practical concern with the game's perspective⁠—we won't be seeing the outside of the tank very much⁠—but we'll still have some ways of getting weird with it.

"You might find yourself with some weird shit inside the tank, and some of that weird, carcassy horror entering your vehicle," said Tomec. "But from a gameplay layer, armoring yourself is not much of a focus, it's most of the enemies doing it."

Mouthwashing was a game that left me so stressed and depressed, I had to go lie down for awhile afterward⁠—I had a similar experience reading the transcript of a recent PlayStation investor meeting. It sounds like Carcass Clad will evoke similar feelings in an actionized, co-op, run-based format. But there will be some quiet time too. Maybe.

"You will have some breaks. A run isn't just sitting there for two hours, constantly moving," said van Egdom. "There's a kind of Left 4 Dead run structure, where you'll have safe rooms in between, and in safe rooms you're very likely to be able to leave the tank.

"I say 'likely', because this is just where we're at in development. We could change fucking everything, man. We're going to do what we have to to make the tank cool. That's the baseline."

After blowing the doors down with narrative horror game Mouthwashing, developer Wrong Organ decided to zig instead of zag: Its next project is Carcass Clad, a roguelike co-op tank simulator in a city where things have gone deeply wrong. But while developer Jeffrey Tomec told me that scripted narrative is on the "back burner for sure" this time, it sounds like Wrong Organ is trying to find a balance for its love of story and worldbuilding.

"We're looking into the best way to do it, but the reality is, every one of our games is made from a core [idea]," said Tomec. "Mouthwashing was, how do we make the script into a video game? Everything in this game comes back to the tank, and how you feel in it, and that is supposed to express something."

Tomec referenced a clash that's burned me in games like Destiny, Redfall, and even the co-op mode of System Shock 2: Players are in a different headspace when playing multiplayer, and that can leave your attempts at storytelling ignored, or worse, obnoxiously intrusive.

"We haven't fully discovered exactly how much we can push it," Tomec said of injecting more overt narrative into Carcass Clad. "Our temptation is always to go and start putting that in our games, and I think we're gonna have to see how much of that fits in here before we start. We strongly believe that narrative shouldn't feel forced.

"You need to understand where someone wants to read, where that's going to add to someone's experience, and where it's going to be you spitting stuff onto the page. Because we're a writing company, we put writing in our games."

But even in the scenario where Carcass Clad winds up almost pure gameplay with minimal script, it sounds like the team has a lot of pent up story and world building it's dying to share. For starters, Tomec explicitly told me that this is an entirely separate setting from that of Mouthwashing. These World War 2-looking tank battles aren't part of the Tulpar crew's distant past or something.

"This world also isn't new to us as a studio," said Tomec. "It's new to anything we've shipped to the public, but we've been talking about the setting for a while. We have stories we may want to tell in this universe. There's a lot more than maybe is going to actually come across in the experience.

"I have the write-up where that explains stuff that might happen story-wise in either this game or the setting outside of the playable experience. But it's always a question of like, is this game actually the effective way to deliver a lot of that, or is that maybe going to be another game, or are we going to decide that we actually hate this setting and ditch it the second this game comes out? There is a lot of thought that's gone into the setting and story."

You can already catch a glimpse of that in Carcass Clad's description on Steam: "The city's saint, long since laid to rest, walks again⁠—gilded and defiled." Sounds messed up and freaky. I expected no less. Carcass Clad does not yet have a release date, but you can wishlist it on Steam.

Ahead of co-op tank sim Carcass Clad's reveal trailer at the PC Gaming Show, I got to speak to Wrong Organ devs Jeffrey Tomec and Dave van Egdom about the studio's upcoming third game. The elephant in the room: Carcass Clad is a huge departure from the studio's breakout hit, Mouthwashing, a singleplayer narrative horror game.

"This game is a statement in some ways, it could seem weird," said Tomec. "We made a story game and you loved it, but now we're doing something [that's] nothing like that, and to an extent, there's a little bit that we definitely don't want to pigeonhole ourselves."

There are definitely commonalities between Mouthwashing and Carcass Clad, the things that Tomec and the others feel are essential to a Wrong Organ game: Themes of dehumanization, innovative deployments of gore and body horror, plus a sense of the mundane gone wrong, a workplace transplanted to an impossible situation. But written narrative is taking more of a backseat.

In addition to wanting to prove something about Wrong Organ, Tomec admitted they also just wanted to mix things up. "Mouthwashing was like, 'God, I wish I was making a shooter right now,'" he joked. But that seems to have come back around.

"We really liked working on Mouthwashing, and I think this deep in the development of any game, [the] grass is greener⁠," said Tomec. "Like, I miss working on Mouthwashing! Now that we've been in this tank⁠—we just got off like, four months of just designing these little components and being like, 'Actually, this gear doesn't rotate this other gear correctly.'"

It sounds like a return to something more narrative-driven isn't out of the question for Wrong Organ in the future, but Tomec thinks they needed to build more capacity and expertise to improve on their own work. "How do you make [Wrong Organ's first game] How Fish is Made better? Well, you make it not 20 minutes long," said Tomec. "That's the easiest explanation. So, we made a two-hour game … But now it's like, what's the natural progression of Mouthwashing?

"Mouthwashing isn't better if it's eight hours. Probably. It's not easy, it's not a direct scale up. How do we fundamentally change the formula to make something that's worth more time to the player than Mouthwashing? And in our eyes, a lot of that is finding a way to get that unique Wrong Organ vibe⁠—our stories and our writing⁠—and to put that into something big, into something that has a real gameplay layer and feels like a super cohesive experience."

That sounds sick as hell, and definitely a game I want to play, but it would also be "a huge undertaking" according to Tomec. "We don't feel ready to fully deliver that right now," he said. "The idea is, we're saying, 'We made the 'story game,' now we make the 'gameplay game,' and then after that we can sit down and decide, are we ready to make the 'gameplay story game?''"

We won't exactly be bereft waiting for that gameplay story game: Carcass Clad, the 'just gameplay' game, looks gnarly as hell. It does not currently have a release date, but you can wishlist the claustrophobic tank sim on Steam.

XOntos, the next game from acclaimed Amnesia horrorsmiths Frictional Games, is delayed—instead of being out later this year as originally planned, the studio said today that it will drop in 2027 instead.

No mention of Grand Theft Auto 6 was made in the delay announcement, although with the second half of 2026 now in full swing and Rockstar's colossus bearing down on the world with increasing speed, I tend to assume that it's at least on the periphery of any game delay into '27. In the case of Ontos, though, Frictional said it simply wants to get it right.

"Ontos is our most ambitious game to date, both in terms of its size and scale, and in the depth and layers of our story and gameplay," the studio wrote on X. "In order to deliver this vision, we have decided to push the release of Ontos to 2027. We look forward to sharing more updates about Ontos, our characters, and our world soon."

Frictional's Amnesia games are spectacularly scary, but also relatively conventional as these things go. Ontos, by contrast, will new more closely to the studio's 2015 release Soma: Frictional said in January that it is not trying to make Ontos "a stressful or scary game in the traditional sense," but that it wants players to "grapple with heavy and thought provoking themes. The goal is to evoke this deep existential terror that stays long after you finish playing."

That sure worked with Soma. The Amnesia games had me screaming, crying, and throwing up in the moment, but more than a decade down the road it's Soma that still makes me sit back in my chair every now and then and think, what the hell. (There were moments of screaming, crying, throwing up in that one too, but they were much fewer and farther-between.) So, yeah, definitely eager for more of that, and if it means waiting until next year, I'm happy to do it.

Microsoft is going through another big 'reset', which is a nice way of saying culling, as it reportedly prepares to cut major games and studios as part of reassessing its videogame investments. But amid all the carnage, Hideo Kojima's OD is apparently unscathed.

According to IGN, a source familiar with Microsoft's plans implied the upcoming horror game remains in the works at Kojima Productions alongside Xbox Publishing. This news comes as Microsoft says it's "taking a fresh look at where we invest so we're focusing on our highest priorities." And honestly, I can't say I'm surprised that OD qualifies as one.

Kojima carries quite a bit of weight around this industry, just ask Geoff Keighley, but OD doesn't just feature his work—acclaimed director Jordan Peele is also reportedly collaborating with Kojima on this one. Add that to its star studded cast which includes the likes of Sophia Lillis, Hunter Schafer, and the late Udo Kier, and you get a game that's considerably harder to axe.

The proof is also in the pudding—this isn't the first time OD has escaped from harm. Almost exactly a year ago today, we saw unfortunately familiar circumstances play out when Microsoft laid off 9,000 employees, cancelling games like Everwild and the Perfect Dark reboot—just one moment in its year of shame. OD survived this as well.

Phil Spencer, former Xbox boss, signed the game, and his new replacement Asha Sharma has since shared her enthusiasm for the project: "I've got great artists and creatives that can pick a great game better than I can, and so I want to give it space, but most importantly, I think it just represents another kind of game." Kojima has previously said (in a classic Kojima way) that he doesn't even view OD as a game, instead being "a movie, but at the same time a new form of media." Sure, why not?

We won't know for sure whether OD is truly in the clear until Microsoft releases a definitive statement on the supposed upcoming layoffs, but if IGN's source is to be believed, OD will once again survive and carry on its already three-year long development.

Point and click horror can be really tricky to pull off, it can lack a sense of agency over your own actions as characters are funneled into certain choices. But it's even harder to do well when the thing you're using to point and click with is your own temperamental phone.

Instead of using a mouse and keyboard or a controller, Unhinged—Netflix's latest horror game from Zach Cregger and David Fincher—requires players to connect their phone and use that instead. It functions as Ava, the protagonist's phone as she calls her friend Claire throughout the game for help, all while running away from some creep covered in blood.

I see the vision with this, and to be fair it certainly makes you feel immersed when you're texting Claire for help or direction, or using its torch to help light the way through the dark hallways of your apartment building after a devastating hurricane takes out the electricity. But that immersion can also backfire.

Why was Claire calling me when the killer was stood a few feet away? More importantly, why the hell didn't Ava put her phone on silent? I actually got so frustrated at this halfway through I went so far as to put my own phone on 'do not disturb' to try and solve the issue. Unhinged is a very short horror game, clocking in at around 30 minutes long, and Claire was lighting up my phone for almost all of that.

Another area where the phone did more harm than good was using it as a mouse to point and click your way through the story. Again, I see the aim with this, to try and make players feel more immersed as if they were actually walking around the semi-abandoned building with nothing but their phone to light their way. But I also found it to be quite a temperamental tool, with accuracy being quite hard to master in some of the QTEs where you have to make a quick escape or reach for something to defend yourself before the man covered in blood finally lunges at you.

It wasn't an unforgivably awful experience, but if you're going to make people use something other than a controller or keyboard then there has to be a better reason than 'it's cool', and it should work just as well if not better.

All of that aside, though, Unhinged was a pleasant point and click horror experience. The setting was suitably creepy, and while there wasn't much suspense that's to be expected from a meager 30-minute horror game.

What carried Unhinged more than anything else, though, was the acting. Zoë Kravitz stars as the protagonist, and then there's Sadie Sink as the well-meaning friend and Troy Baker as the killer. All of their performances were absolutely amazing and did a vastly better job at immersing me in this story than my phone/controller substitute.

So if you have 30 minutes to spare, a Netflix subscription, and are willing to download Netflix's controller app then I'd recommend checking Unhinged out. If it had a longer run time and actually let me use a keyboard and mouse then my praise would likely be higher, but it's still a good horror game with what it had to work with.

Hideki Kamiya cut his teeth on the Resident Evil games, working as a designer on the original and director of Resident Evil 2 before moving on to other things, like Devil May Cry, Viewtiful Joe, Okami, and Bayonetta. Ironically, he's not a big horror guy—he recently expressed a desire for a "non-scary mode" in Resident Evil games—and so understandably is not very interested in returning to the Resident Evil series.

But if he ever did, he would do things very differently. He would make it cozy.

"If I made it, it'd turn into a game where retired Leon goes fishing in the countryside, forages for wild veggies, bakes bread, walks the dog, tends a home garden, drives 50 km to the general store for supplies, invites old buddies over for a barbecue, fixes the neighborhood grandma's oven at her request, sells homemade lemonade at the local festival," Kamiya wrote on X (machine translated) in response to a request for a new game that continues the story of Leon and Claire. "But that'd be cool, right... ?"

I think it would be cool, actually. It's an aspect of videogame action heroes that's not often explored—what do you do when you're not doing this?—and it's also a fun way to introduce the series to newcomers who might not be into the usual zombie survival horror thing.

Besides, if we can have a dating simulator inspired by the Cthulhu Mythos, why not a cozy Resident Evil spinoff?

Despite a history of Twitter trolling, Kamiya does seem earnest about the suggestion. "Capcom, there are a lot of voices out there saying they want something like a [Resident Evil] that's not scary," he wrote in a follow-up tweet. "So if you have some free time, please consider making it... I want to play it too."

I'm not a Resident Evil guy myself, but I think I'd give this one a look, too. And never say never: As announced at The Game Awards 2024, Kamiya is currently working on a sequel to the 2006 Capcom classic Okami at his new Clovers studio. Even if he doesn't want to make the game himself, maybe the suggestion will give Resident Evil's current stewards at Capcom a nudge.

And a semi-relevant side note: If you think 'horror' and 'cozy' are an ill-suited match, I would urge you to check out Creature Kitchen, one of my favorite little indie games in ages: It's 20% off in the Steam Summer Sale, so just $6.39/£5.35/€6.23, and there's also a demo so you can get a good taste of what it's all about before you commit.

In hindsight, calling my new town—in outbreak simulator DeadOS—Zombieville was a rubbish idea. Not only because it's a terrible name for a town, but also because Zombieville completely failed to live up to its name.

See, I'd cooked up a properly nasty pathogen for my nominally determined settlement, the kind that makes 28 Days Later's Rage virus look like a bad cold. It transmitted instantly, converted the victim almost as fast, and produced zombies that could move twice as quickly as the average human.

If this thing got out into the streets, humanity would be dead in days. At least, that's what I thought as patient zero Ruby Mancini picked up the virus at an inner-city intersection (cause unspecified, but let's say 'bat burrito'). After turning a gnarly shade of green, Ruby was primed to chow down on her fellow pedestrians. But she had barely taken a step before being run over by a car.

Ruby's premature un-death taught me an important lesson: it's surprisingly hard to get a good zombie apocalypse going. And it isn't the only thing I learned from DeadOS, a simulator dedicated to the part of zombie fiction that most games gloss over.

DeadOS is the creation of Benn Powell, an indie game developer who you might know for his Randomizer mods for the Resident Evil series. Indeed, it was Resident Evil, specifically Resident Evil 3, that formed the inspiration for DeadOS:

"There's a cutscene right at the beginning where they show the helicopter flying over, all the people getting eaten and dying, and the police coming out and doing their bit," Powell says. "Then everybody's dead and the game starts. I really wanted to make a game that focussed on that specific part, the part that never makes it into a game but is always in a cutscene."

Powell began designing DeadOS in 2019 just before the Covid-19 pandemic—which actually influenced the direction of the game. "It taught me about the R rate … which I think [stands for] reinfection rate," he says. "Now, when you run DeadOS, it tells you the ratio of how many people each zombie infects, so if that number is above one, you have an exponential zombie infection."

Calling DeadOS a game is not strictly accurate. It's more of a simulation sandbox, one that depicts the spread of a zombie apocalypse across a procedurally generated 3D cityscape. You're not so much trying to achieve a specific goal as seeing what happens when you push this button.

DeadOS lets you set a wide range of parameters: the size of the city, its population, the number of armed citizens, the number of police, how easily the virus spreads, what kind of zombie it creates when it does. Then you click 'play' and watch the results of that setup play out.

As a highly goal-oriented player, DeadOS isn't the kind of experience that would normally appeal to me. But I find its simulation fascinating, because it raises some interesting questions about how a zombie apocalypse might play out. The biggest is the one I mentioned earlier—the surprising challenge of successfully seeding a zombie epidemic.

Initially, DeadOS was a simple simulation of how an infection spreads through a population. A zombie would bite a person, that person would get infected and eventually die. Then they'd rise as a zombie and bite another person, so on and so forth. But things changed dramatically once Powell started adding things like weapons and police.

"When I first added guns, [people] would see a zombie and go 'Zombie!' and then blam blam blam!" he says. But since not everyone has the discipline of a Tier 1 Operative, Powell added the possibility for people to hesitate or panic. "You have to have that bit in Resident Evil 2, with the cutscene where Leon's like 'Don't come any closer, I'm gonna shoot!'"

Even with the human factor considered, getting a zombie virus to spread through a civilian population is surprisingly hard, especially in a patient zero scenario where the epidemic starts with a single, traditional slow undead. "If you just let the simulation run, it will fail, because it's just one [zombie]," he says. "All the people run away from it, and it will shuffle around until the police turn up."

Generally speaking, the infection needs a little help. The default play mode—which generates all the parameters for you—solves this problem by having the infection start from multiple points at the same time. "If it's in one place everyone can surround it, they can push everyone out of it, they swarm the area. It's probably not going to get out of there," he says. "When you have two outbreaks at once, and then people start fleeing from one encounter to another … that's how people get killed—they get trapped between two groups of zombies."

But there are other factors that can give the infection a boost too. In particular, the speed of the zombies has a huge effect on the spread of infection. With apologies to classic zombie fans, 28 Days Later-style infected are simply much more lethal than traditional shamblers. "They [can] go as fast or faster than people," Powell said. "Then you can get closer to having the patient zero scenario … especially if you make [people'] turn fast as well."

DeadOS also reveals some interesting observations about human behaviour too. "Braver people will fight the infection more, but then they'll also die more," Powell says. Also, perhaps unsurprisingly, carrying a gun makes civilians much more likely to survive a zombie outbreak. So is the best way to survive a zombie outbreak to be a massive coward with a gun? That's what DeadOS suggests.

Ultimately, Powell says that in a population of 4,000, 250 traditional zombies will be sufficient to make the spread of infection difficult to contain without intervention. At this point, it's really up to you how you let the simulation play out from there. You can simply sit back and watch what happens. Or you can take control of a specific NPC and try to guide them through the scenario, fighting zombies, putting up barricades, looting corpses for ammunition. DeadOS is actually a turn-based game, but when the simulation is running, the turns happen so fast that it appears to be playing in real-time.

And if you grow tired of zombies tearing up the joint, you can decide to call in the military. This is one of the few direct actions players can take during the simulation. When called in, the military arrives in helicopters, deploying squads across the city and sweeping it systematically. It's pretty neat to watch.

DeadOS has been in development for close to seven years, and in Steam early access for almost five years. Yet Powell has no plans to stop making it any time soon. "I want people to be able to make their own cities … so people can purposely design an entire city. I want put in Steam Workshop support, so people can say 'These are my cities' or 'We've remade London.'" He also plans to add other institutions like hospitals, and a proper quarantining system for the military.

The end goal for Powell is to make the most detailed zombie outbreak sim he can with the resources available to him—the Dwarf Fortress of undead Armageddon. "I can't think of another game like this," he concludes. "That's my motivation. This is unique. It's the game I wanted to play but couldn't because it didn't exist, so I made it."

Being as I was assembled in a factory in Sverdlovsk in 1928, I am generally quite bad at identifying or following celebrities. But even I have a profound love for Kyle MacLachlan, the longtime David Lynch collaborator who starred as Dale Cooper in Twin Peaks, Jeffrey Beaumont in Blue Velvet, Paul Atreides in the Dune we don't talk about and, of course, papa Hank in the Fallout TV show.

Well, here's an additional role I didn't know he had (and likely neither did he): Jill Valentine's possibly-maybe boyfriend in the original Resident Evil 2. You see, back when RE2 first released in 1998, players found that Jill Valentine's desk in the Raccoon City Police Department had a picture on it. Inspect it and you get the message "It's a picture of a young man. There's a good chance it's her boyfriend…" Unfortunately, there were only so many pixels to go around back then, and the identity of the man in question—or, well, his model—was impossible to ascertain.

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Until now, anyway. Thanks to Resident Evil fan Morio on X (via Polygon), it's clear that, yup, that sure is Kyle MacLachlan alright. Specifically it seems to be an image of MacLachlan taken from an early-'90s issue of Japan's Roadshow magazine, which often covered western media like Twin Peaks and was, indeed, quite keen on the series.

Precisely who the figure in Valentine's photo was has been a mystery since 1998. Morio said, upon revealing their discovery: "Alright, that's it then. The guy from Jill's desk is Kyle MacLachlan. Years of searching finally over." Incidentally, Morio found that a similar mag picture of Winona Ryder is used for Barry Burton's daughter.

If you're wondering, the answer is no: Capcom didn't use a 4K MacLachlan for the version of this photo in the Resident Evil 2 Remake. In fact, they didn't use a person at all. Valentine was officially un-shipped—the shot of a young man on her desk replaced by a photograph of a dog. Which would be an upgrade were we discussing literally any other man but Kyle MacLachlan.

OD is Hideo Kojima's return to horror, and while I'd like to say it's cloaked in mystery we actually know a fair bit about it: it's co-written with Jordan Peele of Get Out fame, and stars Sophia Lillis, Hunter Schafer, and a posthumous Udo Kier. According to Kojima, early trailers may point to "a standard horror game" but it's definitely not that at all.

In fact, we've been told repeatedly that OD is like nothing else that's come before: what it actually is, is a mystery Kojima seems pretty eager to exacerbate. In a new Entertainment Weekly feature which seems designed, maybe with poor timing, to celebrate the virtues and achievements of Xbox as it enters its 25th year, Kojima is called on to comment about OD, which will be published by Xbox Game Studios.

"I wanted to do something new. I wanted to do something different," Kojima told EW. "I had this OD concept since I was working on DS1 [Death Stranding] and I was working on it just by myself. I can't reveal much detail, but it's something that no one has ever seen before. A new game system."

He goes on to say that despite being Hideo Kojima, the creator of Metal Gear Solid and Death Stranding, and perhaps the most beloved (maybe only) auteur in the biz, many weren't receptive to his pitch. "I pitched to many people, to the big companies, and also to the up-and-coming companies. All of them said the same thing," Kojima said. "They said that I'm crazy, and that they really don't understand the concept—that they will not be able to do it."

Phil Spencer, former Xbox head, was pretty keen on the concept though. Or else, he was keen to secure a crowdpleasing exclusive after Kojima's decades-long association with PlayStation. Most of the Metal Gear Solid games didn't or haven't launched on Xbox consoles, though the majority have since been reissued on that platform. Death Stranding and its sequel both launched as PlayStation exclusives: the first eventually came to Xbox, but the second is yet to make the jump.

New Xbox head Asha Sharma supports OD, calling it "deeply moving" and representative of "another kind of game". She also seems eager to conflate Xbox's support of the game with its broader vision for the medium as a whole. "We need to make sure our platform is sufficiently open so more creators and developers can come on board and be successful, because the next Kojima is yet to be known." (True, but perhaps he was among the thousands laid off by Microsoft in the last two years).

Kojima has a tiny bit more to say about OD: "I wanted to go beyond the limit of the 'scariness' that other games had reached. It's a single-player game, and I wanted to make it as scary as possible. But for those that might stop playing when it gets too scary, I have thought of a system that will allow them to keep going. I can't say much more, because it'll give too much of a hint on the system, and I could get in trouble for saying too much!"

OD has yet to get a release date.

A story trailer for the gross-out horror game Ill dropped earlier this month, although frankly I didn't notice much in the way of story: I was too busy looking at, as cataloged by our Australian goremaster Shaun Prescott, the eye-scoopings, skull stompings, zombie baby punchings, and other such goings-on to really hone in on the narrative angle of the whole thing. Still, Max Verehin, CEO of developer Team Clout, assured me during a recent chat that there is indeed a story going on in there, and that those over-the-top visuals are actually inspired in part by one of the best-loved horror sequences in videogame history: Half-Life 2's We Don't Go to Ravenholm.

The Ill story trailer actually struck me as somewhat less extreme than the debut trailer that appeared at the 2025 Summer Game Fest, which was itself apparently somehow less worse than what the studio cooked up when it first decided to make the game. (And just as a gentle FYI, if you're sensitive to graphic violence and gore, you probably shouldn't be reading this and you definitely shouldn't be watching this trailer.)

"Our entire team has extensive experience in the horror genre, spanning games, movies, art, concept design, and so on," Verehin told me. "Like many players and audiences in general, we’ve reached a point where it's quite difficult to surprise us with anything in this genre.

"When we initially came together, our goal was to combine our experience and create a project that would feel fresh, unconventional, and stand out from the crowd even for us—something that could reignite those raw emotions that have grown a bit dull over time.

"That’s why during our initial brainstorming sessions, we try not to hold back and be bold, letting whatever madness we have run wild. Only after that do we look for a balance: how not to cross the line while still preserving our uniqueness. We aren't trying to do gore for the sake of gore, as our game isn't 'gore porn.' It aims primarily to scare and entertain, rather than just shock."

Which leads back to the narrative element of Ill's latest trailer, which Verehin said focuses on the game's characters and "our mysterious plot," although little of that is revealed: Some sort of unpleasantness in the world's worst hospital and you, who apparently just emerged from a coma, are elected as cleanup guy.

That's not the most original idea for zombie troubles I've ever run across, but it doesn't sound like a straight-up survival horror experience: Ill "combines horror and action," Verehin said, "and since we are fighting monsters rather than actual humans, we expect that tearing through them will bring a sense of fun against the backdrop of the general, oppressive horror."

That's where the Ravenholm comparison comes into play: A grim locale filled with headcrabs and zombie, Ravenholm is a memorable if somewhat incongruous chunk of Half-Life 2, but what really makes it work is the slice-and-dice combo of the gravity gun and numerous conveniently-placed buzzsaw blades. It's not bloody like Ill, but it's definitely a more visceral method of putting down inhuman horrors than just blasting at them with conventional firearms.

"We often look back at our own emotions playing through the We Don't Go to Ravenholm episode in Half-Life 2, how we fought back against the monsters, slicing them with saw blades using the gravity gun, blowing them up, and so on," Verehin said.

"Given the technology of that era, it created the perfect emotional impact. Today, the tech is vastly different, expectations are higher, and the bar for delivering those same emotions to players has risen. And we are doing our best to achieve that exact same effect, but with modern standards."

The tech has indeed improved in the years since Half-Life 2, and I asked Verehin if perhaps it had become a little too advanced—if the realistic depictions of, as Shaun put it, "skull explosions" might put some people off. Well, no—it definitely did, and does, put some people off.

But Verehin said that no single game is going to appeal to everyone, and based on the wholeheartedly enthusiastic responses to Ill trailers on YouTube, and the number of wishlists it's racked up on Steam—it now stands among the top 10 most wishlisted games, according to SteamDB—he thinks they're onto something.

"This audience knows exactly what they want and what they’ve been missing all this time, and they perfectly understand what we’re trying to achieve." And, he added, "we have a lot more content to share down the line, and players will get to see even more elements and mechanics that the game has to offer, which will naturally shape the overall perception as well."

I'll admit that I'm curious. I don't like horror games and I'm not a big gore guy, but Ill has put on enough of a wild freak show that despite myself, I really want to give it a try. It'ss set to launch sometime in 2027.

Idols of Ash looks like another of the droves of low-poly first-person horror games oozing from the 21st century collective consciousness, but it's actually more of a climbing game. I meet the nameless protagonist at the mouth of a mysterious, fathomless pit. For some reason it's my objective to reach the bottom of it.

At first I start to drop down from one platform or outcrop to the next like I would in any other first-person game, or like I would down a well, or the inside of a giant tree, in a Dark Souls game. Idols of Ash reminds me a lot of FromSoft's games, especially of the recurring Miyazaki motif of dropping carefully into an abyss that seems to widen and contort the further I go. The atmosphere here is pure melancholy murk until, with the flip of a dime, it turns skin crawling.

Crucially, I have a grappling hook. This is the trick that Idols of Ash's two hour runtime orbits around. If I hook into where I'm standing I can descend safely into the pit to my rope's full extent. Or, more daringly, I can drop without an anchor and hook onto a surface during my fall. I can also swing with this grappling hook, gaining enough momentum to allow me to make leaps of faith towards distant platforms.

I do this extremely slowly at first, all the better to get a handle on a movement system that becomes more flexible and expressive the more I interact with it. Ain't this nice, I thought: a slowburn exploration game for nyctophiles!

But then a ginormous freaking centipede appeared from the gloom above, snapping me in half with its trunk-sized mandibles. Game over.

The tonal whiplash made me rage quit, if I'm honest, but the promise of that grappling hook and the eerily cylindrical subterranea brought me sulking back. I learned to go fast. The further downward I charted the less I could dare rely on hooking and descending: I had to jump and catch, swing and leap. A growing understanding of the expanse was useful, yes, but so was better knowledge of what kind of surfaces the grappling hook can grapple to, and how much slack I need to make quick scurrying leaps. Sometimes I'd just have to hope for the best.

I reckon that giant centipede had my arse at least a dozen times. Dealing with it became easier when I realised that it doesn't really move much faster than I do, at least on the game's normal difficulty. The centipede forced me to use my instinct and be dextrous. From a design perspective it's basically a manifesto: Leafy Games doesn't want you to descend this hellscape methodically, stopping to take in the depressing sights now and then: It wants you to play this like an arena shooter without a gun.

Like I said, it took me about two hours to complete Idols of Ash, though some people in the Steam forums reckon it took them 20 minutes. Once you've finished it you unlock Nightmare mode which removes checkpoints and speeds up the centipede. A lot of people seem to think this is the right way to play it, but I'm not going anywhere near it, thanks. Much more my speed is the sandbox mode, also unlocked post-completion, which lets me explore without the centipede and play around with a bunch of modifiers, like shorter and lengthier ropes, heightened or reduced fall damage, etcetera.

There is a cryptic story threaded through Idols of Ash. The game's climax is oddly impactful despite the determined vagueness of the exposition up until that moment. I think I'll need to play it again to make sense of it, but overall I think that climactic moment landed because I genuinely felt like I'd escaped a horrible, high stress scenario. Idols of Ash feels like a feverish nightmare. But don't worry too much: it's also an extraordinarily fun first-person platformer. It's on Steam and Itch.

I went into the immersive horror sim, Thanks for the Soup, with few expectations—I certainly didn't think it would hurl me into the complex world of organic broccoli farming, but I wouldn't have had it any other way.

The premise of Thanks for the Soup is simple: you deliver soup from 5pm to 1am to patrons who are stuck inside by some vague lockdown or just because their work is too hectic for them to make a trip to the store and turn the oven on. The more orders you fill, the more money you get, which can go towards a few different things: food, fishing, or farming.

I decided my wages would best be spent on setting the foundations for an organic broccoli farm. What started out as a simple bid to grow enough food to keep me peddling soup orders sprouted into my dream job—the soup delivery became a side hustle.

Yes, the town in which I find myself delivering soup is more than slightly unnerving. The occupants are kind of weird, the neighbourhood gets super dark, flashes of light and thick white fog descends on the town at random, and occasionally you experience a heavenly vision. But a job's a job, and I find cycling around on my bike surprisingly peaceful. All I have to do is think of my broccoli, oh, and eat a mushroom or two—did I mention there's a wide variety of mushrooms found across town?

On my travels across town I found five different types of mushrooms, and because of my dedication to science and—recently—farming, I decided to eat all of them. From what I found, Zuzu mushroom takes a hammer to my depth perception, the Tolid Mushroom makes me super fast, the Folor mushroom makes everything wavy, and as for the Ulod and Cranim mushrooms, I'm not sure yet—I ate a ton of both of them and nothing seemed to happen.

These mushrooms are a big help, especially when things get a bit spooky—it's hard to be scared of whatever may be lurking in the shadows when I'm fighting the mushroom waves trying to stay on my bike. Although I do have to admit that I likely haven't reached peak horror yet as I haven't entered the kitchen.

On my first day as a soup delivery person I was told by my manager not to go into the kitchen. Apparently, if I did I would disturb the chefs and they also don't want their secret recipe getting out. I've watched enough SpongeBob SquarePants to suspect that they're probably using humans as the secret ingredient, but that's honestly none of my business. They can keep on cooking humans as long as I can keep farming organic broccoli. Because if I can farm broccoli, then what's this all been about? What have I been working toward?

I don't know exactly when it changed—when I changed—but over the last half decade, I realized I really like horror movies. Before that I thought I mostly liked movies that leaned harder on suspense than jumpscares, or horror comedies that poked fun at the dumb slashers of the '80s. But it turned out my love of Scream and Cabin in the Woods was just a gateway drug to unabashed enthusiasm for the camp, costuming, and incredible practical effects of a Nightmare on Elm Street or Scanners or Exorcist. I now think Possession is right up there with The Thing as one of the best films ever made and oh my god, why did I wait so long to watch The Blob? Every October I put a few more cult classics on my watch list and find a new horror favorite I never thought I would love but absolutely do.

Anyway, Hellraiser sucks.

Terrible movie! Amazing, flesh-tearing makeup and special effects. Those Cenobite designs? Immaculate nightmare stuff. But every scene in which characters talk is more painful than the kinky BDSM stuff the hell dimension creatures get up to. "This is a movie without wit, style or reason, and the true horror is that actors were made to portray, and technicians to realize, its bankruptcy of imagination," Roger Ebert wrote about it at the time in a withering review.

As a noted lover of videogames, I'm sure Ebert would agree with me that Saber's singleplayer Hellraiser: Revival is already better than the film the second it hands you a shotgun.

I had a great time playing about 40 minutes of Hellraiser: Revival, most of which I spent thinking "Oh this game is like, nasty nasty." The level I explored, set in a cult's fetish club, was littered with BDSM flyers and sex toys, bear traps (the metal kind), and cultists in kink suits that doubled as effective armor plating. I chopped one's arm off with a Jagged Messer, a giant machete the in-game tooltip notes is "a perfect weapon for disembowelment." Another kept knocking me off my feet with shotgun blasts until I used the magical capabilities of the Lament Configuration, Hellraiser's iconic puzzle box thingamajig, to suck the fire essence out of a lit brazier and blast it out like a flamethrower.

I don't want to exaggerate Hellraiser: Revival's complexity by calling it an immersive sim, but at a surface level it feels very BioShock. There are tight environments littered with details to look at, drawers to open for ammo and other scraps, audio diaries scattered about, light puzzles gate your progress from room to room, and the Lament Configuration's ability to temporarily take on certain powers doesn't feel too far off from BioShock's elemental plasmids. Unlike BioShock, however, Hellraiser is full of ball gags, vibrators, and what is definitely the first time I've seen the words "face fuck" written in a videogame.

It's absolutely not shying away from the horniness of Clive Barker's film. Thankfully, the game does not take place almost entirely in an attic: after shooting my way through the cultists I got teleported to the hell dimension, where I ran through spooky transforming corridors until I could use the Lament Configuration to rotate the walls and floors of an Escher-like room to arrange a walkway to a pedestal awaiting the cursed cube. What followed was one of the best button prompts I've seen in years: Press F to Increase Suffering.

Maximum Suffering Increased? I'm not sure what more you could hope for from a horror game, really.

Saber is calling Hellraiser: Revival "survival horror action," which feels apt: it fits somewhere in between the horror and action flavors of Resident Evil. I never had more than a magazine or two of spare ammo for my pistol and shotgun, encouraging me to use the Lament Configuration to kill enemies instead of bullets, or to sneak through a vent to get behind one and stick my machete in their skull. It's got some of the grunginess of a 2000s horror game like Condemned: Criminal Origins, though I think its over-the-top sex and drugs tone might prove so edgy that it's actually closer to The Darkness by the end.

It's not scary horror, at least to me, and I expect tropes more than breaking new ground. In one less fun bit, I played through a looping nightmare in my character's house, where I had to go looking for my missing girlfriend (now a captive of the Cenobites) again and again, repeatedly resetting the room until I found the right interactive bits to move the sequence forward. Not the most creative bit of horror game design—then again, Hellraiser: Revival is the first time I've ever seen ASCII dick and boobs drawn on an old Nokia phone, so I have to respect its commitment, even if it ends up lacking much of the original's queer themes. Games are never this horny.

If not outright scary, Hellraiser: Revival does deliver a constant supply of "well that's fucked up" and guns that kick hard, which is enough to put it on the level of a fun '80s slasher in game form. I'm not sure it's a B movie-style cult classic just yet, but I did chop a cultist's legs off with a bear trap after he yelled "I'm gonna nail him from cover!" so I'd say the odds are, at least, in its favor.

Dead by Daylight recently celebrated its 10 year anniversary with a day-long fan event with panels, meet-and-greets, and crucially, a bunch of new announcements as Behaviour Interactive looks to the next 10 years of development.

First off, the headlining news was a recap of Dead by Daylight's upcoming Chapter and collabs, including the highly sought after horror icon Jason Voorhees who "finally hacks his way into The Fog after a decade of demand." Jason arrives tomorrow on all platforms.

Then there was another Chapter reveal, although this one is set to be survivor-focussed, as it introduces Shane Wiigwaas, "the game's first Indigenous Survivor." Shane will be added later this month on June 25. Later this year Dead by Daylight is also set to get Art the Clown, a Scooby-Doo collection, and the first ever Chapter "developed entirely in collaboration with its community", among others.

But while these upcoming chapters and collabs are exciting, it's largely just business as usual, the real excitement comes from Behaviour Interactive's plans for the future of Dead by Daylight, primarily the upcoming "sweeping visual overhaul."

"Designed to make every Trial more immersive and emotionally impactful, the update will introduce new character model reworks with expanded animation capabilities, alongside realistic facial animations that bring greater expression and nuance to characters.

"Maps and environments will also receive significant upgrades, including enhanced lighting, shading, and textures, improved Fog and Mist effects, a stronger Entity presence, and, for the first time in Dead by Daylight, dynamic weather systems featuring light rain, heavy rain, and storms."

You can see how good the new animations look towards the end of the Dead by Daylight broadcast. The assets shown are a work in progress, but even so they look a hell of a lot better. With upgrades to character face models, hair, and expressions: "we can animate the characters in ways we couldn't before."

There will also be a ton of new voice lines for Dead by Daylight's original characters, alongside plans for sandbox modding and "a wider selection of new game modes is also being rolled out in the coming years, with early details for 1v1 mode and zombie mode shared."

There's certainly a lot to look forward to for fans of Dead by Daylight, which has only been made possible thanks to its solid last 10 years. "Not only can few live service titles boast such a milestone, but fewer still can claim to have reached it on the heels of back-to-back record setting years, a testament to the game’s enduring popularity."

If you had told me just a few years ago that there was about to be a Silent Hill renaissance, I would've called you a liar. But it's happened; and after back-to-back horror bangers in Silent Hill 2 and Silent Hill F, Konami has another developer new to the series working on its next game, Silent Hill: Townfall. Screen Burn Interactive's vision for the foggy town takes place in Scotland, and its lead tortured soul, Simon Ordell, seems to have quite a bit in common with James Sunderland.

When is the Silent Hill: Townfall release date?

The Silent Hill: Townfall release date is Thursday, September 24, 2026. Konami and its co-publisher Annapurna Interactive announced the date at the Sony State of Play during this year's Summer Game Fest.

You can also pre-order the deluxe edition for two days of advanced access, which begins on September 22. Silent Hill: Townfall will be available on Steam and the Epic Games Store.

Silent Hill: Townfall trailers

Konami revealed Townfall as part of its Silent Hill Transmission series, where it's been dishing out new horrors like candy. Townfall's special broadcast introduces fans to Screen Burn—an indie developer I wasn't familiar with until their partnership with Annapurna and Konami—but after hearing about their vision, I think they get the vibe.

Townfall's release date trailer expands on the medical horrors hinted at in its reveal footage, but on a larger scale than previous games. Whatever happened in St. Amelia isn't contained to the declining health of just a few citizens, and the people must've put up quite the fight before succumbing to the fog.

Silent Hill: Townfall gameplay

Silent Hill: Townfall setting and characters

What do we know about the characters in Silent Hill: Townfall?

Simon Ordell

Simon is Townfall's protagonist, and like so many of the Silent Hill leads, he has no idea how he wound up in the game's hellish setting. With all of the medical imagery, chronic illness or self-harm seem like the most obvious guesses, but those things could be related to other people in the town.

A close-up in the reveal trailer shows he's wearing a grungy hospital bracelet with his name, date of birth (15/10/59), and blood type (A+) printed on it. Another clip shows a vault door with his last name, Ordell, in the middle before cutting to a regular door labeled 204. My money is that 204 leads to a hospital room, and there's probably a reason the vault only says Ordell, with no first name included.

Zoe

From her familiarity, I'm assuming the mysterious woman speaking over Simon's CRTV is his wife—or at least someone with a romantic connection. We also see Simon pick up mail labeled "Zoe Ellis," but I'm not confident declaring that's the same Zoe until Konami says so. We all know how these games can be.

Two years ago, Sega and Creative Assembly announced that they were finally working on a follow-up to our 2014 game of the year. Remarkably, in the years since Isolation there hasn't been another stealth game that really captures its sense of dread—where most give their enemies set paths and routines, Isolation's alien instead stalks you, using its own senses to hunt you down. Alien: Isolation's reputation has grown in the years since release, in part because, as Fraser highlighted in a look back for its 10th anniversary, it gets so much else right around the alien itself, too:

"Alien: Isolation really gets it, and is an extremely tactile experience where much of my time was spent hammering away on clicky-clacky keyboards and wrenching open doors. Every interaction demands physical exertion, something rooting you in place, which not only makes the space itself feel so much more tangible, it makes the horror so much more effective... It's the greatest horror game simply because it's the one that scares me the most."

After playing through a short introductory sequence from Alien: Isolation 2, which confirmed that the world's tactility and the very smart alien are both very much still present, I spoke with two of the leads from Creative Assembly about the long-awaited sequel.

PC Gamer: Tell me about this alien versus the alien from the first game, in terms of its behavior and capabilities.

James Green, lead designer: The big new thing in [Alien: Isolation 2] is exteriors, and of course the alien is not going to leave you alone in exteriors. It is going to continue to hunt you there. So we're pretty familiar with what it does in interiors, but its behavior pattern is quite different in exteriors. It hunts you in a very different way, it moves in a different way, and that's really our big difference maker over the first game.

Al Hope, creative director: I really love the idea that players will be in those interior spaces and feeling really claustrophobic and trapped once again, wanting to get out, and then they manage to get outside, and then after that initial rush of like, 'I did it, I'm no longer trapped,' they start to feel really exposed and vulnerable, and actually want to get back inside again.

And then we get to play with that lovely seesaw of emotion and motivation, and sometimes we don't let you do one or the other, and then we have the alien, obviously, as a big part of that, and just as in the first game, it learns, learning and adapting to its encounters with the player. They'll do that in the exterior as well, and we've got some things that we'll be talking about in the future, which could possibly increase your chances of survival, and then the alien needs to take that into account, so kind of an evolved game of cat and mouse.

When it comes to exteriors, did you find that you needed to nerf the alien somewhat, or play around the margins of what it's capable of? Because I imagine all of a sudden you have a lot less cover.

James Green: Well, we never nerf the alien. You know, it would be really easy for us to turn the dial right up and have it kill you instantly, but that's that's not fun. You need the tension and release, you need the ebb and flow. So I think the thing we're going for with exteriors is that exposed vulnerable feeling.

Al Hope: I'd say the fundamental core is the same. It's listening and lurking, and so that's the heart of the experience. So, yeah, in the exteriors the same skills that you use in the interior, about breaking the line of sight, about managing distance, about choices of when to move, those fundamental skills, moving from cover to cover, point to point, are still the bedrock. Obviously it's an organic space, which is which is different, but surprisingly, there's a lot of similarities there. But of course it's different as well.

It's been 12 years since Alien: Isolation. Why make this sequel now and not earlier, since the first game was so well-liked?

Al Hope: I guess the simple answer is that it felt like the time was right to return. I mean, two years ago we announced that we were returning, and I guess it was before that that it felt like, OK, now's the right time. I mean, as a studio, obviously we're busy, but it felt like, yeah, now is the right time.

And, of course, what was been wonderful is that we released the game back in 2014 and over time it seems to gain this momentum of appreciation and gained fans daily as they discover the game for the first time. The original team did an incredible job. I think you can play the original game today and it still holds up really well. It hasn't aged that much, so you get a great experience. And so I suppose that was the other benefit that we had of time, which is really understanding what what players really enjoyed and how they connected with the with the experience.

What is the team continuity like between folks who made the original and working on this?

Al Hope: From my perspective, we've got a really fantastic mix of old and new. So James worked on the original, I obviously did.

James Green: I knew I'd seen you somewhere. [Laughs]

Al Hope: Yeah, so we have some really fantastic veterans who worked on the original, have that experience of building the original, super talented. And then we also have an influx of new, really world-class talent that's coming in with a lot of new ideas, fresh ideas. Obviously, they didn't have that experience making the first game, but they're seeing it from a different perspective. And that's really nice, because it kind of mirrors what we're doing with the game, which is a mix, best of both old and new. And so I feel very privileged to be working amongst such fantastic teams.

Can you think of an example of the benefit of having a member of the team who's new blood, who didn't work on the original but has presumably played it and analyzed it from that perspective?

James Green: When you're faced with a problem in development they're not always going to solve it in the same way. They're going to find a new, novel way to solve a problem, and game development is all just solving problems, really. And if you keep doing it in the same way you're never going to grow. That's what fresh blood gives us. They're going to approach a problem from a different angle, and hopefully that makes the whole game better. We don't just want to do what we did before. It probably would've been really easy to make Alien: Isolation 2 set on another space station, a new set of corridors, a new set of rooms. I think that would be a really good game, but we wanted to do more than that.

Is building a great play space for Isolation different from building a space for a more traditional stealth game, where you'll have enemies patrolling a specific route? They're not agentic in the way the alien is.

James Green: Yeah, there's no patrol routes in Isolation, even for the humans and other characters in the world, we want them to feel natural and believable. They don't do the kind of square patrol route. The alien doesn't follow a script at all, so that's a completely different way of thinking about a level.

Al Hope: Because it's systemic in nature, we need to give the player lots of, maybe not fallbacks, but choices. The build you played today, there were lots of options and choices you can make to try to survive. Some people find all of them, some people only find a few. But the challenge for us is creating a play space that gives lots of choice, and if you're curious about the world you get to find more of these options and paths.

The way I think about it is a survival sandbox. Our job is to create something that has all the features that we need for players to survive. We get the player to enter the sandbox at A, and they have to get to B, and what happens in between is down to the player. The choices they make, and the reaction of the system to those choices. We like to take our hands off and let things play out. Everyone gets these micro shareable stories that can be eight minutes or eight seconds.

One criticism of the first game, and I would say this is a fairly rare thing, was 'there was actually too much of it, and people would have been OK if the game were shorter.' Is that a factor in your thinking at all for this one?

James Green: We do want to learn lessons from the from the first game, and I think mastery of pacing is definitely something we learned from the first game, and we continue to learn. Just as an example, the iconic save points in the original game that are one of the things that really sticks in people's minds, apart from the alien—they were actually a pretty late addition. We had lots of discussions internally about what the right thing was. They went in pretty late, you know, sort of ripping out the automatic checkpoints you'd get in a shooter and replace them with those.

Whereas in this game, in the sequel, we know that's the mechanic right from the beginning, so we can build everything around that, and we can push and pull that design, so it's about building on those lessons.

Al Hope: Yeah, we really love the idea that one of the things the game is about is tension and release, and us, like I said, being hands-off, but being really aware of that roller coaster ride that the player is on, and so balancing, pacing, getting that rhythm right is something that we're really conscious of.

Having said that, there's a lot of players that really enjoyed the length of [Alien: Isolation]. So, we received quite a broad range of feedback, and it's all super helpful. So, yeah, that's definitely something we're conscious of, and we want to terrify people, make the scariest game possible, but ultimately we want to make a game that's completely unforgettable and lives long in the memory. You know, long after they put their controller down, it still lives with them, because they've been on this journey that they themselves have driven. We create this framework, but they themselves have made those choices to get them through, and it's ultimately super satisfying.

On the spectrum of critique, 'too much of a good thing' is not the harshest, right?

James Green: It's a good problem to have, I think.

With the structure of the of the sequel, maybe I'm asking too early, but is the idea for this game to be somewhat linear? will it be more of like a hub where you're branching out to areas?

Al Hope: You're right, it's a bit too early. We're sharing a little glimpse of the game today, it's early on in the player experience and we're looking forward to showing more in the future.

Am I going to get to drive that rover around?

Al Hope: We're looking forward to showing more in the future. [Laughs]

Are you using generative AI in the game?

Al Hope: We're not using generative AI in the game.

Is it annoying that the word AI, which used to best represent what you did so well as game designers—designing this creature that follows you around and is really intelligent and scary—now means something else?

Al Hope: Yeah, I don't know. So this might seem a bit simple, but I think we're just super focused on creating that experience for the player, like the best authentic Alien experience that builds on what we did in the past, that core Isolation experience, so yeah, sure, there might be noise around [AI], but I think ultimately our focus is creating that unforgettable experience, so that we're still talking about it in a decade's time, and whatever the conversation is that's going on right now is all gone, but we've left this legacy within the IP that people remember and love and love to discuss and share. Ultimately for us that's the most important thing, and not to get distracted by other things.

James Green: I think everyone who played today and played over the past couple of days, all they're talking about is how smart the alien was, and how it killed them, and did you find this thing, and did it kill you here, and they're talking about the experience they had rather than exactly what label it gets, and I think I think that's always our goal. People are just distracted by how cool the experience is and how smart the alien is.

Are there ways in which the Alien franchise has expanded since that first game that have given you ideas, or made you feel comfortable exploring something you didn't do in the first game?

Al Hope: Obviously we really love the IP, the whole umbrella. The area that we most focus on, and absolutely adore, is that original 1979 movie, and obviously Isolation is really close to that with Amanda, and then Isolation 2 takes place months after the events of Isolation 1, therefore we really love the idea of being able to expand and push and deepen the zone around that first movie, and we feel like there's so much still to tap into with that first movie, it's a real rich vein.

So we feel very privileged to be able to play in that space and push it, and to do things like the save station appearing in Alien Romulus is just mind blowing for us, that we create something in our little market town of Horsham in the UK, and it ends up on the big screen in the movie. So I think that's that's how we think about it, is we just love to tap back into that 1979 lo-fi sci-fi, all that aesthetic that we absolutely love.

Bloober Team is making a Star Trek game, we discovered over the weekend. It will feature badass bajoran Ro Laren, and yes it's a horror game. It's a combination of genre, developer and licence that could only be the product of throwing darts at a board. Maybe a drunken game of Mad Libs.

Sometimes it's nice to be completely surprised. But sometimes that surprise is 'Bloober Team is making a Star Trek horror game'.

It's weird to be protective of brands, but I confess I did feel a genuine spark of annoyance at the news. Star Trek is fertile ground for games, but it's been underutilised, leaving us with only a meagre handful of good adaptations. My knee jerk response was "This is a huge waste." And I haven't really changed my mind.

I've never gotten on with Bloober Team's brand of horror, and I don't think horror is a great fit for Star Trek, but I confess I am fascinated all the same. Videogame adaptations can be—but rarely are—a great way to explore existing TV, movie and literary properties and recontextualise them. There are so many things games can do that other mediums cannot, and that opens the door to all kinds of interesting takes.

So I'm genuinely intrigued to see what a Star Trek horror game looks like, but at the same time I do wonder who this is actually for? With Star Trek's cultural cachet sadly dwindling, who but those already invested in the shows are going to be throwing their cash at it? Shows that hardly ever dabbled in horror.

The exception to this tends to be episodes that feature either the Borg Collective or, much later, the Gorn Hegemony. The Borg Collective is pretty much the perfect Star Trek villain—a cyborg species that takes the principles of the Federation and twists them into something incredibly disturbing. The gorn, meanwhile, are kinda dumb, but Strange New Worlds tried really hard to make them terrifying. Nobody wants to have lizard babies growing inside them.

And yeah, First Contact is definitely horror adjacent, with scenes that wouldn't look out of place in a full-blown horror flick. Its status as arguably the best Star Trek film undermines my argument a bit, granted, but it also cushioned its more horror-inspired moments between classic Trek. It never fully committed to the horror because it still needed to be Star Trek.

The thing is, horror not in Star Trek's DNA. Nor is Bloober Team's usual approach to horror, with games that tend to offer a pessimistic perspective, which flies in the face of Star Trek's unrelenting optimism. That, at least, makes Ro Laren a good choice for the protagonist, as she's one of the least Starfleet characters to ever don the uniform. She's more akin to a lone wolf action hero with a chip on their shoulder.

So that's one choice Bloober Team has made that actually kinda makes sense. But Ro is an outlier. And a focus on just her exploits, this unconventional rebel, doesn't feel very Star Trek. Indeed, that was the whole point of Ro. She was designed to serve as the opposite of Starfleet's ideals. She didn't fit in, until Picard started mentoring her and she eventually put her ego aside—temporarily.

If we go back six years, though, I wouldn't have been particularly optimistic about a Star Trek comedy show—especially after The Orville fumbled the brief, at least initially—and now I'm mourning the end of Star Trek: Lower Decks, one of the all-time best Treks.

The show's writers found a way to celebrate Star Trek and tell new but classic-feeling yarns through the lens of sci-fi absurdity. It still felt Trek, and it still felt properly canon, all while doing something dramatically different. This suggests that Star Trek is actually broad enough to support dipping into wildly different genres—but Lower Decks, just like First Contact, also featured so many of the critical components of a great Trek show.

We got the adventure of the week format, the focus on teamwork, loads of high-concept sci-fi nonsense, quality inter-personal drama—something that took Star Trek a bit of time to figure out, but when it did it went hard—and countless other elements.

So I guess there's no reason the same couldn't be said for horror. Maybe some horror would actually be good for Star Trek. But this specific kind of horror? Ro's flying solo, stranded on a deadly alien world, which just doesn't sound like it's going to leave much room for the things that make Star Trek what it is, rather than just a setting you can slap any old story onto—like Star Wars.

A 45 minute episode? Sure, I could see that. A change in pace, a wee detour, but then back to the Enterprise next week, where the crew is addicted to a rubbish VR game or Picard's belting out some Shakespeare while he's on the phone to a ferengi. Hours and hours of it, though? I'm sceptical.

I think Ro Laren's great. I'm excited for more Ro Laren. And I'm totally here for studios doing deep cuts, delving into specific characters who weren't really part of the main cast. I'm just not convinced Bloober Team is the studio for the job. Despite how well regarded Silent Hill 2 Remake is, without the bones of another game to fall back on, I fear a return to cheap jump scares and trite pschological horror.

The good news is that this isn't Star Trek's only hope. We showed off Star Trek: Outposts Unknown, a colony builder, during the PC Gaming Show. And we've always got Star Trek Online, which continues to be brilliant (if a bit creaky). The final frontier is still spitting out adventures, even if Ro's excursion to a cursed world ends up being a bit of a stumble.

I'm a bit of a baby when it comes to horror. Don't get me wrong, I love scary movies and videogames, but when someone starts moving like a contortionist and I can hear their joints popping, I'm outta there—that just freaks me out too much. Remothered: Red Nun's Legacy's new gameplay trailer lulled me into a false sense of security with a seductive voice over before bringing me crashing back down to earth with its clickity-clackity nuns—it's most definitely a psychological horror.

Red Nun's Legacy is the third game in the cult horror series, and we just got our first proper look at how it'll actually play during the PC Gaming Show. It's a third-person survival horror, so expect to sneak around chest-high furniture and throw household objects at spooky monstrosities bearing down on you.

The trailer focuses mainly on protagonist Susan running, hiding, and occasionally fighting out of a nun's deathgrip. Just like the previous two entries in the trilogy, we're back in Ashmann territory. This time, though, we're on the slopes of Mount Etna, exploring a derelict noble residence that's now home to the Red Nun herself. The dark corridors and old trinkets make for the perfect setting for a horror game that'll have you solving puzzles while hiding from nuns like a misbehaving child at Sunday school.

In one of the sequences, we see Susan running down a hallway as a pregnant nun, clutching her belly, gives chase to the intruder. It adds a sense of body horror to the game that I'm excited to see once it releases later this year. Susan isn't entirely helpless, though. We also see her wielding some sort of club and even stabbing one nun in the neck. I wonder how many Hail Marys she'll have to do to atone for that.

If you want to stay up-to-date on the game, wishlist Remothered: Red Nun's Legacy on Steam.

Check out everything revealed at the PC Gaming Show.

A new co-op horror game is coming our way, but instead of collecting trash or trinkets P.O.N sees players take on missions from criminal syndicates. The only problem is those pesky crime-fighting superheroes everyone seems to love so much.

P.O.N is a "first-person stealth-action horror game" which decidedly "flips the traditional superhero". Instead of being beacons of hope the superheroes you'll encounter are more like deadly hunting machines, which will stop at nothing to bring you and your buddies to so-called justice.

You'll have to navigate these threats as you make your way around each map, completing the criminal task at hand while retrieving everything specified in the terms handed down to you.

We got a glimpse of what this will look like during today's PC Gaming Show—as is the case with most horror games, the trailer was very dark and included a hell of a lot of screaming. We see four players trudge through abandoned hallways, and it wasn't long before the first person was picked off by what we know to be one of the superheroes in question, although we didn't get a good look at the perp.

It doesn't get much better for the team from here on out. In the chaos and confusion that follows, more players get swept up off their feet and disposed of by this super hunter. Only one's left alive by the end of the trailer, but they're yet to make it out. I guess this is just to depict how difficult this game will be for your average player.

But no matter how scary things get, don't go abandoning your brethren. You've got a better chance at surviving when you stick together: "and remember to not abandon each other because every shadow could hide a 'hero' ready to deliver a brutal brand of justice."

If you think this sounds interesting then you can join the 700,000 other wishlists for P.O.N in the lead up to the game's release, which is now scheduled for sometime during Q2 2027. It's a bit of a wait, so if you're looking for more immediate releases then be sure to check out PC Gamer and the rest of the PC Gaming Show for more upcoming games and recommendations.

Check out everything revealed at the PC Gaming Show.

Polish horror developer Bloober Team is keeping busy. Coming off Cronos: The New Dawn and with a remake of the original Silent Hill in the works as well as Layers of Fear 3, the studio has now announced it's working on a sci-fi psychological horror game set in the Star Trek universe.

In Star Trek: Shadow Frontier we'll play Ro Laren, a Bajoran officer introduced in Star Trek: The Next Generation who came back for Picard, played by Michelle Forbes. She returns to the role here, which isn't her first time in videogames—among her game credits is Dr. Judith Mossman from Half-Life 2.

Shadow Frontier sends her on a rescue mission to a planet that's been taken over by an alien entity. "In true Star Trek fashion," the Steam description says, "Ro's mission is driven by duty and purpose. But here, discovery comes at a terrible cost. The more she uncovers, the deeper she is pulled into a corrupted labyrinth where her memories twist and the planet threatens to sever her connection to reality."

Apparently we'll get to use Ro's tricorder to analyze objects and her phaser to both solve puzzles and zap some enemies, though I'm curious to see how much it relies on shooting aliens—something Star Trek videogames tend to emphasize a wee bit more than the shows. The store page promises a blend of "exploration, puzzles, combat and cinematic set-pieces" but that's a vague enough description it could apply to every prestige action-adventure game released in the last 30 years.

Star Trek: Shadow Frontier doesn't have a precise release date yet, but apparently the plan is for a 2027 release. When it does come out, it'll be available on Steam.

The original Sinking City was a touch too ambitious for its own good, spreading its supernatural horror mystery across an open world that left it feeling thin. When I played a preview build of the sequel earlier this year, it seemed more focused, the kind of survival horror game with room for exploration within its levels but not an entire town to free-roam around—more like H. P. Lovecraft's Resident Evil than a budget Grand Theft Cthulhu.

But you don't have to take my word for it. During the Future Games Show, developer Frogwares released a one-hour demo of The Sinking City 2, which you can try right now on Steam.

Frogwares also announced a release date of August 18, which will give you time to play it ahead of September's horror games, Silent Hill: Townfall and vampire RPG The Blood of Dawnwalker. Saving your horror game for October is probably a bit passé these days.

There's also a new trailer, introducing the sequel's setting of Arkham. (Which the asylum from the Batman comics was named after.) It's been flooded so you can motorboat around it, as in the first game, and filled with Mythos monstrosities, including zombies with bulging fleshy weak spots to shoot. And, er, a sultry mermaid? Well, I guess all those grotesque fish-human hybrids came from somewhere. (Yes, I have read The Shadow Over Innsmouth.)

Asymmetrical PvP is all the rage these days, especially among licensed horror games for some reason—a new 3v1 Saw game just got revealed yesterday—but what if I want to pick up my knife and carve up some innocent people without the social pressures of online competition?

I never thought I'd say this, but Michael Myers has the solution I'm looking for.

A trailer was shown at today's Future Games Show teasing the upcoming Halloween game's solo campaign, a mode untethered to the online PvP. Unlike, say, a Halloween movie, it seems like players will follow the POV of Myers himself, stabbing and stalking to their heart's content as weary narrators recount how scary you are.

There are only brief clips of gameplay, but it looks the way you might expect a game with Michael Myers as the star to look: lots of stabbing and walking forward menacingly. If developer IllFonic pulls it off, I imagine it'll touch on a similar appeal to reverse-horror gorefests like Carrion and Manhunt: tense action games all about playing with your food, so to speak.

I'm curious to see how long and narrative-heavy it will be, given that it's set to cover Myers' "origin story." (I always thought his origin story was just that he was an evil baby who grew up to be an evil, scary man).

Dead by Daylight and this game's predecessor, IllFonic's Friday the 13th game, had no substantive single-player modes to speak of, but the slashing in these sorts of games is satisfying, albeit a bit simple. I can't imagine it'll beget much comparison to more traditional horror games given that you play as the killer, so we could be in for something novel here.

Halloween: The Game releases Sep. 8 later this year, and is available to wishlist on Steam.

It's somehow been 12 years since we first got the pants scared off us in the excellent survival horror adventure Alien: Isolation, but we're finally getting another go-round with the powerful, unkillable xenomorph.

At Summer Game Fest, we got our first teaser for Alien: Isolation 2—and even though it doesn't show us much, what it does show looks great.

We're leaving the space stations behind, as the sequel is set on a planet this time, though that doesn't mean we're going to be completely free of the atmosphere and chills of the original game.

"This time we're unleashing the alien on an unsuspecting colony world," said Ana Sopikova, art director at Creative Assembly. "From the claustrophobic confines of the colony itself to the exposed and storm ravaged landscapes surrounding it, Kurosaki Station is a new hunting ground for the ultimate apex predator.

"Players will face a desperate struggle to survive and escape, and we cannot wait to show you more in the future."

Unfortunately, the new Steam store page for Alien: Isolation 2 doesn't give us a whole lot more information, or even an idea of a release window beyond "Coming soon." The screenshots are all labeled "Pre-alpha capture," which doesn't suggest a release is right around the corner.

This year's Summer Game Fest stream opened with a good amount of applause for Resident Evil Veronica, a remake of Dreamcast game Resident Evil — Code: Veronica.

Code Veronica is especially ripe remake material since it's notoriously easy to inadvertently softlock yourself in the original. The series hadn't quite undergone its mid-aughts action-movie reinvention (though this is arguably where that direction started to emerge, what with the John Woo-inspired CG opening), so you were still grappling with awkward tank controls and at the mercy of brutal encounters that really stung if you hadn't conserved your ammo and ink ribbons—the only way to save your game.

Despite the quirks, it's a standout horror game on the Dreamcast, and even though it eventually made its way to other consoles with the Code: Veronica X remaster, it never made it to PC.

Given how past REmakes have gone, I wouldn't be surprised if this cut all the funny business and reimagined Veronica with less finicky controls, amped up by modern Capcom's snazzy visual tech and the original's puzzle-heavy exploration.

No gameplay footage came with the creepy cinematic, but we know the remake is planned to release in 2027. With rumors of a Resident Evil 0 remake also on the way, I'm hopeful that future REmakes will focus on games that shine despite some rough qualities, and therefore benefit most from reinvention, rather than the all-time greats that play perfectly fine even now.

If you're anything like me, you probably came out of A24's Backrooms film thinking to yourself: 'Scary movie, but I could've survived it'. Well, you can put that to the test, in theory. While I don't recommend running around any derelict office buildings, there are hundreds of backrooms games and others like it for you to check out.

The only problem is, however, that there are hundreds of games; it can be pretty difficult to sort through the masses to find the diamond in the rough. So to try and help jump start your search here are the five games I think you should check out if you enjoyed the vibes Backrooms film.

Escape the Backrooms

This is the most obvious choice for any backrooms enjoyers. Escape the Backrooms one of, if not the, most popular backrooms games around, and for good reason. With over 30 levels to explore and multiple entities to try and survive, it captures the now-iconic vibes.

But the best way to experience this game is with friends. It does shift the vibe ever so slightly, from eerie to chaos, but it's worth it. I've spent hours running around all the different levels with my friends, as we try and ultimately fail to escape whatever thing is chasing us. It's tricky to keep track of where you're going and where you've been when you have three other people screaming in your ears.

The maps are unfortunately not procedurally generated so you could memorise your way through each one, but that would probably take you way too long. So if you're just looking for a fun and scary experience to have with friends, this is your best shot.

Inside the Backrooms

This was my go-to a few years ago, and while I haven't gone back lately, as there were a couple of annoying bugs here and there, it's still an excellent interpretation of the backrooms.

This is another multiplayer experience and it's great fun in the same way Escape the Backrooms is. You also have to balance a bunch of bloodthirsty entities and all your friends running in different directions like headless chickens, getting lost, and screaming their hearts out. Now, that wouldn't be too bad if it weren't for the fact that you're trying to solve the many puzzles inside these backrooms while all of that chaos is going on.

Inside the Backrooms still manages to nail the unsettling and confusing atmosphere that the film explores. And playing it makes me realise that while I probably could've survived the film (because I'd never step foot in the backrooms in the first place), I'd probably be screwed as soon as I turned the first corner, because apparently I have the sense of direction of a fruit fly.

Pools

If you don't want to be bogged down by your friends and just want to enjoy the vibes of a backrooms-inspired game for its atmosphere, then you should play Pools.

There are no puzzles to solve here, no music, or nasty entities to jump at you and scare you half to death. This is a simple game about wandering around odd and eerie levels, and discovering what this labyrinth has to offer.

It's a walking simulator, simple-as, but one which appreciates the necessary atmosphere that's so integral to the backrooms, and acknowledges that this isn't something you need to understand or explain or even escape. The true horror of the backrooms is simply that it's inexplicable yet it exists.

Portal

This is a bit of a weird one, but other than being just an outstanding game in general, Kane Parsons, the director of the Backrooms film, has previously spoken about just how much inspiration he took from the Portal games.

"It's not yellow, it's very gray, and blue, and kind of bleak," Parsons explains. "And by the second game it's rotting and it's totally falling apart. But it's vast in a lot of ways, it feels like an eternal indoors that goes on in all directions, that is just absurd in its scope. So I think it's actually very similar to the Backrooms on that front."

The more I think about it the more I agree about how many similarities there are between Portal and the backrooms—especially Parsons' take on the creepypasta—what with the ominous megacorp Async Research Insitute mirroring that of Portal's Aperture Science. Plus both games are fantastic, so I'd be remiss if I didn't promote a replay at any opportunity.

SCP: Secret Laboratory

This is something of a personal indulgence, but if you love the concept of the backrooms and the world of Parsons' web series then I'm sure the SCP Foundation would be of interest to you.

While these are both part of separate universes they share similar themes of inexplicable otherworldly horrors and other than a fantastic shared archive of stories SCP also has a ton of great games.

My favourite of which is SCP: Secret Laboratory (although Confinement is also great). Secret Lab is an online multiplayer in which players get a randomly assigned role within a secure underground facility which has had a sudden containment breach and try to survive everyone trying to kill each other. Trust me, it's way harder than it seems to be.

Resident Evil and the devs working on the series are currently rolling off the high that was Resident Evil Requiem's launch. As the fastest selling RE game ever, and with some glowing reviews (I gave it a 92 in our Requiem review), it's abundantly clear that the fans want more. And while nothing's been confirmed, the devs have been sharing some ideas.

In a recent interview with Japanese news site Futaman (via Automaton) producer Masato Kumazawa revealed that amid all the brainstorming for future projects, a Resident Evil game set in Japan has crossed the minds of the dev team.

"I think a Japanese setting is something every Japanese Resident Evil fan has thought about," Kumazawa says. "And I’ve also considered it myself. Since the development team is primarily based in Japan, I think every member has given it some thought. While Japan hasn’t appeared as a game setting so far, it might make an appearance at some point in the future."

"If we keep releasing the same kind of game over and over, players will eventually get bored, so we’d like to keep taking on new challenges moving forward."

Kumazawa goes on to explain that the devs aren't massively concerned with following any strict rules for the location of Resident Evil games, or even the timeline for that matter: "We do adjust the timeline based on the assessment that present-day stories help players feel more immersed. The timeline also changes depending on the characters and story we want to portray in each title. Even in Requiem, we have scenes set eight years prior, as well as even earlier periods. So, where the timeline goes from here will depend on the specific title."

Apparently, the team only started portraying characters aging with Resident Evil 4. Requiem is the most obvious case of this with an aged-up Leon initially sending shockwaves through the fanbase.

But just because there's no solid ruleset to follow doesn't mean the devs are going to get too wacky with it. Kumazawa promises fans that they "won't compromise the core elements of the series" such as characters and the events that unfold and will "continue to preserve what the series holds dear". Which I'm guessing means allowing eccentric scientists to keep getting hold of the T-virus, make some disgustingly violent creature with it, and then leave the pen open for it to escape and wreak havoc—you know, classic Resident Evil stuff.

During today's Sony State of Play a release date for Silent Hill: Townfall was confirmed. It'll land on September 24, which is pretty much exactly a year after Silent Hill f marked the full return of the classic horror series.

The thing is, a lot of games are coming out in September. At a glance we have:

• Blood of the Dawnwalker, a big new RPG from the creators of The Witcher 3, is coming out on September 3
• Marvel's Wolverine lands on September 15, though it's a PS5 exclusive (and based on the gameplay footage today, they can keep it)
• Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War 4 is an RTS so maybe it doesn't qualify as a blockbuster, but it's still making for a tight squeeze with its September 18 release date
• Control Resonant will release on the same day as Silent Hill: Townfall, which I think is a bad thing for both
• Onimusha: Way of the Sword is coming on September 25

September is a very busy month it turns out, and I'm not surprised: November belongs entirely to Grand Theft Auto 6. By giving that behemoth a large berth, some of the more modest blockbuster highlights of the season are getting awkwardly cosy with one another. The same day clash between Control Resonant and Townfall in particular seems a bit risky. People drawn to tonally askew, narrative-driven triple A fare are probably going to choose one or the other.

Still, Townfall is starting to look pretty appealing despite how terrible that pun is. In today's trailer we see a lot of mist, ominous red lighting, and snippets of the game's first-person, stealth-centric gameplay. Puzzles will feature heavily, and according to a PlayStation blog, "solving these puzzles isn’t just a way to progress in the game, though, but rather a way to understand the situation [protagonist] Simon finds himself in."

Check out the trailer below:

At the Sony State of Play showcase today unwitting viewers were subjected to one of the goriest videogame trailers I've ever seen, and I was around to witness the Hatred panic. In the trailer for Ill, a new survival horror game coming in 2027, and published by the company responsible for Atomic Heart, I saw:

• 1 eye socket scooped out with a knife
• 1 skull shot at close range, causing a skull explosion
• 1 skull stomped underfoot, causing a skull explosion
• 1 zombie baby's skull punched and crushed
• 1 neck slashed
• 1 neck repeatedly stabbed
• 1 head severed because it is held to a wall with a knife and the rest of the body just falls off it
• 1 leg shot off
• 1 door kicked
• A naked man who wants to kill you

All this takes place in what looks like some vile hospital. The Ill Steam page describes the setting as a "huge research fort" where some "mysterious source of evil" has generated "horrific Aberrations". In other words, that zombie baby isn't a real human zombie baby, it's an Aberration, so I guess it's totally defensible to smash its face to bits.

Ill is developed by Team Clout, which boasts film industry talent who have worked on Longlegs, V/H/S/Beyond and It: Welcome to Derry, as well as the Until Dawn film adaptation. The trailer's perverse focus on bone-crushing slaughter is probably meant to demonstrate Team Clout's "advanced physics interactions" and "advanced dismemberment system". It's the kind of thing horror studios have been parading for decades, the last most notable recent example being The Callisto Protocol.

I guess from a graphics tech perspective some of the scenes are technically impressive, but the environment—messed up underground lab—is about as bog standard as they come for first-person survival horror, not to mention third-person survival horror, and first-person shooters, and third-person shooters, and sci-fi RPGs etcetera. We'll find out some time in 2027 whether Team Clout has anything better to offer than zoomed-in ultragore.

Kane Parsons has a long and storied history with the Backrooms, what with his web series which includes the viral Found Footage installment. With this in mind I was never worried about the authenticity of A24's Backrooms film, but I was still hesitant to see how well the creepypasta would translate to a feature-length movie.

My main worries were:

• Could Parsons explain the backrooms to fresh eyes (which would likely be a good chunk of its audience), and still include enough for long-time fans.
• Would its story be compelling enough for a film while still retaining the mystery of the backrooms.
• Would there be well rounded characters who still took a backseat to the main persona: the backrooms itself.
• Would it use the backrooms entities as a crutch for driving its story forward.

Now, after watching the film I can happily reveal: yes, yes (thank god), yes, and pretty much. There are a lot of scary chase scenes and some jumpscares courtesy of the Still Life, but that's a very nostalgic part of the backrooms games and it was a lot of fun, so I let it slide.

I came out of A24's Backrooms film with a reignited love for this internet creepypasta and Parsons' storytelling. Parsons not only stayed true to the backrooms—in how it remained allegorical to memory loss: the horror of forgetting what used to be normal or not being able to remember the faces of people who were constants in your life—but also stayed true to his format which has worked so well thus far. It felt like I had just watched one of his YouTube web series episodes at the cinema, and I mean that in the best way possible.

Spoilers ahead for the Backrooms

This Backrooms adaptation was made to fit into Parsons' existing web series, but even if you hadn't watched any of it before it was still easy to digest and figure out, with the Async Institute and the hostility of the backrooms established early on.

Every character in the film also has the purpose of explaining or furthering the backrooms' identity in one way or another. There was Clark's stubborn inability to change and need to escape his own mistakes that drove him deeper into the tunnels of the backrooms, dragging those close to him down as he went. Dr. Mary Kline's need to help others sent her into the backrooms in pursuit of Clark, but her curiosity and resilience are what lead her through to Async. But even still, I don't think Kline has broken through that 'window within' for good. I have a feeling that if we do get a Backrooms sequel she'll have more to endure in it.

This may have left some people wanting more, or thinking that the characters were just canon fodder and therefore poorly written, but that's not the case. The main character is the backrooms itself. In backrooms media all roads lead back to this liminal space—it's the driving force of the narrative, main character, and setting all wrapped in one.

This leads me onto the next 'job well done' for the Backrooms film: its ability to leave some things unexplained. Sometimes people have a need to explain the backrooms or other 'lost media' found on the internet, to come to some sort of logical answer, but like other creepypastas the joy of the backrooms comes from it remaining unexplainable.

Yes, Parsons sets out certain rules for the backrooms: the layout doesn't constantly change, you can enter and leave through gaps or doors which stay in the same place, and the origins of Still Life (one of the two entities found in the backrooms) are explained. But there's also a lot left up to the imagination. Did Kline make it out of the backrooms at the end? Is Pirate Clark still alive? And what is Async's end game?

But my favourite theory thus far is that the characters were always in the backrooms. What leads me to believe this is how you only see a few shots of the outside world and that, in these scenes, the sky looks almost as if it's been painted on. The buildings and streets also look uncannily laid out, and weird things do happen—the extra switches appearing on the electrics.

Kline's mother is also shown being institutionalised in a flashback, after locking Kline inside and hiding from 'them'—perhaps she figured it out before anyone else. The film also ends with multiple shots of descending backrooms, which get progressively less sensical as it descends, perhaps the world in which Clark and the rest find themselves in is simply a more intact backrooms. But who knows? Not me—and that's part of the fun.

I've grown up around the collective storytelling of internet creepypastas and clandestine group projects like The SCP Foundation. And aside from the effect these had on my malleable young brain, one thing I've learned is how amazing storytelling can be when you have passionate and creative people at the helm who also have enough humility to not seek complete ownership over the project. Kane Parsons' Backrooms adaptation is an excellent example of exactly this.

Welcome to Silver Pines. You might recognise it, if you've visited Twin Peaks or Alan Wake's Bright Falls. It's wet, it's weird, it's a bit unsettling. It's also the last-known location of Eddie Velvet, a musician being tracked by private investigator Red Walker—that's you. But who cares about runaway musicians when there are monsters trying to eat your face?

Ol' Silver Pines has gone a bit Resident Evil, you see. A storm's coming, nearly everyone has evacuated the town, and now it's infested by grisly creatures with breathing problems. They would very much like to kill you.

With limited resources, a tiny inventory, lots of locked doors and a fair share of light puzzles, Silver Pines channels Resi a lot more than its other inspirations. You can even find healing herbs, and combine objects in your inventory.

Developer Wych Elm describes Silver Pines as a "love letter to classic survival horror", which is also how most survival horror games seem to be described. We are infected with nostalgia. Aside from the more overt references to games like Resi and Silent Hill, it also channels classic survival horror combat, in that it is quite annoying.

Well, initially at least. I'm only able to discuss the first hour, though, and it was enough to make me consider a life of pacifism.

After my first encounter with a shadowy creature—which was, at the time, unkillable—I discovered my first weapon. A puny boxcutter. It is, unsurprisingly, not very good at killing whatever hellspawn have infected Silver Pines. And despite being a tiny blade, Walker wields it like a much slower weapon, constantly leaving himself open to attack.

Even when just faced by a single foe, I'd usually end up critically wounded—and any injuries make Walker, who's already a sluggish guy, even slower. Faced with a rapidly depleting supply of herbs, I devised another strategy.

I crouched and went for the shins.

This strategy might not be viable for the whole game, but it certainly helped in this first hour. You can just waddle up to oblivious monsters and keep slashing at their shins. And there's nothing they can do about it. Granted, this is not fun. It takes ages and looks stupid. But I did stop needing to devour herbs.

The good news is that you'll eventually net yourself some firearms, though expect to be spending most of your time fighting in close range, regardless of your weapon of choice.

It's a looker, at least, with characters and enemies rendered in an almost rotoscope aesthetic. In motion, it's quite impressive—and that goes for the fights especially, unless you're just being a lil' shin-stabber.

But mostly I just felt a bit bored—even after a single hour. And that's the problem with love letters. They are by their very nature derivative. I've done it all before. And while Capcom was able to revitalise Resident Evil with the bold switch to first-person, I'm not convinced Wych Elm is going to have the same fortune by making it 2D, which feels limiting rather than additive.

At least it's pretty.

We rather like Resident Evil Requiem here at PC Gamer—our own resident horror expert, Elie Gould, gave it a stonking 92% in their Resident Evil Requiem review, claiming it provides "excellent action set pieces accompanied by great weapon handling, some truly horrendous horror, and satiates my love of classic Resident Evil puzzles. All within 10 hours."

That's some hefty praise, but now you don't just have to take their word for it (though you absolutely should, they know their stuff), because despite the fact it came out three whole months ago, Requiem now has a playable demo.

"The demo version allows you to play part of the game's early stages. Please note that save data from the demo version cannot be transferred to the full version of the game," Capcom states. The demo itself follows Grace Ashcroft waking up in the Care Center, but it also gives you a taste of Leon, if that's what you're into.

It's an interesting move by Capcom, given Requiem wasn't exactly struggling for sales. Back in April, it was revealed that the game had sold seven million copies in just two months—a number that's likely only increased. For comparison, the Resident Evil 4 Remake took a whole year to pull those numbers.

Maybe it's just a means to keep the ball rolling. After all, if the word-of-mouth about your game's pretty good, a demo's a good way to turn prospective players into buyers. Pragmata enjoyed a huge amount of buzz due to its demo, so Capcom might just be looking to repeat that trick here.

It'd pair nicely with Capcom's seeming desire to stack value on top of the game, too—adding a surprise roguelike mode called Leon Must Die Forever earlier this month. First twink death, now this—I almost feel sorry for the guy.

You can try out Grace Ashcroft's very bad time now via Steam or the Epic Games Store. Or, if you happen to be one of those PC Gamers with a console or two kicking around, PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X/S, and the Switch 2.

Saturday, Behaviour Interactive revealed the latest playable killer coming to asymmetrical PvP game Dead by Daylight: Jason Voorhees. If that has you wondering, 'How was he not in that game already?', you're not alone. In a press release, Horror Inc. executive VP Robbie Barsamian said Friday the 13th fans have been waiting for this collaboration "since Dead by Daylight launched."

That release also revealed some of Jason's abilities (in keeping with DBD's naming conventions, he's called The Slasher in-game). He can turn invisible and reappear at "key environmental points" like breakable walls and pallets, destroying them and causing any nearby survivors to give away their hiding spots with a scream. "Survivors will have to contend with the tension that comes from suddenly losing track of Jason … and knowing a vicious attack could be waiting just around the bend," the release states.

Jason can also fashion "makeshift projectiles" from objects in the environment, like shattered pallets and even the hooks that killers use to claim their victims. He'll be able to pin survivors to walls using this ability, leaving them "helpless and suspended," but projectiles are only replenished when Jason goes back into stealth.

Senior creative director Dave Richard said in the press release that Jason's DLC comes at a good time, as the game's 10th anniversary "needed to be something special … we’re just thrilled the stars aligned."

The masked murderer of horny teens has a surprisingly prolific gaming career. He showed up in Mortal Kombat X, for example, as well as some smaller games that have been delisted by now. Among them was Friday the 13th, a licensed asymmetrical PvP game not unlike Dead by Daylight, so Jason joining Behaviour's coterie of killers is a full circle moment of sorts.

The team that worked on that Friday the 13th game, which fully shut down at the end of 2024 after years without dedicated servers, is working on a follow-up themed around Halloween set to release later this year. It's hard to feel bitter—as long as we're being honest, Michael Myers is way cooler.

If you're itching to get stabby with The Slasher (so, slashy, maybe?), you won't be waiting long. Jason will be added to the game's public test build on Steam tomorrow, May 26, and the DLC will fully drop on June 16.

Flowers and survival horror might seem like a weird combination, but there's a surprisingly strong tradition of blending flora with scares in video games. The original Resident Evil had players fight a giant plant monster, and the whole premise of The Last of Us is basically "what if mushrooms were hostile?"

The Florist takes things to another level, however. The debut title from Unclear Games looks like something you might get if Jeff VanderMeer gave up the whole 'writing acclaimed novels' business and took a sudden and powerful interest in fixed-cameras and deliberately awkward combat. The debut title from Unclear Games puts plants at the front of centre of its survival horror experience, and the results look pretty darn interesting, at least going by its latest trailer.

The Florist puts you in the role of Jessica Park, who starts the game delivering a flower arrangement to a town called Joycliffe (which is not exactly Silent Hill in the order of great fictional town names).

Shortly after arriving, however, Jessica discovers that Joycliffe is suffering from a mysterious affliction that causes explosive floral growth. Which on its own sounds like a good thing, except these flowers can infect and kill humans before transforming them into the world's prettiest zombies.

The game itself looks like it'll play as a trad survival horror, going all in fixed camera angles, implausible environmental puzzles, and methodical, slow-burn combat. There's a whiff of tank controls to the available footage too, though it doesn't show enough of Jessica moving freely to call it one way or another.

While the mechanics may be traditional, in appearance The Florist is distinctly modern. Not just in all the hyper-detailed plan life scattered about—the trailer also shows off some quite nuanced scripted sequences, like a zombie-type enemy with a sackcloth hood smashing a big sack through a plank floor.

It's a shame that the trailer is so short, as I would have liked to have seen more of the game as it plays moment-to-moment. Nonetheless, it's more than enough to get me intrigued. There's no release date for The Florist as yet, but Unclear Games plans to launch sometime in 2026.

The hype is building for Zach Cregger's upcoming Resident Evil film. The first trailer released just a few weeks ago, and since then fans of the series have been drip-fed more information about Cregger's take on the iconic horror series, with his latest interview explaining what serves as inspiration for this film.

"Resident Evil is kind of the flagship for survival horror," Cregger says. "What I love about survival horror games, and Resident Evil mostly is this overwhelming feeling of dread. Where it's like I have to go down this long dark passageway I have two shotgun shells, I know there's a lot of shit in there waiting for me and it's all really bad but I had to go." Yeah, we've all been there Cregger.

One of the worst encounters I've had in a Resident Evil game was actually pretty recent, with it being in Resident Evil 8. Now some may know what I'm alluding to without me even having to explain any further. But for the record, it was that god damn giant fetus baby that lay underneath the house of Donna Beneviento.

Stripped of all the items and weapons I'd gathered thus far in the game, all I could do was run and hide from this giant baby that was calling out for me. What should have been a quick 20 minute segment ended up taking me almost an hour as I kept having to pause and catch my breath before continuing on down the dark labyrinth underneath the house. So, yeah, I'd say an "overwhelming feeling of dread" is a pretty good way to describe Resident Evil.

But unlike some of the more classic games, Cregger is taking a page out of Resident Evil 7's book: introducing a civilian into the mix who has no prior combat training or knowledge of weapons.

"I had this idea for a story in the world of Resident Evil, but it's kind of like me, like if I was dropped into a Resident Evil game," Cregger explains. "I'm terrible with guns I wouldn't know how any of them work I would miss 99% of my shots." This is accompanied by a genuinely funny shot of the protagonist Bryan missing a close-range shot on a door lock, I feel that pain.

"I loved the games, I played the games, I don't know how many thousands of hours, but too many. This is an opportunity for me to be loyal to the games in spirit and in tone, and build a story that just puts you in that scenario again, and again, and again with increasing stakes."

From what little I've seen alongside all the interviews and explainers Cregger has put out into the world, I'm actually pretty excited about this Resident Evil film—a sentence I never thought I'd hear myself utter.

Directive 8020 starts aboard the spaceship Cassiopeia, where you join a group of scientists venturing to the exoplanet Tau Ceti f. Tasked with setting up the next intergalactic colony, all these scientists are meant to do is take a look at the new planet and figure out how safe it is for the colonists following their ship. I'll save you the suspense: it's not very safe.

Before you can even get situated, an alien lifeform finds its way inside the ship, and from then on you're tasked with keeping the scientists on board away from harm, aka the shapeshifting alien lifeform that seems to have an infinite amount of teeth, eyes, and flesh.

It's a tough task, but one made infinitely easier thanks to Supermassive Games' new system, Turning Points. This mechanic treads new ground, taking a sledgehammer to the kind of tension you'd find in previous Supermassive Games like Until Dawn or House of Ashes—it shouldn't work, but it does.

I spoke highly of this system in my Directive 8020 review, as it allows players to rewind mistakes no matter how far along you are in the story. I don't love it for how it sanitises my poor decisions, no, Turning Points is quite literally a game changer; transforming Directive 8020 from a survival horror into a gory puzzle.

Before I dive into the glories of using Turning Points, here's a quick PSA: play Directive 8020 on Survivor mode first. This effectively turns Turning Points off, offering up a classic horrifying Supermassive Game. I did this for my first run and didn't regret it. It kept events suspenseful from start to finish as I typically had no clue how my actions would manifest in reactions, which made my blood pressure rise with every QTE.

It wasn't until my second and third runs that I switched Turning Points on, and my playthrough was better for it. It meant that I got all the nostalgic scares and stressors of previous Dark Pictures Anthology games, but with the new and improved horror puzzle aspects you get with Turning Points.

I say horror puzzle because, in the best way possible, that's what Turning Points turns Directive 8020 into. My second run through saw me trying to keep everyone on the Cassiopeia alive, through redoing botched QTE's, or retracing my steps to a decision that would have huge consequences down the line.

Then, in my third run, the puzzle kicked in as I set about trying to unlock every single scene in the game. I had great fun trying to line up sequences of events and decisions to unlock future outcomes.

I got good endings, not so good endings, emotionally confusing endings, and very bad endings, all of which had different requirements. But the most fun I had with Turning Points was finding all the interim scenes scattered throughout the game, whether that's seeing how a certain person would react if I argued with them instead of agreeing, or if I messed up a sequence which would lead to a horrific death.

This brings me onto another excellent feature of Directive 8020: its body horror. John Carpenter's The Thing is one of my all-time favourite movies (and honestly, I didn't hate Nightdrive's The Thing Remastered either), while Alien: Isolation is another one of my greats. Directive 8020 delivers on the same grotesque shapeshifter body horror and the dread of being stalked by a sci-fi monstrosity.

There are a colossal 44 death scenes in Directive 8020, with some being so graphic I had to cover the screen with my hands or just close my eyes, which in hindsight was rather more effective. That doesn't happen often, though, so I welcome it when it does.

The alien, otherwise known as The Entity, definitely makes my shortlist for best videogame monster. Its bulbous flesh engulfs the ship by Episode 5, leaving trails of eyes, teeth, bones, and any kind of biological matter really, meaning you have to constantly wade through all of its wretched biomass. But I don't just love it because it's disgusting, it's also pretty smart.

Like any shapeshifting alien worth its two cents, The Entity knows how to infiltrate a group. It's hinted pretty early on that this thing has been reading up on the scientists aboard the Cassiopeia, learning more about their personalities, plus professional and personal history, allowing it to seamlessly slip into the group undetected. I don't think I'd be able to pick it out from a line up—unless it had five eyes popping out the side of its head. I'd probably be able to spot it then.

So, if you enjoy watching grotesque space horrors bolt straight towards you, contemplating just how insignificant we all are in the face of neverending nothingness, or just enjoy sci-fi horror, you can check out Directive 8020 on Steam.

Remothered: Red Nun's Legacy's latest trailer reveals more of what players can expect from the third installment of the survival horror series. This is the story of one mother's venture to find her lost daughter along with a group of other young girls, all of whom went missing in Sicily.

The trailer picks up 14 months after the young girl went missing, as her mother Susan heads into the secluded and derelict Villa Ashmann in hopes of saving her daughter. Bad things, of course, ensue immediately. Before long she comes face to face with the Red Nun and her followers, who, may I just add, all give off big discount Silent Hill nun vibes.

Aside from the villa, some nuns / nurses, an old lady with a gun, and the big bad herself, we don't get to see much more about what this game may entail. But by the looks of things it'll be a mix of survival and psychological horror. The twisting villa and demonic inhabitants also remind me of Layers of Fear, and while I wasn't the biggest fan of that game's story I did love its take on psychological horror with a mansion that could endlessly change in a blink of an eye.

The end of the trailer reveals that we'll be getting another look at what it'll be like to actually play Remothered: Red Nun's Legacy early next month on June 7 during The PC Gaming Show, and that the game is currently available to wishlist on Steam. So I guess we'll have to wait a few more weeks before we get another look at the Red Nun and her demonic followers and what will actually be going on inside the cursed Ashmann villa.

Remember a couple years back, when some of the top men behind the Dead Space series dangled a fourth game in front of Electronic Arts, and the response was basically, "Lose my number?" It sounds very much like that was the last gasp for the once-great horror games, at least for the foreseeable future, as producer Chuck Beaver said in an interview with FRVR that it just doesn't have the juice to satisfy the C-suite.

Beaver, who served as a producer on all three Dead Space games, said the challenge facing Dead Space is a familiar one: It needs the potential to be a huge hit in order for EA to give it the green light, and the "numbers just aren't there."

"Horror games have a bit of a ceiling, you know, and I think the number back in [former EA vice president] Frank Gibeau’s day was five million units to keep going on Dead Space," Beaver said. "I think the number is like 15 million units now, given the cost of things."

That's "a sadness in capitalism for all of us to suffer," he said—at least "until AI makes it apparently easy for you and I to just type 'make Dead Space 4'." This, FRVR clarified (in case it needed clarification), was a joke.

It's true, though: Game development costs are skyrocketing, at least for so-called triple-A games, and that puts the cost of failure way up too: It's "a high-stakes game for big boys only," as Take-Two CEO Strauss Zelnick recently put it.

But there's a deeper problem facing games like Dead Space, too. "Companies now are looking for the next Fortnite," Beaver continued. "They need something that is a perennial moneymaker." Singleplayer games like Dead Space that come to the table with no live service offerings or endless monetization options are a "dinosaur fossil of a business model" by comparison.

Yeah, it sucks—Dead Space was great—but Beaver's not wrong. Dragon Age: The Veilguard was well-received by fans and critics but considered a failure by EA because it failed to "break beyond the core audience," as CEO Andrew Wilson said in 2025. And the lesson it learned from that? "Games need to directly connect to the evolving demands of players who increasingly seek shared-world features and deeper engagement."

At the same time, it's also fair to say that while many of us have fond memories of Dead Space (which, by the way, is almost 20 years old now, in case you weren't feeling sufficiently aged yourself), it's not exactly a world-beater. The 2023 remake of Dead Space was quite good but not a big seller, and The Callisto Protocol, a grisly Dead Space-like headed up by OG Dead Space executive producer Glen Schofield, met with a similarly flat response. Schofield, who left developer Striking Distance less than a year after the game launched, said in 2025 that he may be done making games entirely.

Konami has been gradually easing itself back into the business of making proper videogames in recent years and, as well as reviving the Metal Gear series with the Master Collection and an excellent remake of MGS3, has both remade Silent Hill 2 and co-developed Silent Hill f, the first properly new entry in the series since 2012's poorly received Downfall.

And the good news? It was great! We're never going back to the halcyon days of Team Silent, but PCG's Elie Gould reckoned this was "a true return to form" that received a stonking 90% in our review: "A game that not only can stand proudly shoulder to shoulder with other goliaths in the series, but one that is brave enough to take risks and deploy changes to set the groundwork for what I hope to be the new standard of Silent Hill games going forward."

Konami has now announced that Silent Hill f, released in September 2025, has sold over two million copies worldwide, as of April 22 this year. That's even more impressive in the context of the game itself, which is not a mainstream action blockbuster like your Resident Evils but a much more subtle horror experience set in 1960s Japan and woven around the culture's mythology. Protagonist Hinako and the choices she faces throughout, and the way her inner fears manifest, has convinced even the hardcore Silent Hill-ers that this series now has its identity back, and a real future ahead of it.

The game was developed by Neobards Entertainment with Konami's support, and of course published by Konami. I don't want to tempt fate here, but I'm very much liking what I've been seeing from Konami in recent times. Yes the MGS Delta and Silent Hill 2 remakes were arguably too faithful at times, but I thoroughly enjoyed both and am just glad to see one of the great development houses getting a little of its mojo back.

Clearly I'm not the only one. Delta took the Metal Gear series to over 65 million copies sold and, while that's Konami's big-budget golden goose, a new Silent Hill shifting over two million shows that the audience is there when the publisher delivers genuine quality. For all I love Resident Evil, Silent Hill was always the cool kid alternative and a genuinely distinct, much more unsettling style of horror: and with these kind of numbers, fingers crossed it's not 13 years before we see another.

Just as you think you've made it through a tense episode of Directive 8020, you hit a puzzle that requires a key code to progress. Whether you've decided to send a distress signal or a warning to Earth in episode 7, you'll still need to find the serial number for the probe. It's not exactly hidden in plain view either.

Much like every other key code you need to find throughout the game, you need four numbers to progress to the next part of the story. Rather than being a huge elaborate puzzle to solve, it's more about looking in the right places. Here's what you need to do so you can get into the probe.

How to find the serial number for the probe in Directive 8020

The serial number for the probe is 2540.

You can find the answer yourself by using the two screens displaying part of the number on either side of the probe. Due to the storm on Tau Ceti f corrupting the probe, conveniently, parts of the number on both serial number screens are missing. This is where the simple task becomes that little bit more challenging, as we've only got two parts, and one entire number seems to be missing.

Fortunately, the first screen is next to where you need to input the serial number and shows 40 at the end of the four-digit sequence. If you head around to the back of the probe, and look for where you pinch the replacement chip from, you'll find the second serial number screen. This only shows a 2 at the very beginning of the sequence, leaving the second digit for us to figure out. However, if you head toward the rocks to the right of the probe, you'll find a third serial number screen hidden behind them. This displays the final number we need to complete the sequence: 5.

You'll need to input this code once you've replaced the overloaded chip with the replacement unit found at the back in order to send either your distress signal to initiate your rescue, or the warning to Earth. This is one of the most significant sections of the game's story, and even though there's no alien lifeform stalking you down, it still feels like there's a lot of pressure on you to get it right the first time which doesn't help with remembering the order each number goes in.

One of the objectives you'll need to complete as medical officer Samantha Cooper in episode 5 of Directive 8020 follows on from an interaction where Anders asks you to help her get some sedatives for an "experiment" she wants to conduct. Not suspicious at all. If you've spent more time working on Cooper's "playful" personality, then you'll be able to agree to the plan. However, if you've been making sure Cooper stays professional, you may avoid this puzzle entirely.

Depending on your previous actions,as Cooper, you need to track down the three chemicals you have to combine to create a sedative. You aren't told what they are, instead, you're only given the chemical symbols. Unless your chemistry knowledge is up to scratch, this puzzle can seem a lot more challenging than it is. So, here's what you need to do.

How to find the correct chemical agents for Anders in Directive 8020

In the chemical cabinet, each of the three chemicals you need to solve this puzzle is linked to a number. This sequence in particular, and the number sequence you need to input into the keypad is 168. The three chemicals you need for Diazepam Synthesis are:

• Chloroacetyl Chloride
• Ammonia
• Dimethyl Sulfate

To the left of the cabinet, you'll find a poster showing the three chemical symbols of each. This makes it slightly more challenging to know what you need to use, especially if your chemistry knowledge isn't quite up to scratch. Fortunately, there are three posters around the room which show three different chemical symbols alongside their names, one being a chemical you need for the puzzle alongside two random ones, which help guide you toward the solution.

If you've got a notebook to hand, making a quick draft of the three you need definitely helps in this section. Even a screenshot does the trick. When you're face to face with nine possible chemical symbols in total, I found myself getting confused at which ones I needed and ended up inputting the wrong key code as a result.

Once you've punched in the correct code and combined the chemicals, you'll need to take it back to Anders. A cutscene will play, showing Anders taking the chemicals and you both reconvening in the wing to continue the objective before meeting back up with Williams. This marks the end of this storyline and puzzle, so you can crack on with the next steps of Ander's curious plan.

Directive 8020 is filled with locked doors and computers you need passwords to access, and when you're trying to quickly make your way through a section without getting spotted, not knowing where to look for key codes can make tasks a lot harder. It's impossible to stand around and input thousands of potential passwords, especially when any number of alien lifeforms could get to you before you find the correct one. So it's best to spend that time searching for hints instead.

The key code to Carter's PC is one of the first you'll need to discover in Episode 2, and fortunately it's one of the more straightforward passwords to uncover. You only need four numbers, rather than having to string together an actual passcode, and once you know what clue to look out for, you'll be gaining access to his files in no time. Here's what you need to do.

Where to find the key code to Carter's PC in Directive 8020

The key code you need to unlock Carter's PC is 2808. You can also use 0828.

The clue is the post-it note stuck to the front of his monitor which states "Luna's" and has an arrow pointing toward the screen. If you leave Carter's room into Crew Quarters, and turn right, there's a calendar on the wall. Inspect this by walking up to it and pressing the left mouse button, and it'll show you the month of August.

On the 28th, "Luna's Birthday" is written in bold letters. So, take this date alongside the month, and input it into the computer. It doesn't matter if you do the date first or the month, as they both unlock the PC. Interact with the computer again, and a cutscene will then play showing Simms walking into Crew Quarters, and then a new objective will appear instructing you to follow her.

You won't be able to interact with Carter's PC a second time once this cutscene has played, it's basically only there to trigger the next cutscene with Simms and raise Eisele's suspicions. Follow Simms through Crew Quarters and into the Lounge, where you'll find her in front of the monitor showing a log of her and Carter talking, and you'll be able to continue the story from there.

If you played a Cthulhu lore drinking game during The Sinking City then I pity your liver. It had tentacles, a New England setting, a sanity mechanic, a troubled private detective, an asylum level, analogies for racism incongruously placed next to depictions of actual racism—all these genre clichés shuffled onto its damp stage, shuffled around a bit, then shuffled off.

It wasn't a terrible game, but it was a bit of an odd fish, mixing horror with an open-world detective game like a version of L.A. Noire where you've got a rusty motorboat instead of a Chrysler. You could tell Frogwares, the developers of the Sherlock Holmes games, wanted The Sinking City to be about mysteries. But it was a chore crossing the open world every time you needed to hit up the archives or find a different abandoned house to search for clues, and many of its sidequests ended in monster shootouts in those samey abandoned houses.

The Sinking City 2 could have doubled down on detective stuff, becoming another Sherlock Holmes game in all but name. Instead, Frogwares stripped back the open world clue-hunting in favor of survival horror, and based on what I've played it's a success. This is Resident Evil: 1929, with the original Sinking City's psychic detective vision and knockoff Obra Dinn event-sequencing replaced with puzzles more typical for the genre (expect to hunt for a four-digit code to open a padlock more than once), and shooting that actually feels decent with a mouse and keyboard.

It's not a direct sequel. You play a shabby detective named Calvin instead of a shabby detective named Charles, the flooded city you're stuck in is Lovecraft's favorite city Arkham instead of Oakmont, and instead of tracking down the source of mysterious visions you're trying to revive your girlfriend, who has been comatose since you performed a ceremony and took an ill-advised trip to the Dreamlands together for funsies.

The first segment I got to play began in a waterlogged library where I had to find a book with a resurrection ritual that could undo the problems caused by the last ritual I got out of an occult book. Seems like trying to solve your cocaine problem by taking up heroin, but let's give it a shot.

Arkham's equivalent of zombies are possessed by leech-worm things and their skin boils with convenient weak-spot lumps, though the way they lurch around inevitably makes it hard to line up a shot on the left shoulder or wherever the latest pustule has appeared. Pop those arcane pimples and enemies drop long enough for a stomp attack, and while Calvin the haunted private detective may not be Leon Kennedy, in moments like these he proves an acceptable substitute.

As well as zombies, the first game's wylebeasts return, particularly the ones that look like a spider made of pale human arms. After leaving the library I hop in a boat to my next destination, getting distracted by a church on the way that turns out to be overrun by the things. Someone's tried to deal with them by surrounding the church with beartraps, and I manage to successfully lure a couple of wylebeasts onto the grim metal teeth without standing in them myself. That saves some bullets, though there's a crafting system just like the first game that lets me combine metal scrap and shell casings to make more.

One of my favorite improvements is that you can search cupboards and other containers for loot with a single press now instead of needing to hold down the key. It's the little things.

While the church isn't truly optional—there's a puzzle here to lift a gate to get to my next destination—there are optional things to do which can earn ammo and perk points. While there are heaps of perks to buy for upgrades to damage, toughness, and reload speed, you can only equip a limited number of them. In the demo I can only have one, though there are unlockable slots in the talent menu for two more.

I say "talent menu" but actually it's the silver face mask of your comatose girlfriend, which you carry on the back of the satchel where you keep spare bullets and health kits. Which is an agreeably odd detail, and not the only one in The Sinking City 2. There's the guy who has replaced his eyes with worms so he can read alien books, and locked doors with what I assume is alien-tech facial recognition that can be opened by carrying around the authorized person's skinned face.

Said doors appear in the second location I have access to, a spooky hospital from later in the game. Which is another tick for the Cthulhu lore drinking game, but a cliché that's balanced by more of that agreeable oddness. Like the safe rooms, which are intrusions from the Dreamlands that look like rooms from the idealized home you shared with your lost love. There's a gramophone with a seashell speaker (a returning prop from Throgmorton Manor in the first game) that you can save at, and the usual storage container and talent-resetting area.

The fact this space is an actual oddity in the world rather than just a menu makes it meaningful—at one point I popped in and out of a safe room and an NPC asked where I'd been, genuinely baffled that I temporarily stepped outside the confines of his reality. It's this kind of deliberate surrealness that gives The Sinking City 2 its unsettling atmosphere, that gives the dusty old Lovecraftian tropes back a bit of their power to unnerve.

The Sinking City 2 is due this summer and will be available on Steam, GOG, and the Epic Games Store.

Phasmophobia's latest update, which was pushed out prior to the Alan Wake collab that starts today, has not been received well by fans. So much so that the devs have issued an apology to players alongside a promise to fix the issues this update brought.

"We want to start today by apologising for our Player Character Update that launched last week," the devs say in a blog post. "It’s clear we missed the mark on this, and didn’t deliver on our promises to you. Your feedback and your reviews were justified. Our team has grown significantly over the last year, and with that comes a higher standard that, in this case, we failed to meet."

On top of existing bugs, players encountered new issues with character designs such as animations not working properly, alongside problems with hands and objects being misaligned.

"Who thought this looked well enough to publish," one player posts alongside an in-game video of wobbly legs. "The bendiness of the legs, just why? And the worst part is the stutter when you have your video-cam equipped, shit gives you straight up motion sickness."

ITS SO ASS LIKE WHO TF THOUGHT THIS WAS READY TO PUBLISH from r/PhasmophobiaGame

The Player Character update had been scheduled to give Phasmo a new lick of paint ahead of the Alan Wake collaboration. I completely understand wanting to polish the game up after all these years, but even without all the issues, I have to admit I was a little sad to see the original characters go—I actually enjoyed the OG jankiness.

"We know we now have a long journey ahead of us to earn back this community’s trust," the blog post continues. "We’ve begun to put plans in place to share more of our development processes with you on the way to 1.0, allowing you greater visibility into the work we’re doing and what you can expect from future updates for Phasmophobia. We ask that you stay tuned to our channels for more information on all of this in the future."

The latest patch did fix some issues such as head orientation and body movement, but even still there seems to be a real sense of weariness from the playerbase with this one. Some players have pointed out that Phasmo has a history of releasing poor updates and then following it up with quick fixes. Here's hoping there will actually be some lessons learned this time.

What a mess. An innocent man is dead on the ground, my crew are all looking at me like I've lost my mind, and worst of all, I've just ruined my 'survivor' run. Everyone was yelling that this guy was an alien, and in a game about shapeshifting aliens you can forgive me for thinking he was, indeed, a shapeshifting alien who needed killing—that probably won't hold up in court, though. But there's no need to dwell on trivial mistakes like summary execution. Not in Directive 8020. We can run this back, and this time, I'll look cool, collected, and very smart by not shooting the man everyone was calling an alien.

I thought the most exciting and refreshing aspect of Directive 8020, a decade on from developer Supermassive Games' Until Dawn, would be its shift to sci-fi. As a fan of Alien: Isolation and John Carpenter's The Thing it seemed to be my exact lane of horror. But to my surprise, what sets Directive 8020 apart is its new Turning Point system, which allows you to rewind pivotal moments and erase your mistakes.

It seems counter-intuitive given that so much of the tension in Supermassive Games' interactive narratives has always come from the finality of the decisions you make. You live and die by your choices, whether they be successes or failures. Directive 8020 takes a sledgehammer to that idea with the Turning Point system. It shouldn't work. But it does.

All aboard

This is largely thanks to Directive 8020's premise, location, and characters which make using Turning Points a must for more than just achievement hunters. I had an insatiable need to know more about the story and what would happen to my beloved crew if my decision making was just slightly off kilter.

It all starts aboard the spaceship Cassiopeia with a group of scientists venturing to the exoplanet Tau Ceti f. Driven to the edge of our known universe by a dying Earth and decaying Mars, these scientists are to pave the way for the next intergalactic colony. This can and does, of course, go disastrously wrong—thanks to said shapeshifting alien that bought me a one way ticket to prison. The story's gory twists and complex characters both warrant further exploration (or panicked undoing) using Turning Points.

I completed three full runs, with the last one seeing me hop around to every eventuality in what I'm now calling my 'anything goes' run. In all that time I came to appreciate the story and characters to the fullest by filling in gaps with extra notes scattered around the ship, many of which I didn't find or fully understand in my first playthrough. Particularly poignant was how Pari Simms, one of the sleep scientists, haunted the narrative through every run, via video diaries hidden in the deepest corners of the Cassiopeia.

Pilot protagonist Brianna Young and medical officer Samantha Cooper also stood out, with each one's story getting better every time I used Turning Points. At first Cooper comes across as a light-hearted yet professional medical officer who clearly cares about her crew. Standard doctor stuff. But she just kept putting herself in harm's way, or volunteering for certain death missions, and it took me until my second playthrough to find out what had happened on Jessop Station, a place I'd only heard allusions to for the first few hours.

It wasn't until a subsequent runthrough which I properly learnt of the reactor meltdown at Jessop Station which triggered an inferno blaze that engulfed everyone—Cooper was the sole survivor, leaving her with severe trauma and survivor's guilt. That shred of information completely changed the way I saw her recklessness.

Aside from gathering every shred of information because I'm just that nosey, the simpler reason to use the Turning Points system is because you want everyone to survive. Directive 8020 works hard to justify this gamer instinct with video recordings left to family members yearning for home cooking and inside jokes and quips shared amongst the crew. Every character feels and acts like a real person, and my affinity for them only grew with each new drop of information.

But I decided to first play Directive 8020 in survivor mode, which forbade ever undoing a decision. Sitting with each horrible outcome supplied the dread and tension that I'm used to when trying to keep everyone alive in a Supermassive game, and to no one's surprise I absolutely botched it—I'm talking game-ending levels of fucked it up.

After the bloody mess that was my first run, my next step was enabling Turning Points to ensure everyone survived, avoiding every poor decision, missed QTE, and painful death scene. That's an experience you could get in any other narrative horror game by following a guide. But it's really the in-between where Turning Points shines.

Anything Goes

All that was left was an 'anything goes' run where I sought to unlock every extra scene that was still left blank. From this point Directive 8020 shifted from survival horror to a bloody and somewhat confusing puzzle. It's not uncommon to restart a game to get a specific valued outcome, but the best part about Turning Points is that you can experience everything the game has to offer without starting from scratch (although some outcomes warrant early redos).

I meticulously worked through each story thread for each episode, I experienced every scene in the first episode and found that the most key decisions happened midway through the game, so I often found myself restarting from episode 5 to see what new gory detail I could unlock.

Alongside allowing you to jump to and from different decisions and outcomes Turning Points also displays what conditions you need to unlock certain scenes, meaning you can easily go back to the crucial point and play on from there.

I used Turning Points to change characters' personalities, from playful to professional, to unlock new endings by tweaking the conditions needed beforehand, and experience all the goriest death scenes, of course.

I was not disappointed: there are 44 death scenes in Directive 8020, and some of them are so disgusting I had to cover my screen with one hand. As time goes on, The Entity (the shapeshifting alien which had caused me so much grief) realises it doesn't need to infiltrate the group to kill them. The lifeform spreads through the ship, engulfing it in tendrils, flesh, teeth, bones, eyeballs, basically any biological matter you can think of. And it is yucky.

It makes for some of the best body horror I've seen in a game for quite some time, even though I played most of the game on medium graphics. The Entity's fleshy boils still look absolutely sickening when you turn the settings down to low.

It certainly makes my shortlist for best sci-fi killer: Taking inspiration from John Carpenter's The Thing sets a pretty high bar, and the idea of 'crew goes to space, meets alien, alien hunts them' is hardly original. But neither ends up rendering Directive 8020 rote thanks to Supermassive's decision mechanics and savvy twists.

The good ending

I have been quietly hoping that Directive 8020 would be great for quite some time now. After a slew of Dark Pictures games that failed to hit the mark for me, I've been waiting for Supermassive to deliver on a game that's utterly captivating from start to finish. After playing it for over 20 hours, finishing multiple endings, and killing the crew in all sorts of morbid ways, I'm really happy to see that hope manifest into reality.

It's clear that Directive 8020 is built atop the promising but uneven Dark Pictures Anthology games Supermassive has worked on for the past decade. But it takes a bold step in the right direction with the Turning Point mechanic, and a confident leap into the cold vacuum of space.