Outlast has long since established itself as a horror gaming staple with an impressive track record of two mainline games, a DLC, and an online multiplayer game that still scares the bejesus out of me. So it's hard to believe that there was a time when developer Red Barrels was unsure whether or not it'd even be able to get it out of the door.

After trying and failing to convince Ubisoft to let him make a horror game and just generally feeling like it was time to move on, Philippe Morin, co-founder of Red Barrels decided to leave and form a small 10-person team with developers from other big-budget studios. Their first pitch: a horror game.

“We thought at first that we’d come up with the pitch within three or four months and shop it around to a few publishers," Morin says in an interview with GameSpot. "And we’d find out pretty quickly if it works or not." Unfortunately, it turned out to be the latter, at least at first.

Morin explains how many of the publishers they approached would “rather invest $50,000 in 10 mobile games than $500,000 in [Outlast].” This was likely equal parts because of how obsessed everyone was with mobile games back then and thanks to how niche the horror genre was perceived as. 13 years later the horror genre is still perceived as one of the smaller areas of interest in gaming, despite all of the amazing games released and the revival of two staples, Silent Hill and Resident Evil.

“We were experienced game developers,” Morin says. “But we didn’t know much about that side–publishing and marketing and sales and all that. So we had to learn on the fly.”

Red Barrel finally had to turn to a publicly funded investment program, the Canada Media Fund (CMF) to finance Outlast, with a whopping $1 million dollar investment. But even that wasn't enough. The developers had to take money out of savings, credit cards, and leverage home mortgages to get the project over the line; a huge financial risk. “Everything was pretty much on the line,” Morin recalls. “Of course, it meant working very long, long hours. We were in a sprint to release the game before running out of money.”

Luckily this story ended well, very well actually. After just five months Red Barrels managed to hit the goal of 400,000 copies sold and while not all of them were at full price after sales it was still enough for the team to get some "pretty significant bonuses."

Outlast would go on to sell 15 million copies as of 2018 and spawn three other games, the final being the recent multiplayer horror game The Outlast Trials which achieved an all-time concurrent player count peak just 11-days ago of 147,955. Pretty solid for a multiplayer survival horror game.

Gamedev may as well be conducted in a black box as far as many players are concerned, so it can be easy to think of a good game as one where development went smoothly and a bad game as one where things went terribly awry. But in the case of The Outlast Trials, making something sickeningly good took a lot of struggle.

As Red Barrels co-founder Philippe Morin told Gamespot in a recent interview, it took six years to turn the vague notion of a co-op Outlast game into something ready to launch via early access. It was "a fucking long time," as he recalled it, and the product of "a shit-ton of prototypes."

"[The Red Barrels team] went too far trying to make [The Outlast Trials] systemic, random, and trying to reach our ultimate goal of infinite replayability," he told Gamespot. "We needed to come back to something that maybe added less replayability, but definitely felt more like Outlast." The article notes that a seemingly shippable build was produced within four years, but playtests went poorly enough to send the team back to the drawing board.

I suppose concerns about replayability have been put to rest now that it's mutated into a sizable live service game with around 20,000 people playing as I write this, though the game's ongoing development isn't entirely free from strife—as the article points out, players are mixed on its use of AI-generated imagery, and Outlast 3 was seemingly put on the backburner after Trials proved a huge success.

Hellraiser: Revival's commitment to being both gnarly and horny has already been thoroughly documented, with PC Gamer's Wes Fenlon describing it as "nasty nasty" in his preview . This uncompromising attitude to both gore and kink went down well with fans, but it has also been celebrated by Hellraiser's creator, Clive Barker.

In an interview with horror site Dread Central (via FRVR), Barker admitted that he had concerns about the project going into it, but was thoroughly impressed by the final product. "I'm proud as f**k at the end result," he said. "I was fearful at one point that the game would be overly censored, but I'm genuinely astonished by how far they've been able to push it."

Barker, who worked closely with developer Saber Interactive to shape Revival's world and to advise on the game's story, reckons that Saber Interactive's work on the game is a prime example of how to approach adapting a license. "I think what was achieved in the game is a wake-up call to anyone who's been involved in the making of a franchise like Hellraiser," the author and director explained.

Barker reclaimed the American franchise rights to Hellraiser several years ago, and Hellraiser: Revival is written as a legacy sequel that ignores the trajectory of the films after Hellraiser 2. "There are many of the Hellraiser movies that were made by the Weinstein brothers that were created simply to hold onto the rights," Barker explained, pointing out that "less and less" money was spent on those films over time. "It's not the fault of the writers and directors, but just the way the system works in some cases."

But it seems the experience of working with Saber on Revival has whetted Barker's appetite to further explore the universe he created. "I have many ideas that I'd like to see realised in the Hellraiser universe, and I'm planning to keep my fingers in that pie," he said. For now, these ideas are being explored in a new series of comic books, but Barker says that he'd "love to go further in the movies."

Barker also strongly implied that Hellraiser: Revival does not represent the end of his collaboration with Saber. "I'm looking forward to working with them again on some other projects." It isn't clear whether this would be a sequel to Revival or an adaptation of a different work by Barker.

The positive reception to Hellraiser: Revival will likely be a relief to Saber Interactive too, following this summer's Rideshare Stimulator controversy. In August, Saber CEO Matt Karch denied accusations that the company had replaced Rideshare Stimulator writer Stella Sacco with ChatGPT, then issued an apology to Sacco for the way he publicly spoke about her following the allegation. Alongside all this, Saber admitted to using generative AI in a general sense, but the company's CCO Tim Willits assured players the tech is not used in Hellraiser: Revival or ongoing projects like Jurassic Park: Survival and Space Marine 3.

Red Barrels' Outlast series has long held a reputation for pushing the envelope further than most horror games, with depictions of violence, gore and nudity that can be shocking even within a medium well versed in delivering scares. But it isn't just audiences who have found the studio's games shocking beyond the virtual horror norm. As co-founder Phillipe Morin recently revealed, there have been numerous instances where people in and around the studio have found working with the material frightening to the point of being traumatic.

In a chat with Gamespot, Morin discussed the studio's unflinching approach to horror, explaining that it wasn't a deliberate attempt to court controversy, and was simply a "personal preference" on Morin and the other co-founders' behalf. "We didn't start like 'Oh, we've got to make the goriest game out there'" Morin explained. "It was just, 'we're making a horror game, so obviously we'll make it gory. I remember even the scriptwriter early on was saying, 'There's never too much blood.'"

Nonetheless, the intense and graphic nature of Outlast' horror has proved triggering within the studio. During the interview, Morin recalls one incident involving an individual associated with Red Barrels—possibly an employee, though Morin doesn't state this explicitly. "We started pushing and pushing, and you know, I remember there was a playtest, and somebody, after a couple of hours, basically ran out of the studio to go cry outside." Apparently, this person never returned to the studio.

Morin says that Red Barrels is not oblivious to the potential effect of its games on people, and that this informs how the studio approaches recruitment. "When we do job interviews, we always make sure that people are fully aware of the kind of content we create and the kind of conversations needed to create that content," he explains, adding that "People have to be comfortable with that because obviously you hear stuff in the studio that [if] you said the same thing in a different studio, you'd end up in a meeting with HR."

Yet these attempts at transparency with potential employees have not always been successful, as Morin explains. "We had one case of somebody who started working with us on Monday, and then on Thursday they resigned because even though they knew about the gore and the violence, they had a blind spot for other things, more so about religion, and they were not comfortable with that." While Morin doesn't specify when this occurred, it's likely that it happened during the development of Outlast 2, the story of which revolves around a violent Christian cult.

Yet while some people may have found Red Barrels' horror to be too much, the broader audience has absolutely lapped it up. The most recent game in the series, The Outlast Trials, sold half a million copies in its first week of early access, while the series as a whole has attracted a whopping 60 million players since 2013. Hence, if Red Barrels ever does make Outlast 3, it's unlikely the studio will soften its approach.

I am a stakhanovite, a hero-worker. My productivity is not measured in grams but kilos. My working hours have been divided and subdivided into ultimate efficiency: not a nanosecond is wasted.

That is, in Flesh Grinding, whose demo I've been mucking about with. Not in real life, where my working hours consist mostly of staring at a blank Google Doc and wondering if I'm a moron who could never actually write at all.

Anyway, Flesh Grinding, which releases in Q4 2026—not to be confused with Fleshgrinder, which releases in Q1 2027; good luck—is a labour simulator. It's also one of those PS1-style horror games that are so fashionable right now. But mostly it is a game about working.

Working, specifically, with flesh—great, distended chunks of the stuff that plop down from the ceiling and amass in shiny piles. You must pick them up, walk them to your grinder, then turn them to mince. You must do this until your IV drip runs out of fluid, at which point it is time to return to your home and upgrade yourself, spending the millilitres of blood you scrounged from your grinding on upgrades.

Hit your goal (a kilo of meat at first, then five kilos, and so on) and new areas open up with new machines—feed a lump of flesh to this thing and it will spit out IV-replenishing potions, that kind of thing, which add entirely new aspects of the fundamental flesh-grinding loop to think about and strategise for.

You're no longer just trying to run as quickly as possible between your flesh pile and your grinders. Now you have to figure out when in the process to stop at the new machines, how to run a perfect loop that wastes the absolute minimum amount of time you get each day on the factory floor.

In this way, it is exactly like real life.

No, really. Or, well, sort of really. I've definitely worked jobs that felt as grey and arduous as standing at Flesh Grinding's, uh, flesh grinder and attempting to maximise the return of each stifling second—to cram as much compensable work into every fragment of time I had before the inevitable burnout set in. It wasn't quite an IV drip of unknowable motivating fluid or an endless parade of shapeless flesh: it was writing freelance marketing copy, which was worse.

I'm rather impressed by Flesh Grinding for condensing this experience down into its sickly gameplay loop. It's a laborious work sim that nonetheless feels quite moreish, that tempts you to return day after day to make some new tweak to your routine or to test out a new machine.

That's what's really horrifying, I say. I mean, sure, the blood and strange ethereal figures and creepy grandmother and ever-multiplying religious icons are also, probably, scary to someone, but surely far less than the constant reminder that the trade you make for being alive is selling eight hours (at least) of your day, every day, to distant and unknowable forces, and all the wear on your body and mind that entails. And then you spend your off hours trying to compute how to come in the next day and do it all even more efficiently. What a horrible scam we've played on ourselves. What a, um, grind.

Silent Hill's resurrection is one of the happier stories to emerge from the games industry in recent years. After spending roughly a decade locked in a Konami cupboard, Silent Hill has received three new entries published by Konami in as many years, all of which arrived to positive reviews and, seemingly, healthy sales. But if Silent Hill 2 Remake, Silent Hill f, and Silent Hill: Townfall still haven't satisfied your craving for allegorical horror in foggy towns, fret not, because Konami has plenty more plans for the series' ongoing revival.

In an interview featured in Famitsu (via IGN), Silent Hill producer Motoi Okamoto explained that Konami is "relieved" by both the critical and commercial reception to the aforementioned three games. "All three titles we initially announced were able to be released successfully," Okamoto said, adding that, "they've also received high praise, and we are satisfied with it."

Okamoto went on to say that the games released so far only represent the "first wave" of Konami's planned games for the series, and that there's not one but two additional waves on the drawing board. "Successfully launching this 'first wave' comes with great relief, but we're not stopping here; we must think of the second and third waves," Okamoto stated. "We can't share specific details, but we're currently looking at a number of projects."

It's a very different situation from where Silent Hill was only a few years ago. During the chat, Okamoto revealed that persuading Konami's executive to pursue new entries in the series has been challenging, especially after the cancellation of Hideo Kojima's Silent Hills in 2015.

While Okamoto eventually got Silent Hill 2's remake greenlit, he was convinced that "just one remake is not enough". According to the producer, his reasoning was "if there were only one release, wouldn't people think that the development is going to be cancelled again?"

While Konami is keeping details of its future Silent Hill projects under wraps, we do know about one of them already. After its excellent remake of Silent Hill 2, Bloober Team is turning its attention to the 1999 original. Remaking the original will represent an interesting challenge, considering how much simpler its narrative is compared to its legendary sequel, and I'm curious to see how Bloober Team will approach it.

As for whether NeoBards Entertainment and Screen Burn Interactive will return to the series after their takes on Silent Hill, this is yet to be confirmed. But according to our resident Silent Hill expert Elie Gould, both developers certainly have what it takes. In their Silent Hill f review, Elie described the Japan-set action-horror as a "true return to form". As for exploring the Scottish town of St Amelia, Elie wrote that Screen Burn "absolutely understands what makes a great Silent Hill game" in their Silent Hill Townfall review.

One of the most beloved horror games (demos?) of all time is finally free from the shackles of the PS4. Hideo Kojima's P.T. has been natively ported to PC by programmer Lorean Xavier, who made the project public this week. Not an emulator nor a remake, the native PC client does not contain any copyrighted materials—it requires a dumped copy of P.T. to function—but instead translates the original code into something that'll run on Windows and Linux.

That distinction not only sidesteps potential corporate scrutiny, but also allows Xavier to add modern graphical features and mod support to the PC version. It's an impressive effort that, according to the creator, has been in the works since 2024.

"I wanted to make the version of P.T. that my younger self always wished existed," Xavier, 21, told PC Gamer over email. "My attachment to the game goes all the way back to my childhood. I remember watching videos of it on my phone, wishing I could experience it myself. I didn't have a PS4, so playing the original was never really an option for me. I never imagined back then that I'd eventually be the one bringing it to PC."

The window to play P.T. "legitimately" was famously brief. Kojima surprise-dropped P.T. on the PlayStation Network in 2014 as a "playable teaser" for the Silent Hills reboot he was making with Guillermo Del Toro. When Kojima and Konami had a falling out, Silent Hills was canceled and P.T. got caught in the breakup, being delisted in early 2015. The horror classic has persisted only through emulation and preserved PS4 hard drives—until now.

"The idea that something so influential could eventually become practically unplayable never sat right with me," Xavier added.

"There have been several PC remakes over the years, and I appreciate that people tried to preserve the experience, but none of them ever really satisfied me," Xavier said. "Something always felt off, whether it was the lighting, the atmosphere, the interactions, or the way certain events played out. They could resemble P.T. visually, but they never truly felt like the original to me.

"And that's exactly why I wanted to do this differently. I didn't want to make another interpretation of P.T. or recreate it approximately in another engine. I wanted the actual experience, with its original assets, sounds, animations, and behavior, running natively on PC."

While the project is "not a modified version or fork of [PS4 emulator] shadPS4," the emulated version was an "extremely valuable" reference to compare the original game's behavior to the port.

We're in weird and wild times for the recompilation scene as gen AI has accelerated the creation of console-to-PC ports, often with janky, hastily-vibecoded results that make good preservation more difficult. Xavier is open about using AI in his workflow, but believes it's no replacement for "actually knowing what you're doing."

"I think there's an important distinction between using AI as a development tool and blindly relying on it to create an entire project you don't understand. In my case, I use AI to help with debugging, identifying issues, testing code, and working through problems when I get stuck. It can be incredibly useful for accelerating that process, especially when you're working alone on something this complicated.

"But I'm still the one responsible for the architecture, the implementation decisions, writing and reviewing the code, and understanding how the different systems fit together. My years of experience with reverse engineering and P.T. are what allow me to direct that process in the first place."

In terms of faithfulness, the port has the seal of approval from at least one person who would know: Lance McDonald, the Australian creator who datamined P.T. and discovered many of its secrets back in the day, is impressed by what he reckons is a "1:1 port of the entire codebase."

You can check out the "PT-PC" project for yourself on GitHub.

Amid celebrations for Resident Evil's 30th anniversary, executive producer Jun Takeuchi revealed what future plans Capcom had for the Resident Evil series, including what will happen after the devs run out of games to remake.

"The current 'Resident Evil' series is being developed along two tracks: the numbered titles allow players to experience the ongoing story of the series, while the remake series allows them to experience the past," Takeuchi says (via RENEWS). This isn't new information as Capcom has begun its huge remake project in 2019 (with the Resident Evil 2 remake) and has since gone on to give Resident Evil 3 and Resident Evil 4 facelifts as well, with the next scheduled to be Code: Veronica.

It seems that Capcom is planning to finish remaking all the older games, perhaps pre Resident Evil 7 which Takeuchi deems as a "turning point" for the series. So if that's true we may expect to see the following:

• Resident Evil 0: A yes from me, just to see Billy Coen again.
• Resident Evil: Will this be the first remake of a remake?
• Resident Evil: Revelations: This could go so hard in the hands of the RE remake team.
• Resident Evil: Revelations 2: I'm in just so Moira could get a better backstory.

And then there are the big two, Resident Evil 5 and Resident Evil 6; it was bound to happen eventually. It was perhaps wishful thinking that Capcom was going to let these games slip into distant memory. While I think there is a world in which Resident Evil 5 and 6 could actually be redeemed, both games will need a hell of a lot of work and reshaping for this to happen, and I'd hate to see the series falter on these two games yet again.

Let's just say Capcom does successfully remake all of these games and the world doesn't completely implode. All of these remakes will buy the studio about 12 years, with Capcom's current schedule of releasing a remake once every two years. Now, 12 years is a long time, but it's not forever, and I think Capcom intends to carry on forever. So what will happen when everything is remade? The cycle could just carry on with a Resident Evil 7 remake, it'd be about 21 years old at that point, or Capcom could have something else up its sleeve.

"Someday, the remake series will catch up with the era of the numbered titles, and we are already thinking about what we will do when that happens," Takeuchi adds. "In fact, we have been gradually preparing for that since around 'Resident Evil Village.' The appearance of names such as Umbrella and Spencer, as well as the return of Raccoon City in 'Requiem,' are also in preparation for a 'crossover'.

"One of the reasons we regard '7' as a turning point for the series is that it was also the title where we began working on this kind of setup. At first, we included these elements with the sense that they were fan service, but users were far more delighted by them than we had imagined, and they even began analyzing the thoughts that the development team had privately kept to itself. So, as a series, we decided to respond to users’ expectations and pushed this setup further in 'Village' and 'Requiem'."

While I appreciate getting to experience older games and get a hit of nostalgia, I'm far more interested in what Capcom has got on the drawing board for its new games. Requiem managed to free the series from the shackles of Umbrella (kinda, sort of, it was good enough for me). But I would love to see more twists, new plot threads, and new characters. The world of Resident Evil is far too interesting to get bogged down in remakes.

Silent Hill: Townfall is a suffocating experience, especially if you're like me and love tormenting yourself with stealth, limiting the use of any kind of weapon. I spent almost all of my first playthrough forgoing any pipe or plank, or even pistol in favour of my trusty CRTV and top-notch strategy. But my pacifist run stopped dead in its tracks when I got my hands on the shotgun.

Silent Hill: Townfall spoilers ahead

Every horror game fan will know the liberating power of getting your hands on a shotgun in a game where you've done nothing but cower and run from danger—finally, you get to be the danger. Turns out the horrors are trapped inside this game with you, not the other way around.

I may have embodied this a bit too much when I got my hands on the shotgun in Richard's section of Townfall. Tasked with making it to the top of a 10 story office building, you need to solve puzzles and clear the way all while fending off a new kind of Silent Hill monster: the widow.

These are bloodied creatures with shrouds of flesh covering their faces. They'll hide behind doors, under desks, or just anywhere that's a bit shadowy. They'll jump out at you, stab you with a knife, and then run off to yet another hiding place. It didn't really bother me at first, their attacks don't deal a massive amount of damage, so I just kind of decided to live and let live, for a short while at least.

Before I knew it I couldn't take a step without one of these widows hurling themselves out of the shadows and attacking me. The final straw was when they interrupted my loot hunting—a precious pastime that I hold very dear—so I decided to make use of the shotgun and the very large stock of ammo I'd built up.

Eventually I'd cleared out every floor. I actually went out of my way to ensure I could walk freely around the office building without being pestered. But then I looked closer at the piles of dead bodies lying at my feet. Uh oh, I have succumbed to my inner rage and have perpetrated the same cycle of anger and death that got us stuck in this situation in the first place, becoming the true monster of Silent Hill again. Whoopsie.

On further inspection these widows had the photos of their deceased loved ones stapled to their bodies. Precious people that my character had indirectly, but essentially killed due to his own greed and hubris. No wonder they're angry.

On reflection I did also notice that some of the monsters were perhaps hiding from me. And hunting them down with a shotgun probably wasn't the most empathetic thing to do to people who were simply enraged by the loss of a loved one. Dammit—this is why I keep getting the bad ending.

Apart from the fact that this section made me question all the morals I thought I had, it was one of my favourites because of how well Screen Burn was able to craft and convey who Richard was in such a short amount of time. Yes, he's clearly evil, like pantomime levels of evil. But I didn't really mind that because by the end of this section I was genuinely convinced that he thought he was doing the right thing for the good of the town as well as himself.

Complex characters like this who aren't built to be liked but appropriately examined do so well in Silent Hill because of the nature of the curse. Richard has enough turmoil, inner strife, rage, and regret to power like three different Silent Hills simultaneously. While I would've loved to see more about how his twisted mind would've warped St Amelia, this section is enough for me. Though, I don't think I'll be able to look at a shotgun in a horror game the same way again.

Silent Hill: Townfall is a suffocating experience. Monsters around every corner, limited supplies, and a whole lot of puzzles. But that all changed when I got my hands on the shotgun. Now I am the danger and these monsters are really bad at hiding.

It's been a while since I set foot nervously inside the Playtime Co. factory, but last time I was there I was hounded through the halls and air vents by a towering blue plush toy that wanted nothing more than to hug me to death.

I played a bit of the multiplayer prequel to Poppy Playtime this week, and I can now report that there's something even scarier than that giant Huggy Wuggy doll roaming the factory. Her name is Miss Delight. You can meet her yourself because the Escape from Playtime open beta is now live on Steam and you can try out the game all weekend long.

This time you're one of the cute little Playtime toys, like a plush bunny, a cartoony cat, or a fluffy unicorn, and your goal is to escape the accursed factory with your pals by skittering through the dark corridors and shadowy rooms collecting supplies. Fill a cart with enough useful junk and you can advance to the next shift. Complete all the shifts and you're free. But it's not gonna be easy.

In my session we were stalked by progressively more monstrous toys each shift we completed. There are toy robots who speed toward you when detected and explode on contact, though if a teammate bonks them in the back of the head with a thrown object first, they shut down. There's also a Cat Bee (it's a cat dressed like a bee) that latches onto players and poisons them until, again, another player knocks them off with a thrown object. You can already see the purpose of sticking together.

Then there's Miss Delight. You'll know she's around by the clicking of her high heels echoing through the factory. She, like Huggy Wuggy, is tall, towering over you (especially since you're just a little stuffed toy) and insta-murdering you if she catches you. Thing about Miss Delight is that it's simple to stop her in her tracks: just shine a flashlight in what's left of her face.

But somehow Miss Delight standing there staring at you is worse than Huggy Wuggy chasing you down. Turns out there's something worse than an unstoppable monster, and it's a monster that stops. And stands there motionless. Staring at you. With bright, shiny dead eyes a gaping, hungry mouth. Just standing there, completely still, staring… right up your flashlight battery dies.

That's not the only warning about Escape from Playtime. Mob Entertainment has one too:

"We want to emphasize that this is very much a playtest looking for your feedback," the developer says. "This build has many work-in-progress aspects, experimental features, experiments with balance, and locked away features. Your feedback from this Beta Playtest will greatly aid in the development of the launch build and beyond!"

There will be a survey after you play if you'd like to give feedback. The open beta runs until 6 pm PT on Sunday, October 4, and supports up to eight players (with at least groups of four recommended). Find the full beta details here.

I was brought up with the mindset that when you start something you should see it through to the end, even if it gets a bit tricky. So perhaps that's why Resident Evil dropping its in-built Roman numerals irks me so.

It all started with Resident Evil: 7 Biohazard where the Roman numerals for seven were shoved into the 'Evil' and then continued with Resident Evil: Village. So, in the lead up to Resident Evil 9 I was on tenterhooks, eager to find out how Capcom was going to incorporate IX into its title.

I had my own theories, settling on Helix or Appendix as my favourite options. It made sense in my head, what with their respective links to DNA as well as the T-virus, and an icky body part that simultaneously means something that comes at the end of a story—I really liked appendix.

Alas, we didn't get either or those—we didn't get an IX at all—we got Resident Evil Requiem.

I made my peace with Requiem, it has cool connotations for the game, referring to a prayer for the soul of the deceased or a general act of remembering someone who has died. I also saw one promotional image that turned the 'q' in Requiem into the number nine, so that's something, maybe. But wait, there's more.

Resident Evil's executive producer Jun Takeuchi has revealed in chat with Japanese press for RE's 30th anniversary (via GamesRadar) that the name Requiem holds much more than just the above, bog-standard meaning:

"Let me give you a hint: 'Requiem' isn't just a title chosen for its meaning of 'requiem.' The spelling of Requiem (REQUIEM) contains not only the 'RE (response)' mentioned earlier, but also a 'Q (question).' In other words, this 'Requiem' presents both an 'answer' and a 'question.' I will explain the meaning of that at some point in the future."

Yeah, I don't think I'm entirely on board with this breakdown of Requiem. I guess it makes sense but it's also giving off GCSE English blue curtain vibes. I am, however, intrigued to find out more about this in the future, and perhaps we can also discover what the rest of Requiem stands for. Who knows, it could go something like: 'U' for you the player, 'I' for me, the player, 'E' for evil residents, and 'M' for me, the player, again (I get two because I'm special).

Log this under "Mods that I'm glad exist but, just being honest here, I will probably never actually install it": Bryan, the dope from Zach Cregger's Resident Evil movie (which is great, btw) has been modded into Resident Evil 2. This is the everyman more games need: not a cop with nerves of steel but a screaming dope who can't hit the broad side of a torso monster with a full clip. Grab it on Nexus Mods.

Holy [BLEEP], they got [BLEEP]ing Peaches to do [BLEEP] the Pain Away for the Hellraiser game. Most opportunistic promotional crossovers leave me cold (or annoyed) but I have to admit, this one, to borrow the words of PC Gamer hardware writer (and Peaches fan) Jess Kinghorn, is legit a banger. Originally released in 2000, Fuck the Pain Away was Peaches' big hit, and it's been used in numerous movies and TV shows in the years since. But what makes it work so well here is that this remix and video doesn't come off as forced or awkwardly shoehorned in: This is pretty much (warning, NSFW) what Peaches would do anyway.

The new Fuck the Pain Away video for Hellraiser: Revival is also extraordinarily NSFW—so much so that it's not embeddable here. You have to go watch it on YouTube.

Today's basically a national holiday for Resident Evil fans. September 30 marks 28 years since the day the cop inside Leon S Kennedy died, the day he'll never forget; when Raccoon City was wiped out by Umbrella's classic mishandling of bioweapons in Resident Evil 2.

So to celebrate the day that made Leon S Kennedy who he is, I've collated all the most traumatic experiences I've had in Resident Evil games:

But enough about me and all my trauma, what about you guys? I'd be morbidly interested to know what your most traumatic memories from Resident Evil are. But please, no more chase scenes, my heart can't take it.

Like many people, I'm a big fan of quickfire submarine horror adventure Iron Lung. Yet despite receiving rave reviews and spawning a film adaptation by Markiplier, surprisingly few games have picked up its baton of vehicular terror. There are other submarine horror games like Barotrauma, as well as job-based horror games like Klekta and Shift at Midnight. But the former has quite a different vibe, while the latter pair seem more inspired by Lethal Company than David Szymanski's 2022 horror.

Which is why I'm so intrigued by The Temple, an upcoming Half-Life 2 total conversion that likewise lets players pilot a terror submarine. But the temple ups the ante by adapting the scares into two other forms of transportation, taking players out of the depths all the way up into space.

The Temple is set on an aquatic planet dotted by strange, concrete megastructures, which you're tasked with exploring using three separate vehicles. One, as mentioned, is a submarine that will take you into the depths of its ocean. The others are an airship for exploring its skies and abandoned towers, and a space shuttle that lets you travel to asteroidal moons that orbit the planet.

The Temple was originally released as a pair of maps for MapLabs, a mod that collects together maps from various Source engine modding competitions. While that initial version was fairly short—around 20 minutes in length—the total conversion will revamp and expand those two existing maps, while also adding a third map for over two hours of exploration-based sci-fi horror.

There's a trailer for the mod that you can watch above, which shows all three of its vehicles in action. For a short Half-Life 2 mod, it looks pretty accomplished, with a real eye for colossal structures. The mod also features Amnesia: The Dark Descent-style invisible water monsters, and a talking crow (or at least, a crow whose corvid language you can understand), which will help guide you through the experience.

That alone is sufficient to convince me to check The Temple out. While there's no specific release date for The Temple yet, its creator, who goes by Klems, says that it will launch "very soon, possibly next month".

Opening the auxiliary lines at the end of Part 6 in Silent Hill: Townfall is perhaps its most complicated yet simple puzzle. By this point in the game my brain was completely fried and my nerves were shot. So in case you're also in a bad spot, here are some tips to point you in the right direction.

Spoilers ahead for Silent Hill: Townfall

How to get to the Auxiliary Room

Before you head to the elevator and go up to the auxiliary room, you'll need to get the key. This can be found in the command centre, and the code to get into it is 0825. Inside, you'll find the key to the auxiliary room. Now you can head downstairs to the elevator, but be warned—this is where The Weight and other monsters are lurking, so you need to be cautious. You can make a mercy dash to the elevator as the doors close quickly, but it'll be tight.

Once you've made it to the next floor, there'll be a couple of smaller monsters who you can easily circumvent. Make sure to close the door to the auxiliary room once you're inside.

How to open the auxiliary lines

Here you'll find a pipe running across the walls with levers at various intervals. There's also a locker and a desk with a terminal. The first step is to open the locker and find the floppy disk. Then, head to the terminal and use the floppy disk to get your clue: a bunch of lines.

At first glance, this could look like morse code or some other cipher, but actually it's much simpler than it seems: It shows whether each lever needs to be horizontal or vertical. But not every lever is included: only the ones which are adjacent to one white line for the first row, two lines for the second, and three lines for the third.

Auxiliary Line 1

Auxiliary line 1 solution: | _ | | _ | _ | |

The first line starts on the wall next to the locker, just by the white arrow at the bottom of the wall, and includes all the levers which are next to the singular white lines on the pipes. The pattern goes like this:

1. vertical
2. horizontal
3. vertical
4. vertical
5. horizontal
6. vertical
7. horizontal
8. vertical
9. vertical

If you've done it right the light next to the last lever should turn green.

Auxiliary Line 2

Auxiliary line 2 solution: | _ _ _ | _ _ | |

The second line starts on the wall next to the locker by the middle white arrow. The pattern should be:

1. vertical
2. horizontal
3. horizontal
4. horizontal
5. vertical
6. horizontal
7. horizontal
8. vertical
9. vertical

Again, if you've done this right, then the light next to the last lever should turn green.

Auxiliary Line 3

Auxiliary line 3 solution: _ | | | _ | _ |

The third line starts on the opposite wall to the other two, above the second light that just turned green and the pattern should be:

1. horizontal
2. vertical
3. vertical
4. vertical
5. horizontal
6. vertical
7. horizontal
8. vertical

Again, if you've done it right the final light will turn green. That's the end of that, and now you can leave the room (be careful of the creepies), head back to the elevator, and make your way back to the control room (avoiding The Weight and other monsters) to wrap up your segment in the command centre.

I've played enough horror games at this point to wonder whether I'd be any good at actually surviving one. While some games are simply out of the question after finishing Silent Hill: Townfall recently I came to the conclusion that yes, given the right circumstances I'd probably make it to the end. But what about the rest of the PC Gamer team? Well I have an answer for that as well.

I've played enough horror games at this point to wonder whether I'd be any good at actually surviving one. While some games are simply out of the question after finishing Silent Hill: Townfall recently I came to the conclusion that yes, given the right circumstances I'd probably make it to the end. But what about the rest of the PC Gamer team? Well I have an answer for that as well.

We've got a good amount of horror aficionados on the team which helps, and I've given extra points to those of us who've either played Townfall or Silent Hill games similar enough to know what to do in the distressing scenes ahead. But I have to admit most of the list was vibes-based research.

There were only three coworkers I couldn't rank and therefore put them in the 'Wild card' category because they are so utterly unpredictable that they'd either fly through the game or be unable to get out of the water. Or as our own Joshua Wolens put it: "me, Kara, and Andy are about to die horribly in the zombie apocalypse* or prove a very important point."

While I'm positive that every single person on our team could breeze through Townfall's tricky puzzles, the deciding factor are its monsters which start out rather tame but then take a steep difficulty curve towards the end of the game. Even still, I'm fairly confident that about half of the team could make it to the end of the game. As for the rest? Godspeed soldiers.

*Josh thought we were talking about Resident Evil.

Like it or not, Zach Cregger's Resident Evil film has been a critical hit. It reached universal acclaim on metacritic and was a smash hit among the PC Gamer team. I wasn't as fond of it as I hoped to be, but even still I loved the ride and appreciated its faithful adaptation of the videogames.

After all this time, I never thought a Resident Evil adaptation could be as good as this. Now, its success is mostly thanks to Zach Cregger's genuine admiration and great knowledge of the games, but some accolades also needs to go to Roy Lee, the film's producer and the person who secured the rights to Resident Evil after Cregger expressed interest in it.

Lee has also worked on other videogame adaptations such as A Minecraft Movie and (as reported by the Wall Street Journal) he currently has 20 movies and TV shows in development and production, which are based on games like Battlefield, God of War, and—my god: Silent Hill.

I am even less sure of someone being able to pull off a genuinely good Silent Hill adaptation than I was about Resident Evil, so I am morbidly intrigued to know more about this venture. But sadly that's all we know so far, there's no word on whether this will be a film or a TV series, so we'll just have to sit and wait for the fateful day when more is revealed.

But that won't stop fans from speculating or, more realistically, fearing what we now know to be the inevitable. The top comment on a Reddit thread discussing this adaptation simply reads: "For the love of James Sunderland keep Christophe Gans away from it!"

Yeah I get it—Gans' 2006 Silent Hill film adaptation leaves much to be desired. While I'll always defend the beautiful cinematography of Dan Lausten in this film, its writing and plot is convoluted and pretty confusing. Nostalgia has done that film a world of good for me, in so much that I look back on it kind of fondly now, appreciating the love that the people who worked on it clearly had for the games even if they didn't stick the landing.

Unfortunately, Return to Silent Hill is simply too bad and too recent for any kind of nostalgia to ease the pain. I'm not sure why Gans is completely opposed to staying true to the complex, vulnerable, and unlikable qualities of its male protagonists, but it's done nothing but hurt the adaptations. So I too will echo the above sentiment of: please, for the love of James Sunderland, do not let Christophe Gans anywhere near this upcoming project.

Silent Hill: Townfall has a different kind of resonance if you grew up in the UK. Its Scottish island of St Amelia is already my favourite video game environment of the year for how it evokes the atmosphere and time of a place—specifically 1996—and captures the specific details of small town life.

From the video rental shop to the bunting sadly hanging from the buildings, it's the kind of run-down fishing town you never normally see in a video game. That's probably because it's not as glamorous as somewhere like Kamurocho in Tokyo (St Amelia regrettably lacks a Sega World) or New York, and not as dreamy as the Stephen King-inflected small town settings of games like Alan Wake or Silent Hill 2.

Using the Silent Hill franchise as this trojan horse to smuggle in a location that's clearly of interest to the Glasgow-based development team at Screen Burn was a marvellous idea: given the state of the games industry, it's unlikely that anyone will ever again be given the budget or time to craft an authentic British newsagent or storefront for a fish and chip shop.

Still, as eerily authentic as St Amelia's exterior details are, like the telephone boxes and road signs, it's the interiors that I find uniquely settling. Here's why: my grandparents basically lived in the houses in this game.

The kitchen tiling, the heaters, the wallpaper, the appliances—it's so forensically accurate to a certain type of house. The kind of places that were last renovated in the '70s or '80s and haven't been touched since, maybe because the residents were too old to want to redecorate or because they couldn't afford to do so. When I step into these homes in Silent Hill: Townfall, my gut response is, "I've been here before and I hate it."

'70s chic

The artists at Screen Burn didn't just capture 1996 in some of these homes, they pinpointed the environmental details that were old even then. That's next level visual craft, assisted by things like ancient Argos catalogues.

"Some genius out there had scanned every Argos catalogue for the last 30 years," game director Jon McKellan told us at Gamescom, "and we were like looking at them and finding out, OK, if we need a TV in '90s, let's look at the catalogue from the '90s and find out which one would be more appropriate."

I sent the above screenshots to my mum. "That is my parents’ house," she confirmed about the first two images, talking about a terrace house somewhere in the midlands. "We all huddled round that gas fire."

To me and many other British players there will be an extra nightmarish layer to the game because of this familiarity. Seeing a world that you know you've visited before but that is now totally lost is uniquely unsettling.

Why am I fixated on this? Well, I have encountered this feeling of nostalgic spookiness before when I've watched old British TV stuff like the ultra-cursed Tales of the Unexpected or Threads, but never in a game.

Maybe the game's 1996 setting is just to satisfy director Jon McKellan's love of analogue tech, which is similarly front-and-centre in the likes of Stories Untold and Alien: Isolation, but these interiors feel like the result of a hundred artistic choices.

That specificity in the environmental design, to me, is quietly the best thing about Silent Hill: Townfall (with apologies to the actual game bit, which I am enjoying even if I'm swearing at the stealth sections a whole lot).

Even the likes of Everybody's Gone to the Rapture or Atomfall tend to romanticise elements of British life in their countryside locations. Silent Hill: Townfall blots out any potential warmth of these empty houses by surrounding them with fog, towering walls and monsters, and making them the backdrop for a gnarly psychological horror story.

Still Wakes the Deep got a bit closer to this feeling, being a '70s period piece set off the coast of Scotland—but that took place on an oil rig, and living on one of those isn't exactly a universal experience.

The thing is, to my parents' generation, the types of houses you explore in Townfall are just the places they grew up in. My mum says she finds '70s interior design quite warm and comforting. This clicked something else into place for me about why I find these details frightening: it's probably just an age thing.

When I watched this year's mega hit film Backrooms, I came out of it wondering why the children all found it so frightening. I'm doomed to know the concept of a 'liminal space' from the amount of time I spend online, of course, but what they seemed to be afraid of was basically an empty Woolworths retail unit.

I get that any empty space that's supposed to have people in it can be quite eerie, but the basis of an entire online mythology and $400 million movie? That was strange to me. But that's really a younger audience's version of what I'm experiencing here.

My theory is, whatever ordinary place seems old to you is inherently unsettling. The things that we find normal now will seem otherworldly, grim and strange to future generations.

One day, someone will make a horror game set in a strip mall with a gorgeously rendered bubble tea shop, vape shop and Apple Store. And to me, it won't be a horror game at all. It'll be a documentary.

You may have qualms about my top picks for changeable Resident Evil villains, but I will die on this hill. Let me tell you why.

Donna Beneviento would be the easiest to change, for sure. I could already tell in Resident Evil Village that her heart wasn't in it, and I think all I'd have to do is say some nice things about her dolls and then bingo, she's on a better, healthier path.

Surprisingly, I think the same goes for Alex Wesker. Yes, she's got a god-complex, but I think I could use that to my advantage, because at the end of the day all a god-complex is is a need to be liked mixed in with some good old fashioned narcissism, and I've managed a fair few people with that. Plus I have low blood iron so she probably wouldn't want to snatch my body.

Then we get into trickier territory. Albert Wesker and T-00 (Mr. X).

My first step with T-00 would be to ditch the rocket launcher. I know this is risky, but fear is not a healthy emotion to build fruitful discussions around, and trust is a two way street. The next course of action I'd take would be giving him a real name. Mr. X is cool if you're a villain in a '90s Saturday morning cartoon, but it's a bit too formal. I think he looks like a Jeff and suspect he'd appreciate being humanised.

When it comes to Albert Wesker I have nothing else to back up my claim that I could change him other than a feeling in my bones that I could do it and the fact I have a winning smile and a can-do attitude.

But I'd like to hear from you guys, too. Do you think you could change any or all of the Resident Evil villains for good? And if you'd even want to talk to Salvatore Moreau (aka fish boy from Resident Evil Village)—it's a no from me.

My God, they've done it. We're finally in the era when videogame movies can actually be good. Not just good for a videogame movie, or "It's good, but here are 50 caveats." It's simply brilliant. And Resi's lovably feckless protagonist Bryan is the primary reason. But before I dive in, I need to warn you about something.

Yep, this is going to be spoiler city. Spoilers for days, folks! Spoilers as big as your head—if your head is exceedingly large. So I'm going to give you ample time to stop scrolling. I am here to protect you.

You must have stopped scrolling by now, right?

OK, this is your last chance to avoid spoilers, folks!

OK, great, I am now free to spoil the heck out of this excellent movie. Hurray!

The best thing filmmaker Zach Cregger did with Resident Evil was leave the heroes in the games. Bryan is not a hero. He's not skilled with firearms like Leon, nor does he have huge, rock-punching arms like Chris. He's just a tired dork trying to complete his last job of the night.

Bryan is not some stand-in for the protagonists we know and love—he is effectively a Resident Evil player, transported into a Resident Evil crisis. He's a more specific kind of everyman, one who reflects Resi fans.

His ear-demolishing screams, his silly mistakes, his complete lack of knowledge about firearms (he has used them in videogames), his cowardice and ineptitude—all of these traits transform Resident Evil from the over-the-top action movies we're normally stuck with into a survival horror romp that you can laugh at.

His cowardice and ineptitude aren't even that noteworthy, in that it's how most of us would react in this situation. He's as cowardly and incompetent as the average Resident Evil player would be if they were thrown into an actual apocalypse. This means his mistakes and near misses aren't frustrating. We're not sitting there thinking, "I could do better". Instead we empathise. I'm not judging you. I'd suck at this too.

That said, he does fuck up a lot. For your convenience, here's a list of his dumb mistakes:

• He lies about having tire chains so he can make a quick buck, inadvertently putting the whole world at risk.
• Instead of focusing on the ice-covered road, he keeps looking at his phone, leading to his first accident.
• He shoots at a t-Virus victim, but instead hits his own vehicle several times, stranding himself in a field.
• He drops a ladder that he needs five seconds later, resulting in a nasty fall.
• He taunts an aggressive dog, which then reveals itself to be a mutant.
• He wastes ammo on a padlock even after realising it can withstand a blast from a shotgun.
• He totals his stolen vehicle seconds after getting it by trying to ram a gate.
• He tries to pick up a mutated child even after he's seen a lot of shit. It ends badly.
• Instead of shooting the gestalt t-Virus mutant, he shoots the ground right next to his feet.
• He fails to load a clip several times, and once he finally does it, he shoots his new gun inside a vehicle.
• He accidentally shoots an Umbrella employee in the leg instead of saving him.
• When he finally, miraculously, makes it to the Raccoon City hospital, he gives up because the lifts don't work.
• Even after being told to use the stairs, his laziness gets the better of him after four flights. He finds a working lift and uses it. Again, it ends badly.

Damn, Bryan, you are bad at this. Cregger said he had to cut out a lot of the humour because test audiences found it too funny, but Resident Evil still left me laughing constantly. Not because it's full of incongruous gags. It's a pure horror movie rather than a comedy-horror romp. But the situations Bryan finds himself in, and the way he keeps fucking up, it's a gas.

Resident Evil is at its best early on, and I know it lost some folk when Bryan started to transform into a badass. He survives a collapsing lift, weaponises an acid-spewing mutant, deftly makes it across a vertigo-inducing chasm, and then he uses his final bullet in the coolest way possible. He becomes an absolute boss.

But I'm convinced this is in keeping with the movie's tone.

This is what it's like to play Resident Evil—at least if you're me. I tend to spend the first couple of hours jumping out of my skin whenever I see a shadow or hear a footstep. I'm a wreck. My shooting is panicked, my screams are frequent, and I spend a great deal of time hiding. But by the end of these games I am able to embody Leon, Chris, Jill, Ethan and all the rest. I am a grizzled survivor pulling off impossible stunts.

Resident Evil doesn't just ask, "How would a Resident Evil player handle a real t-Virus outbreak?" It also attempts to capture the actual experience of playing the games. And it does so incredibly skillfully.

This is why it's the best videogame movie. Even though it features none of the familiar faces and takes plenty of liberties, it ends up feeling more authentic than a movie that's aiming for a 1:1 recreation of Resident Evil 2. It tries something different, and in doing so it ends up being a canny recreation of the Resi experience. And on top of that, it's simply a great horror movie. If you don't care about Resi, it's still going to be a hoot.

Walking up to the old town of St Amelia for the first time in Silent Hill: Townfall, I was greeted by that familiar thick fog and eerie quiet—an omen of the horrors to come. I know what kind of monsters are waiting for me beyond the fog and I am painfully aware of just how unprepared I am for it—with no flashlight, healing items, or weapon on hand. But weirdly enough none of that matters, because for the first time in a Silent Hill game I feel content.

St Amelia is a fictional town, but as I'm sure many players based in the UK will soon discover, developer Screen Burn breathes so much life into this sleepy fishing village that I could've sworn I'd been here before. It's certainly a strange feeling to have in a game like this, but with Konami opening Silent Hill up to the world it's now the UK's turn to have our sense of home toyed with.

Here to suffer

The story follows Simon Ordell, a man unknown to us and himself. The only sense of person he has comes from a medical bracelet with his name, date of birth, and blood type written on it. I watched as he dragged himself up from the waves of the North Sea, onto the docks, and headed into St Amelia seeking help and answers as to why he's here on this cold foggy island.

A Silent Hill game is nothing without its setting and St Amelia delivers. I spent more time than I'd care to admit reading info boards about the history of fishing on the island and peeping over fences to see how the locals had done up their gardens. The more I explored, the better sense I got of the kind of people who lived in this town and what had happened to them.

Simon also sees more than just the old town as he ventures to a hospital, a corporate office, your classic Silent Hill supernatural 'other place', and, brace yourself, some new builds. My time in St Amelia flew by rather quickly, with just 13 hours spent in total, but that was more than enough to be rewarded with heaps of brilliant visual storytelling and the usual gift of stressful encounters.

St Amelia has its fair share of gut-wrenching horrors lurking around each corner, though—you don't spend a grand total of 35 minutes and five seconds hiding in lockers unless there's something pretty bad waiting for you on the other side. But even still, I found myself drawn to exploring the fog because my curiosity outweighed my fear.

But the further I progressed the less content I became. Not because there were more faceless and bound monsters stumbling around (although that didn't help), but because there was more to the island than St Amelia's historic old town. There was a side that was painfully familiar—cobblestone streets shifted into tarmac roads and cottages were turned into flats for better efficiency. The island changed as Simon moved away from the heart of St Amelia and towards the parasite which had latched onto it.

The town itself felt alive more than just lived in, and if that doesn't tick all the boxes for a world-class Silent Hill setting, I don't know what does.

Try to B positive

A good rule of thumb in Silent Hill is to approach its puzzles with lateral thinking, and Townfall is no different. They start fairly easy, coaching you in the art of taking in absolutely everything from your surroundings, digesting it, and then stitching together an answer from what has been gathered. It's the classic case of finding the combination to a lock by sifting through letters conveniently left scattered around the near vicinity.

But as I spent more time in St Amelia, my brain gradually got the hang of looking at things from a Silent Hill perspective. And although the puzzles got harder it didn't feel like a noticeable difference. Hell, the first thing I thought when stumbling across a bunch of blood types scribbled across the wall was "This is a puzzle and it wants me to figure out how to create blood type A+". If it weren't for the 7+ hours I'd already spent in Townfall I doubt that would have been my default response.

There were a few exceptions towards the very end of the game, however, I think a fresh brain would have had far less issues. Take the dreaded pipe room for example, where I had to use what looked to be morse code to twist a room full of levers in the right direction. After bashing my head against my desk my synapses sparked, a thought was formed, and I figured it out—I wish you all the best of luck with that one.

The puzzles aren't the only smart design features in Townfall, though, with the best and brightest being the handheld CRTV. This quickly became my closest companion as it allowed me to see the creepies through any wall or obstacle. It may seem like a bit of a cheat code getting to know where the monsters are but there are some limitations.

It's not always crystal clear where the monsters were, sometimes the CRTV could be a smidge off or it wouldn't relay that a monster is actually further away than it first seemed. It also can't show multiple enemies on one frequency, which means I had to toggle between several to see all the monsters that were close.

I wouldn't say I'm much of a pacifist but I opted to forgo the planks of wood, pipes, and firearms for most of the game, instead favouring the CRTV as my weapon against the monsters to help me stealth around them. I played on the normal difficulty and I didn't have a run in with a monster until quite far into the latter stages of the game. They're not blind, I was just able to move around them with some ease if I used the CRTV correctly and was cautiously optimistic about how fast Simon could run.

Even with all its finicky buttons the CRTV may be the most creative, fun, and useful puzzle solving tool I've ever had the pleasure of playing with. It turned navigating Townfall into one big scary puzzle, which is exactly what I look for in Silent Hill.

You can't change

But all of these amazing puzzles and fantastic world building would be for nought if Townfall hadn't also been able to pull off the kind of beautiful and psychologically jarring storytelling we've come to expect from the Silent Hill series.

To say there's something wrong with Simon would be to state the obvious. We're in a Silent Hill game after all, and no one in their sound mind would hallucinate grotesque faceless monsters which shoot needles out from their abdomens. But the fact that there's something off about Simon isn't what interests me—the fun part is finding out what he did to end up like this. It's clear that people in the town are angry, that some awful disaster happened on this island which rocked its community to its core. What's unclear, however, is why it involves some seemingly random American dude with induced amnesia.

But Simon's not on his own. There are two other characters who also inhabit this liminal space with him—Zoe and Richard. At first I just thought these to be your typical filler characters but as it turns out these two are perhaps the most interesting characters to have ever fallen into the fog.

Zoe and Richard portray different sides of the same disaster that Simon's caught in the middle of, with one being wrongfully guilty and the other willfully ignorant. Both have their own playable segments within the game in which their characters are explored in depth alongside the roles they played in the catastrophe, and through this I began to piece together Simon's story.

My favourite sequence in all of Townfall was actually Zoe's part. In this she relives the aftermath of the disaster as a nurse and a first responder to the victims as she tries to save the life of an unknown patient.

I am not a trained nurse so taking the patient's readings, running tests, and ultimately medicating them was probably one of the more stressful experiences I've had in a horror game. But it was worth it because through the stress I understood her guilt and trauma with painful clarity. It also made it clear why she's found herself wrapped up in this mess.

Then there's Richard who is an opposite to Zoe in every sense of the word. He's not blameless or caring; he's an asshole. But boy, is he an interesting character study. I won't go into too much detail concerning Richard as his story is one that is better experienced firsthand. But, like with Zoe, after playing through his sequence it became clear to me what this game's curse is. While the answer seemed simple at first examining the curse through the lens of three different characters adds enough diversity for an incredibly rewarding story and analysis of its characters.

My only issue with Townfall was that I didn't get to spend more time with Zoe and Richard, because in comparison Simon is just a little boring. His role as a blank template for players to print themselves onto worked wonders for immersion but ultimately his character suffered for it. I found myself drawn more to Zoe and Richard, two characters who had more invested in this community from the get go.

That's not to say I dislike Simon. He's a fantastic character who comes into his own during the latter stages of the story and is someone who will grow on me the more time I spend mulling Townfall over.

After all was said and done and I'd finally reached the end of Townfall's brilliant story, my overwhelming feeling was one of relief. Like Silent Hill f before it, Townfall had some monumental expectations to live up to and the unenviable task of proving that yet again the mystique of Silent Hill is not limited to one mountainous town. But it's now clear that Screen Burn absolutely understands what makes a great Silent Hill game and the series is better off for it.

"Oh man, can't wait to fly this plane through the fog around these spooky towers. I sure hope I don't lose my mind like the guy who did this job before me." That's what I imagine the protagonist of The Hollowing thought right before he climbed into the cockpit and promptly started to lose it.

We just saw the world premiere trailer for The Hollowing at the PC Gaming Show Tokyo Direct. It's a first-person horror flight sim made by Rubeki, developer of Lorn's Lure, and this is even set in the same world.

The Hollowing has the same signature PSX aesthetic, which I'm a big fan of for horror games. It's also great for speed, because this new project has been revealed barely two years after the dev's previous game came out.

In The Hollowing, you've got to fly between towers in a huge megastructure, fixing them up as you go so that the settlements in the place can stay in touch with one another. It's just you, your plane, the fog, and a voice on the radio.

Throughout the trailer, they give snippets of what happened to the previous pilot. Apparently they'd hear strange interference on the radio, and "spore toxicity" gave them visions. Maybe that fog is even more ominous than it seems.

By the end of the teaser, it's obvious the same issues are affecting our new pilot, Phil. I guess they're not built differently after all. There's no release date for The Hollowing just yet, so if you want to stay up to date with the game, wishlist it on Steam.

Check out our Steam page with all the games, updates, and DLC featured in the show. You can also read our roundup article which includes every announcement from the show in the order it aired.

At first glance you could be forgiven for thinking Dust till Dawn was a simple cleaning game. Early into the World Premiere trailer, showing the game off for the very first time during the PC Gaming Show Tokyo Direct, it seems very mundane at first glance as you clean your way around a Japanese apartment, little cash amounts floating off of each item as you scrub it and put it back in place.

Then, it twists and music from Akira Yamaoka, composer of the Silent Hill games, kicks in and you see the dual nature of Dust till Dawn, which is not just a cleaning game but also a horror, somehow. Don't worry though, you'll still be asked to clean to the best of your ability, even as everything goes to hell around you.

I find eyes unspeakably creepy, despite having several of them tattooed on me, and as a result Dust till Dawn's trailer, which is pretty big on spooky peepers, terrifies me. I'm quite a big fan of the game's aesthetic, which has twisting geometry and early 90s stylings that make it feel like the classic Japanese horror movies of yesteryear. Not that I'll be able to play it, because in addition to being terrified of spooky eyes, I'm also scared of horror games in general, and this looks to be a fairly effective one.

Dust till Dawn comes from Mac n Cheese Games, also developing the "nuns in space" survival horror Void Martyrs. With Dust till Dawn, with an elevator pitch of "Spooky Clean 'Em Up", Mac n Cheese seem to be nailing the one sentence reasons to play its horror games.

If the trailer for Dust till Dawn has whet your appetite, you can wishlist it on Steam here, or check out everything in the PC Gaming Show Tokyo Direct on the Steam page. You can also read our roundup article which includes every announcement from the show in the order it aired.

There is, you must admit, something a bit disconcerting about children's toys. The sightless eyes, the static expressions—it all combines into a hollow unpersonhood that triggers some ancient, primeval fear in the low regions of your brain. Something that also doesn't help: the unslakeable lust for murder.

Alright, that last part maybe does not apply to my childhood teddy bear, but it does apply to the nightmarish denizens of Escape From Playtime, which just announced it's accepting playtest sign-ups at the PC Gaming Show Tokyo Direct.

Set in the Poppy Playtime universe—one of those things which is quietly wildly popular—Escape From Playtime bills itself as a 1-4 player co-op survival horror that puts you in the shoes of the setting's Smiling Critters. These are A) haunting and B) probably relatively benign, as inhabitants of this world go. Your goal is to explore an abandoned toy factory at the behest of an ominous voice, who tasks you with finding building materials and other resources with which to do… something really benevolent, probably.

We get a glimpse of the game's creepy puzzle-solving, traversal, and hiding-from-dread-beasts-beyond-comprehension action in the trailer. The Smiling Critters are very small, which means you are even more defenceless than you might have thought possible, and also navigating a lot of environments designed for full-size people as not-full-size animal facsimiles.

It's a whole lot to process, really. You're gonna be making a lot of regrettable decisions about when to split up with your friends, when to hide, when to run, and when to greedily run back to that one room to gather up a resource you missed. This will not end well for you, I think, but I suspect it will be rather enjoyable, if you're the kind of person who enjoys holding their breath in a closet while a murderous beast passes by mere inches away. Who isn't? Find out more on Steam.

Check out our Steam page with all the games, updates, and DLC featured in the show. You can also read our roundup article which includes every announcement from the show in the order it aired.

I don't know if you've ever watched an Argentinian horror movie. I have, and they're damn scary. I had to watch the PC Gaming Show Tokyo Direct 2026 minidoc with one hand over my eyes, because Tenebris Somnia blends 2D survival horror gameplay (which I can handle) with live-action cutscenes made by an award-winning Argentinian film crew (and the make up and effects are so good they terrify me).

Tenebris Somnia expertly blends a retro 2D style with filmed cutscenes. One moment you're walking through a creepy, colourful hallway, the next you're watching an actual person's face distort in a way that defies all logic and reason. Dave Oshry, CEO of New Blood Interactive, the publisher of the game, hypes up the practical effects crew, but I'm pretty certain they just cast real demons.

Executive producer Airdorf says it "feels like you're playing through someone's nightmares," and I agree. One creature has an extra face underneath its face, connected via one mouth. That's horrifying. Those effects are mostly made with practical materials, too, which is why they look so damn good. "AI could never make Tenebris Somnia, let's just say that," says Oshry.

So that's the horror, but what about the survival aspect of the game? Well, that sounds like it's going to be pretty good, too. "You will only ever have just enough health," Oshry says. "You will only ever have just enough ammo. You will very often have to resort to a wrench or a pipe." He's wielding a wrench in the video while he explains this.

As for the story. Well, it's described as being relatable to anyone who's been in a troubled relationship. "You'll laugh, you'll cry, you'll call your ex," Oshry says. That's the scariest thing about Tenebris Somnia so far.

If this sounds like you're kind of horror, wishlist it now on Steam. Tenebris Somnia launches October 16, 2026, just in time for Halloween.

Check out our Steam page with all the games, updates, and DLC featured in the show. You can also read our roundup article which includes every announcement from the show in the order it aired.

I hate flying. Crammed into a tiny metal tube with 100s of other people, 1000s of feet in the air, unnaturally defying the will of God—it's awful. I don't know how flight attendants stay so calm and professional the entire time. At least in the real world they don't have to contend with shape-shifting demons like they do in Night Plane, the upcoming horror job sim from Liquid Static Studio.

In a new trailer unveiled during the PC Gaming Show Tokyo Direct, things get spooky real quick. A deer just stands there, menacingly staring at the flight attendant before they board the Plane Airlines plane, and we see a bloody handprint smeared on the emergency door.

There's also a smattering of eerie shots throughout the airport, looking like something out of The Backrooms. But it's not just the airport and plane, oh no. We catch a few glimpses of a cave and forest, so it looks like the plane crash lands at some point.

And with what was occurring on board, I'm not surprised. Passengers levitating in the air, deer demons charging down the aisle. Awful stuff. On top of all that, you actually have to work.

Night Plane is, at its core, a job simulator. You'll need to check tickets, attend to the needs of the passengers, and try to eject non-human visitors. How you do that without them eviscerating you, I don't know.

It sounds a bit like Papers, Please, only with the added element of my deathly fear of flying, so it seems like a strong horror game. If you want to try it out for yourself, you can download the demo now. And you won't have to wait long for the full release, as the game is coming out October 26, 2026. You can wishlist it on Steam.

Check out our Steam page with all the games, updates, and DLC featured in the show. You can also read our roundup article which includes every announcement from the show in the order it aired.

Amnesia: The Bunker is without a doubt the most frightening horror game I've played this decade. Its terrifying tale of being chased through a crumbling French bunker by a monster has the darkest, thickest, most unnerving atmosphere of any horror game I've played since Alien: Isolation. It's so intense that it's hard to imagine anyone making something light and airy out of its subterranean warrens, and it's downright inconceivable that someone might, say, turn Amnesia: The Bunker into Mirror's Edge.

And yet, that's exactly what modder TiMan has done. Created for Frictional Games' 2026 modding jam—which ran with the theme of 'What is reality?'—Bunker's Edge sees the base game's protagonist Henri transported through a portal from the trenches of war-ravaged France to the pristine skyline of EA's free-running classic.

The change of scenery alone is remarkable. The Bunker's HPL engine is purpose built to deliver darkness, shadows and murk, so seeing it handle such a bright and colourful environment is mightily impressive. But what's really interesting is how TiMan has implemented all of Mirror's Edge's free-running mechanics. Mantling, sliding, wall-running, pipe-climbing, runner's vision, that 180-degree wall-jump that I always struggled to perform in the base game, it's all here.

Despite the breezier setting, Bunker's Edge is still a horror game. The Bunker's monster has followed Henri through the portal, and chases him across the rooftops just as relentlessly as it stalks him through the base game's subterranean fortification.

All told, it's a snazzy bit of modding showmanship, though there are a couple of points to be aware of. First off, Bunker's Edge is (very understandably) not as slick as actual Mirror's Edge. Some of Henri's parkour moves, like sliding, are a little awkward, and more than once I clambered straight through a wall and found myself trapped inside the world geometry.

The other thing to note is that Bunker's Edge is very short. You can blast through the whole thing in about 15 minutes. The ending is also extremely weird, not what you'd expect from either The Bunker or Mirror's Edge.

Nonetheless, Bunker's Edge is a fun diversion for a Sunday afternoon. Alongside hosting modding jams, Frictional is also working on its next horror game Ontos. The sci-fi adventure has more in common with 2015's Soma than The Bunker, but it's still one of my most anticipated games of 2027.

Resident Evil is one of those series which rewards nosey players. There's always notes, recordings, and pictures hidden in the cracks and crevices, all of which give players more info. Whether that be the structural integrity, of Mr. X's trench coat or the fact that Grace Ashcroft has absolutely zero social life.

But it's not just all about notes—there's also a great deal of information given in Resident Evil games via their seemingly throwaway voice lines. So, with that in mind, one leaker has just found the motherlode.

Notable community modder Keff0 has posted two videos to YouTube over the last week. One goes through over 600 cut voice lines from the Resident Evil 4 remake, and the other explores nearly 400 cut voice lines from Resident Evil Requiem.

The Resident Evil 4 remake deep dive into the scrapped voice lines is certainly interesting, as we hear more from Leon, Ashley, Luis, and the Merchant. Hearing more from Leon is always a win, but the prize for 'most notable cut voice' line has to go to the Merchant, as he sneaks in a reference to Resident Evil Village.

"Ah, I see you're no stranger to villages," the Merchant says in a cut line from the RE4 remake. "The Duke? Lad shows promise." This is likely referring to The Duke from Resident Evil Village, who acts as the resident merchant and something of a guide to Ethan Winters.

Funny thing is, The Duke has also mentioned RE4's Merchant before, saying "What're ya buyin?" to Ethan before joking that it was "just something an old friend of mine used to say."

Both characters are also similar in that they seem omnipresent, omniscient, and unkillable, popping up at random across the map unscathed and knowing far more about what's going on than they perhaps should. Although the Merchant may not be as immortal as he once seemed, as Keff0 also uncovered unused animations for their death scene, suggesting that at one point during development players were able to kill him.

The cut voice lines for Requiem may not hold any connections to different Resident Evil games, but they do have masses of information about its characters and, crucially, the infected.

We already knew that the strain of the T-virus in Requiem was slightly different, in that it allowed infected to retain some memories of their past life and repeat some familiar actions like scrubbing the floors, eating, or singing. If you listened closely as well you could also hear the infected crying and asking for forgiveness.

But thanks to the cut voice lines found by Keff0, we now know that it could've been so much worse. Burning zombies would beg for water while screaming about how much the flames hurt. The huge Chunk would plead that he didn't want to die and cry about how stressed he was. Some infected would even thank you once you put them out of their misery.

The lines we did get were certainly enough to hammer home just how tragic it all was. But I can't help but feel a little sad that we missed out on some of these. I think I would've actually felt sorry for Chunk had I heard him whining about how stressed he was—it's certainly relatable.

Then there's Leon's cut lines. Most of them are just his usual grunts and groans along with some spider-themed quips—there's so many spider quips. But the most interesting line comes towards the end of the game, when he's really starting to suffer the effects of his infection and multiple monstrous fights: "I promise I'll make it home."

It may not seem like a lot. But given how sombre Leon's been ever since Resident Evil 2, it's actually quite significant that Leon came back to Raccoon City not as some hail mary mission to save Sherry and redeem his previous shortcomings, but with the intention of moving on and living his life away from its shadow.

Sadly, we were never going to be able to have all of these lines in Requiem or the Resident Evil 4 remake—there simply isn't the space to fit them all in. But at least we got to see what could have been.

If you've seen any slasher flick, you know the drill: every youth is horny, and the horny must die. Despite Halloween not being quite as trope-riddled as some of its stabbiest contemporaries, its recent asymmetrical PvP adaptation did include a minigame where two players could slip into a closet and bang each other for buffs—but after only a few days in a deluxe edition-exclusive early access, the feature has reportedly been removed.

In fact, it seems to have been silently hotfixed out. The most recent patch notes make no mention of the sex minigame, but the comments sure do. On the Steam thread, one user commented "ADD BACK THE CLOSET MINIGAME" five times in a row. Others have noted that Lynda, a flirty playable civilian who previously got extra benefits from the sex minigame, has had that trait removed, which I can confirm with a quick launch of the game.

Players on social media are not pleased, as you might imagine. "Lame as hell," wrote Choice-Scholar-2297 on Reddit. A thread on the game's subreddit titled "Please add back sex mini game" is quickly gaining traction; freetheree's original post reads, "Why did they remove it!??!?!?!? Me and my homeboy just wanna have sex in a closet? And we can’t???? Tf??????"

Lots of the sorts of jokes you might expect are being thrown around, and of course, it is hilarious that if this change sticks the game will have had closet sex as an exclusive time-limited pre-order bonus. Unfortunately, there might be a good reason for its removal.

You see, players are also speculating about the reason this might have been changed: dead players can respawn as older characters, such as a police officer or Michael Myers' therapist Dr. Loomis. Fine on its own, disturbing when those characters can potentially solicit sex from a high schooler—Laurie Strode, for instance, is only 17 years old in the version this game depicts. While Illfonic has not confirmed this is why the feature was patched out, I struggle to imagine a more convincing reason.

I've reached out to Illfonic for comment on the patch, and this story will be updated if I hear back.

I was largely nonplussed by Gamescom's Opening Night Live, particularly its relentless barrage of identikit fantasy action games that I struggled to tell apart. But one game stood out like a rat-powered computer in an elven glade, and that was Ontos, Frictional Games' latest horror adventure/existential crisis generator.

The Gamescom trailer was a barrage of unsettling, distinctive imagery, from rodent server-racks to slack-jawed dudes with electrodes protruding from their heads. I was instantly intrigued and keen to learn more, so I was delighted to discover that Frictional graced us with a longer look at Ontos in action.

The 10-minute showcase focuses on the same part of the game as the shorter trailer. But it adds significant context to how Ontos plays and the kinds of challenges you'll be dealing with. It starts with the player character—a woman named Aditi—arriving at the hospital wing of Ontos' repurposed 'Moon Hotel' Samsara via an internal railway system, before exploring the wing and unpicking an experiment run by a scientist called Crombie.

In moment-to-moment play, Ontos shares a lot in common with most of Frictional's other games (the exception being Amnesia: The Bunker, which is more of a proto immersive sim). There's a lot of tactile environment interaction, poking around computers for text logs, and a grisly sequence where Aditi plucks some electrodes out of a live rat's exposed brain. On top of this is a sprinkling of stealth, as Aditi evades a security camera by throwing a box across the room. Interestingly, the camera tracks the box's movement as it arcs through the air, which I'm sure must have featured in another game up to now. But I cannot recall an example of it.

Eventually, Aditi arrives at Crombie's experiment, which involves the rat server-rack seen in the Gamescom trailer. Crombie, speaking through the rat server, says he tried to create a copy of his personality to be stored in the rat RAM, but accidentally uploaded his consciousness from his own body, which sits slumped on a chair in the same room in a near-vegetative state. He then asks Aditi to help him return his consciousness to his body. It's a reasonable request, provided the voice in the rat computer really does belong to the original Crombie.

Such philosophical dilemmas were exactly what made SOMA such a brilliant and unusual horror game, and the showcase has convinced me that Ontos' spin on these more intellectual scares will be worth investigating the very least. The only thing I'm not totally sold on is Aditi's voice acting, which to me sounds a bit too chipper for someone confronted with such traumatic, reality-defying imagery.

In any case, 2027 can't come soon enough. Yet while Ontos was my favourite game shown at ONL, I wasn't quite the only thing that piqued my interest. Alien Isolation 2 seems to be shaping up to be a worthy successor to the original, as Joshua Wolens discovered in his hands-on demo. And naturally I'm up for one last adventure as Geralt of Rivia in The Witcher 3: Songs of the Past, which Joshua also saw in action in Cologne last month.

Silent Hill has gone international. Last year we went to Japan in Silent Hill f, and now the series is off to Scotland in Silent Hill: Townfall. As a middle-aged Scot who still remembers the '90s, when Townfall takes place, I was simultaneously nervous and excited about the rare opportunity to play a game that's so close to home.

What a relief, then, that Townfall not only feels incredibly Scottish, its Scottishness also perfectly matches Silent Hill's brand of unsettling psychological horror. And it's not such an unlikely pairing. Scotland is a brilliant fit for this kind of game—and I'm going to spend the next 2,000 or so words convincing you why.

It helps, of course, that the studio is both local and knows its way around the genre. Glaswegian developer Screen Burn has been serving up frights and mysteries since 2015, namely through Stories Untold and Observation. You might know it better by its former name, No Code. Co-founder and Townfall game director Jon McKellan also worked on Alien: Isolation prior to starting up the studio.

Welcome to St. Amelia

"We wanted St. Amelia to feel like a real place," McKellan tells me. "And I think, as with most writing, you write what you know, and it made sense for us to dig deep into our upbringings, into our past, and try and build a place that felt believable. To make the player care about this place, you need it to be believable.

Walking the streets of St. Amelia is an eerie experience because it all feels so familiar. There are still so many towns in Scotland that look like this—that mix of old fashioned architecture, cosy little shops and tiny fishing vessels sitting next to modern medical clinics and parked cars. The odd new flourishes squeezing into old spaces.

Outside a shop I notice a pair of charity boxes—one in the shape of a guide dog, another a swirly wishing well that looks like a helter skelter—that nearly everyone from the UK will recognise, not just Scots. These tiny bits of window dressing make the fictional town feel like a tangible place. I have absolutely been here before, even though I definitely haven't.

"A lot of it was going back through our old memories and trying to find things that we remembered, finding old photographs," says McKellan. "But also some genius out there had scanned every Argos catalogue for the last 30 years, and we were like looking at them and finding out, OK, if we need a TV in '90s, let's look at the catalogue from the '90s and find out which one would be more appropriate."

If you want a dose of '90s shopping nostalgia, here's an Argos catalogue from 1990. Enjoy looking at decades-old lawnmowers and kitchen utensils!

Being set in the '90s also means that technology can't really save you. You don't have a miraculous smart phone in your hands, and satnav was still very new. All you have is your CRTV, a chunky portable TV—just like the one I had as a teen—that picks up fuzzy signals, which you can use to solve puzzles and see where enemies are.

"They're kind of frail, they're unreliable," says McKellan. "I think all of that speaks really well to horror because you get these tools and they help you, but they're never going to be good enough to get you out of a jam. Relying on the analogue, it allows you to play within those limitations, which work well with horror. I think aesthetically as well, it adds texture, even just to the real-world tactile interfaces that feel just a little bit more grounded. Anything we can do to make the player feel like they're there is going to help with horror."

Weather alert

It wouldn't be an accurate portrayal of Scotland without our horrible weather, of course, which turns what would otherwise seem like an attractive, inviting town into a dour, dreich place. It's foggy and grey, the Scottish default. Normally, though, that would seem quite welcoming to me. Us Scots are a weird bunch and we're abnormally proud of our shite weather.

It's not just because we're pessimists revelling in misery (well, not entirely); there's actually a streak of optimism in the Scottish psyche, with so much Scottish art being about finding beauty in stark, gloomy places. Some of that art is even in my living room, where I've got a trio of prints depicting one of my favourite locations, the gorgeous island of Arran—presented as a jet-black rock—surrounded by a storm.

At a most basic level, it's just nice to be in your cosy home looking out the window at the rain pishing down or the fog rolling in. And Townfall preserves this. While there are plenty of horrors hidden in the buildings, the streets appear to be a lot more deadly, with the mist hiding horrors drawn from Simon—the protagonist—and St. Amelia's trauma. It feels safer indoors.

When Scotland is presented in videogames, it's usually a brief aside or approaching parody—all kilts and whisky and golf, with accents that call to mind fantasy dwarves. Townfall is more confident in its Scottishness—it doesn't need to scream about it at the top of its lungs. It's an understated familiarity, which lends it a more potent air of authenticity.

In the '90s, most of the world's experience of Scotland came through two movies: Braveheart and Trainspotting. Unsurprisingly, a Hollywood production featuring an Australian nutcase didn't quite capture the country. Trainspotting certainly did, though. It reflected the less palatable side of Scotland, the one the tourists rarely get to see: the squalor, the addiction, the depression and urban decay.

Townfall is much closer to Trainspotting than Braveheart, but rather than urban poverty and heroin addiction, it explores themes like medical trauma, the evisceration of small communities and the social impact of Margaret Thatcher's rule—one of Scotland's most loathed villains, right up there with King Edward I of England, the man also known as the Hammer of the Scots.

Trauma team

"The medical trauma is something that Simon's clearly involved with," says McKellan. "Without going into too much detail, I think again you kind of write what you know, and a lot of the experiences that Simon and the characters have have come from a real place and come from something that's pretty authentic in terms of how we cope with those things. So it also felt Silent Hill. It felt like the kind of story you would expect in a series like Silent Hill, without copying anything that's come before."

The way this is presented is extremely harrowing. In one early scene, we see a character Simon knows standing in the town square, when a huge tube suspended from the sky appears and plugs into his mouth. There's a hint of cosmic horror in the scene—tentacles dangling from the heavens—but also grounded psychological horror, that traumatic experience of being hooked up to medical equipment with feeding tubes pumping their contents into your stomach. It's nauseating.

"I think relatability is a big thing in horror," says McKellan. "The more you can relate to a problem, the more you can understand it. The more you can be frightened of it. The more you can be affected by it. And I think some of the themes and issues that we dive into in Townfall, some of them even very subtly in the background, I think a lot of people connect with it and have a stance on it, have an opinion on it. Like say the time period, the setting—it's all really relevant, and it creates a perfect storm for what has happened in St. Amelia that I think a lot of us could relate to, whether you're from Scotland or not."

But what actually happened in St. Amelia?

Townfall's introduction only provides hints. A company is referenced. There are protest signs scattered around the town square. Tension permeates everything. This is a town that has been through some shit—like so many Scottish towns of the era.

"I won't spoil what happened in St. Amelia and the journey that you'll go on there," says McKellan, "but there's a lot of imagery from those eras, growing up in the '90s and the era of Thatcher, things like that. It was a very tense climate at times, and I think there was a lot to draw from them for inspiration in terms of how it would look and feel for a town to be angry about something, and how it feels to protest."

The protest signs I see are real, as in Screen Burn actually made physical protest signs, scanned them and added them to the game, "to make sure it felt like this is what it would look like". The studio didn't simply want to make copies, it wanted to make the real deal, something authentic. Something that reflects "what life was like", even if the game isn't technically about what life was like—this is still Simon's story. And Simon is an outsider.

Stranger things

If you're a stranger to Scotland, you'll be fine in St. Amelia. While I can feel the Scottishness sweating out of Townfall's pores, it's often subtle, and knowing anything about Scotland is not a prerequisite. I've never visited Japan, but that doesn't stop me from getting something out of Silent Hill f, or being obsessed with Like A Dragon.

Simon is American. He is a visitor exploring an unfamiliar town. He's the perfect viewpoint for players—even if you are Scottish. The town, initially, is an enigma. We don't know what happened here or what's going on. We need to unravel the mystery.

"We wanted the player and Simon to be kind of in lockstep," says McKellan. "I didn't like the idea that Simon would come to the town but know his way around, or have amnesia and not know where things are. It made more sense that both Simon and the player see this for the first time. So all the discoveries that you make, Simon makes too, and that keeps you more more connected with Simon throughout the story."

The first-person perspective really emphasises this. I don't know about you lot, but third-person horror isn't nearly as thrilling and stressful to me. It's more like watching a film, and while I love horror films, it's rare for them to actually succeed in making me scared. Videogames have an advantage in that you're participating in the horror, but if you're inundated with UI elements and seeing your character at all times, it sheds a lot of the uncomfortable intimacy. When you're seeing through your character's eyes, however, it's a lot more effective.

"It gives us a kind of intimacy with the environment that is hard to do in third-person," says McKellan. "With the environments we've got, because we're in first-person, we didn't have to scale everything up. We didn't have to make the doors wider to let the camera through with you. We could keep everything to the right scale and make it feel quite dense and claustrophobic. So in terms of the horror, it's really helpful. It gets you close to the horror. There's no one in between you and the thing in front of you."

McKellan also notes that it really helps with the storytelling, too, "letting you explore that town and feel like you're really digging through people's cupboards and understanding where they lived". It bestows St. Amelia with a stronger sense of place, which feels essential in a game where the setting is so critical and looms so large.

I can't imagine using the CRTV in third-person, it would feel so clunky, and that was a big consideration for Screen Burn as well. "You just can't do that kind of mechanic from a camera far away without relying on UI overlays and making it feel almost sci-fi," says McKellan. "So we felt like doing it diegetically in your hand was a must-have."

I played Townfall in a well-lit, hot room surrounded by other journalists as a fan blew directly in my face. There probably isn't a worse way to experience a horror game. But I was genuinely entranced. St. Amelia's thick, thick atmosphere, the obsessive attention to detail, the juxtaposition of the familiar and the horrifying—I was no longer an exhausted journalist trying to get through another Gamescom appointment, I was living through a horror story in my own backyard. And it was awesome.

Silent Hill: Townfall launches on September 24.

It's like seeing an old friend: the clanking in the vents over your head, the way the ribbed tail passes over objects with a thunk-ka-thunk-ka-thunk-ka-thunk, the head-within-a-head, the screaming. You are here, you are back, you have been impaled through the abdomen and killed.

I have played perhaps 20 minutes of Alien: Isolation 2 at Gamescom 2026 and I can tell you this: it is certainly Alien: Isolation. There are some new wrinkles, though—where the first game was a strictly inside affair, stranding you on the space station Sevastopol, the second game sets you down planetside in an entirely new character's shoes. Fewer air vents, fewer vital systems shuddering to a halt; a lot more weather, a lot more space.

You are Blake. Here are the two things to know about Blake: she is not Amanda Ripley—the first game's protagonist who did not feature at all in my time with Alien: Isolation 2—but she is Weyland-Yutani. Specifically, she's Weyland-Yutani management, and isn't that interesting? You're no working class hero. You're now in the shoes of a character who, in any Alien movie worth its salt, would likely reveal themselves as a villain and end up decapitated about 70% of the way through the film.

Planetside, too

The demo Sega and Creative Assembly put together for Gamescom was a little odd. It consisted of (what I must assume are) the game's opening scenes. Blake and a couple of Weyland-Yutani flunkies are on the surface of a planet and checking out a crash site. In practice, this divides the demo into two: the part where you're wandering outside and the bit where you've penetrated the crashed ship.

Why is this weird? Because the crashed ship was, quite literally, an area from the first Alien: Isolation—one of the units Ripley jettisoned from the Sevastopol in her adventures on the cursed station. It's also the only part of the demo that actually featured the xenomorph. That means I never got a chance to experience the alien in the new, outdoor environments, only in one I had already played before.

I'm happy to predict that being pursued by the xenomorph outside is going to feature whole new dimensions of stress and disorientation over the previous game. In their search for the crash site, Blake and co have to deal with a rising storm on the planet's surface. Rain builds and wind roars, cutting off your senses as you try to navigate the map. I found it stressful, and I wasn't even being chased by a monster at that point.

"You can be in an exterior, and you have the wind and it's really strong, and you throw a flare and it just flies back in your face," says Ana Sopikova, the game's art director, as she describes the new threats you face in the outside world. "What do you do now, right? Or the rain starts and it's really loud and you can't hear the alien's footsteps. So it's basically taken everything that people love, but just adding new layers on top of it… with everything being unscripted, it just creates much more depth in the experience."

Hello, you

After a lot of time getting rained on and lost, I made my way into the crashed ship, and the xenomorph wasted absolutely no time in oozing out of an overhead vent.

All the old fear hormones kicked in. By the end of my time with the first Alien: Isolation, the xenomorph had lost all terror for me. It was just a game mechanic—an obstacle like any other to be circumvented and handled. I guess that immunity wore off, because sneaking about the wreckage of this ship as the alien clanked about over, under, and beside me had my heart rate spiking.

Creative Assembly's still up to its old tricks. The studio makes ample use of Alien's analogue, mechanical world to force you to zoom in on cranks, valves, computer screens, and save points in ways that kneecap your awareness of the room around you and send your imagination into overdrive. It worked in the first game. It works here.

But it was all quite familiar. Without being able to take the alien outside, my experience of dodging it in the new Isolation felt much like it did in the old one. A lot of throwing objects to distract it, ducking under desks, and fervently praying that it wouldn't turn to walk down the path that would lead it directly to me. All good fun, but I'm ready to see how the xenomorph handles touching grass.

To hear Creative Assembly tell it, heading planetside will change the game when it comes time for Alien: Isolation 2's release. "In the first game, and in the sequel as well, [the alien] learns and it adapts," says Sopikova. "This is something that we're putting a lot of focus on, because we don't want the player to just pick their favorite tool and keep using it… And obviously, now with more elements, with exteriors, with the weather, with more variables at play, we can really expand on that depth of how the alien learns. What exactly does it learn about you? How does it affect the way it hunts, and how does it affect you ultimately?" Well, I'm eager to find out.

Something's wrong with me. No matter how many horror games I play, I just can't get scared like I used to. Perhaps I'm the problem—maybe a decade of playing horror games pretty much non-stop has irrevocably altered my brain chemistry.

Take Resident Evil Requiem, for example—that just doesn't make the cut for a horror game in my book. Apart from the first five minutes in the underground cells, there just wasn't anything that felt particularly scary. In fact, I don't believe that any horror game that gives me a gun can be scary, except for Amnesia: The Bunker—I genuinely thought that game was going to kill me.

Again, I find myself thinking that there's something up with my nervous system, because even Hideki Kamiya, director of Resident Evil 2, would disagree with me. He believes that Capcom has become blind to just how scary its recent games have become.

"I've never been a fan of horror. I mean, even from the time I was young, I could never handle it," Kamiya says in an interview with VGC. "I don’t like horror, and I don’t like scary things. I'm not able to make it through scary movies, and that was even the case back in the day.

"But nowadays, with how photorealistic and high-fidelity video games have gotten, the amount of crazy, horrifying things that people are able to put on the screen is absolutely insane, and I think anybody who's on the Resident Evil teams at Capcom, at this point, they must all be completely numb to how scary the thing they’re making is."

Kamiya has previously pitched a cutesy Resident Evil game, complete with Leon fishing in the countryside, foraging for wild veggies, baking bread, and walking his dog. It's either that or Capcom adding a "not scary mode" for its games, "where the zombies get all cute, the blood splatters turn into cherry blossom petals, the music becomes this upbeat, feel-good kind of tune, and you can just purely enjoy the puzzles and battles in a fun mood."

I do find it quite difficult pitching Resident Evil and others like it to my friends who won't touch horror games with a barge pole. It does seem a shame that these fantastic stories and characters are locked behind the requirement of a broken amygdala.

"Just recently this year we had Resident Evil Requiem and the big return of Leon Kennedy, and he went back to Raccoon City, and he's reliving all of those memories and all of those experiences," Kamiya says. "As somebody who directed that original game, Resident Evil 2, I was curious to know how that panned out for him. I wanted to experience that myself as a player, but the game was way too scary, and I couldn't."

Now that's a shame. Maybe Capcom has gone awry if even the director of one of, if not the, most iconic Resident Evil games is barred from accessing its recent games. "I legitimately wished it would include some kind of non-horror mode for people like me," Kamiya adds. "I talk to folks who are on the Resident Evil teams at Capcom just privately, and I tell them that their games are way too scary, and they're like, 'what, come on, they’re not that scary'. They seriously seem to have no awareness of how scary the things they make actually are, so I really hope they address that at some point."

While I do think adding a softer mode that could make the games accessible to more people may be fun, like The Dark Pictures Anthology's cinematic mode, I don't want Capcom to pull its horror punches. I actually want Capcom to go to the other extreme and experiment with more Resident Evil 7-likes which are suffocatingly terrifying. But maybe there's something wrong with me.

Secret Neighbor, the multiplayer spinoff for the 2017 horror game Hello Neighbor, has been temporarily taken offline following a security breach by a hacker who accessed the game's backend systems and deleted player data.

The incident, which occurred last week, involved an individual who obtained credentials with admin access to the game. The hacker then proceeded to wipe player profiles, in-game progression, and other data, while also carrying out what developer Hologryph and publisher tinyBuild described as a "coordinated attack on our server systems and infrastructure" across all platforms.

Hologryph and tinyBuild addressed the situation in a Steam post, (via delistedgames). They explained that, in addition to the attack, the hacker had "stated they intend to continue targeting the game and its backend systems until the game is removed from sale across all platforms."

According to both companies, no personal data or information had been compromised by the attack. Yet as the incident is ongoing, they have opted to "temporarily shut down the game until we had addressed the breach and closed any vulnerabilities that may have led to the incident."

In its statement, Hologryph and tinyBuild say they have alerted the relevant authorities to the situation. They are also working with PlayFab—the company which provides Secret Neighbour's backend services—in an attempt to recover the data that has been wiped.

As for when the issue is likely to be resolved, no timeframe has been provided. But Secret Neighbor remains on Steam and available to purchase. But Hologryph and tinyBuild say they will keep players updated "on our progress and how the situation unfolds going forwards."

Secret Neighbor released back in 2019. The following year, tinyBuild invested $3 million into Hologryph, becoming a majority stakeholder in the company having acquired the original Hello Neighbour's developer, Dynamic Pixels, a few months prior.

A sequel to Hello Neighbor was released in 2022, and a third game is apparently in development. The original Hello Neighbor is still going strong, too, having received its highest peak concurrent player-count in March this year.

Too much of a good thing, believe it or not, can be bad, even when that thing is Silent Hill. Especially when faced with the prospect of a new game every year, though franchise producer Motoi Okamoto has tried to reassure us that it's totally a good thing.

"Our aim is to, hopefully, have an annual release of new games," Okamoto says in an interview with GamesRadar at Gamescom 2026. "We would like to let players know that we have more experiences coming up, and many types of games that, we believe, will be able to provide positive kinds of surprises for players waiting for this for the series."

Silent Hill f was perhaps the most pleasant gaming surprise I've had in a long time. My expectations weren't exactly low for the game, but I was still apprehensive to see whether Konami and NeoBards could pull off a Silent Hill game which left behind the foggy American mountain town and did something different. But as you can probably tell from my glowing Silent Hill f review, they managed to pull it off.

They did such a great job, in fact, that it single-handedly made me excited for future games to take the curse of Silent Hill to new locations. So why am I so apprehensive about the idea of a new Silent Hill every year? Well, because I also used to play Call of Duty.

What scares me most about an annual release is the pressure both development studios and devs at Konami may face to keep up. Silent Hill isn't exactly an easy formula to replicate, yes its atmosphere and vibes are distinctive, but it takes more than a bit of fog to pull it off. The key is having a story which is traumatic, believable, and substantial enough to not only justify the fog descending on the protagonist, but to also keep players interested.

Okamoto does at least understand the need for keeping the series fresh with new ideas, however. "If we stay laser-focused on the same American setting, that would exhaust [narrative] possibilities, and also potentially cause fatigue for the playerbase," he adds.

While teams need to "work within the types of environments and the types of storytelling that works best for them" they also need to push the boat out, creating new circumstances which justify new games. I never want to finish a new Silent Hill game and think to myself: 'I should've just replayed Silent Hill 2'. Hopefully, it never comes to that.

As a former employee of Playtime Co., you've explored the depths of its horrifying toy factory and met many of its inhabitants, including Huggy Wuggy, who just wants to hug you (to death).

Today Mob Entertainment, makers of Poppy Playtime, have announced a new game, and it's sending you back to that haunted toy factory once more—but this time you can bring some friends along. Escape from Playtime is a co-op horror game for 1-4 players and it's coming to early access on Steam. Here's the announcement trailer:

This time around you're playing "from the perspective of the cute-yet-disturbing Smiling Critters," says Mob Entertainment—the Critters being the misfit toys you meet in the original episodic (and singleplayer) Poppy Playtime.

"Tasked with scavenging materials for a mysterious building project that promises escape from the factory, players will need to work together and follow instructions from an ominous voice lurking somewhere in the shadows, all while evading the factory's most dangerous denizens," the developer says.

"Along the way, players can solve puzzles, uncover clues, scavenge tools, use hiding spots and alternate routes, and turn the factory layout to their advantage. Proximity voice chat adds another risk: communication is essential, but an irresponsible whisper can bring the mission to a brutal end."

Fans of the original horror series will see some familiar sights in the factory, but just because you've been there before doesn't mean there won't be a few surprises: "The mysterious Voice seems to be altering the factory's layout, creating procedurally generated environments that change with each run," says Mob Entertainment.

Well, a spooky factory full of mechanical horrors sounds like a great fit for co-op, so I'm not surprised Mob decided to make their next survival horror game a multiplayer experience. There's no date shown in the trailer, just that Escape from Playtime is "coming soon" to early access. Here's its home on Steam while you wait.

Good news from the near future: Space travel has apparently advanced enough to allow humanity to establish a hotel on the surface of the moon.

Bad news: The RAMpocalypse apparently continues unabated, forcing novel experimentation with alternate forms of computer memory not rendered wholly unaffordable by AI datacenters. Namely, rat computers.

This believable projection of the current miserable state of consumer hardware comes courtesy of Ontos, the next game from Amnesia developer Frictional Games. In the trailer above, a man strapped to a chair with electrodes stuck in his head is a bit freaky, though less so than another guy who's missing everything from his upper teeth down; perhaps humanity in the future is so desperate for localized processing power that we're resorting to shoving DisplayPort cables into our brains, too.

The strongest big of imagery in the trailer by far, though, is a computer the size of a wall with 60 rats connected to it in sequence. Or parallel? I'm not great on my circuitry fundamentals, but I know a rat computer when I see one.

I am instinctively scared of the rat computer and the unknown potential of 60 rat minds taking the place of random access asiago memory.

My fear is apparently warranted, given the ominous question posed in the trailer's YouTube description is as follows:

"Do you follow the instructions given through the rodent machine?

Do you seek an alternative approach?

Or simply sabotage the experiment to satisfy your own morbid curiosity?"

The description claims there is "no right or wrong solution in Ontos," but I think the subtext is clear: We must do whatever possible to avoid this future coming to pass. Let's call off this whole AI thing before the next hardware generation arrives, lest Dire Digital Rattus 6 become the only memory accepted by motherboards by the year 2030.

Assuming we even have that much time. Ontos is out next year, and might be a banger; we loved Frictional's last game, Amnesia: The Bunker, scoring it a 93%.

If there's one thing I know about the upcoming Resident Evil film it's that the director Zach Cregger is doing the utmost to stay true to the series' roots. "I happen to worship these Resident Evil games and pull a lot of inspiration from the experience of playing them," Cregger reminds fans in a recent interview with DiscussingFilm.

I've already explained why this means he knows ball. But authenticity is a moving target for a series which just turned 30 years old, and has made some pretty monumental changes over the last three decades. Exactly what Cregger chooses to remain true to isn't as clear cut as some may think.

One example of this can be found in the latest teaser for the film, which shows a first-person camera angle of Bryan creeping through corridors and shooting down some speedy infected. An OG Resident Evil fan could faint at the sight of this, as traditionally, a third-person or fixed perspective were what you would see in a Resident Evil game. But this isn't the late 90s anymore, in fact, Resident Evil hasn't had an new exclusively third person perspective for almost a decade now.

Apart from that little hiccup at the start of 2000, 2017 was the first time Resident Evil scrapped the third person perspective with Resident Evil 7: Biohazard, with Capcom opting for a first-person perspective instead.

It was initially met with a negative knee-jerk reaction as players (myself included) feared that Resident Evil was about to be taken down a gimmicky FPS road, but we were wrong, and Biohazard managed to pull it off so well that first-person has now become a staple for the series with Resident Evil 8: Village and Requiem having both first and third person options. And dare I say, first-person suits Village better.

"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," Cregger adds, again reminding players that this adaptation isn't meant to be a 1:1 shot recreation of any of the games, but instead an amalgamation of ideas, traits, and vibes that the games employ.

In the same way, Cregger has explained that he's tried to recreate the game's progression by keeping "the environment changing every seven or eight minutes" always pushing the protagonist forward as if he's "moving onto another level." This is also helped by the fact that Bryan will move through weapons much like a protagonist in one of the games would: "You start with a pistol, and then you graduate to a shotgun, and then you graduate to a machine gun."

In the grand scheme of things, camera perspectives will play a small part in how successful the film is. But all these little nods to the games combined will serve as a solid foundation if Cregger manages to pull it all off, which I really hope he does.

1998 was a vintage year for PC gaming: Half-Life, Unreal, StarCraft, Thief and Baldur's Gate all released in lavish oversize retail boxes, and it was just as busy in console land: Ocarina of Time and Banjo-Kazooie released on Nintendo 64, while the original PlayStation enjoyed Metal Gear Solid and Resident Evil 2.

Into this crowd of future classics was also Sanitarium, which shuffled onto shelves, probably sheepishly, in April 1998. It's an isometric point-and-click adventure starring Max, an amnesiac who wakes in a bizarre, rundown sanitarium. Lest you think this is a game about exploring a slightly eerie rundown hospital, let me disabuse you of that notion immediately: For fear of spoiling everything, I can only say: this game goes places.

Richard Cobbett wrote about Sanitarium in his Crapshoot column, and Alexis Ong even went as far as to track down its creators. If you've played Sanitarium—especially divorced from its mid '90s context—you're probably evangelical about it. It carefully balances the line between camp and psychologically gruelling, but questions of tone aside, it's a gorgeously vivid and varied thing, with beautifully rendered isometric environments.

I bought Sanitarium for a couple of bucks on Steam a while ago, but it turns out there's yet another version of Sanitarium coming, also published by Ziggurat. Sanitarium Enhanced is a new reissue with a range of fairly light-of-touch tweaks and additions including widescreen support during gameplay (not just during cutscenes), controller support, and an extras gallery including behind-the-scenes and cut content.

Perhaps most importantly, a new optional hint mode has been added, which should make this quintessentially '90s point-and-clicker much more palatable to modern players who don't want to waste hours systematically clicking on things to check if they're interactive or not. A range of unspecified "legacy bugs and issues" have also been fixed.

Steam Deck optimizations are also included though I should point out that the old version of Sanitarium works just fine already using the trackpads. But, if you prefer to use face buttons and analog sticks soon that'll be much easier, by dint of this new version also arriving on Nintendo, PlayStation and Xbox consoles. When? Some time later in 2026.

Good news everyone: we've got even more Silent Hill: Townfall to help fill the void until its release. But instead of a short story or teaser trailer, we have 18 minutes of poor old Simon Ordell wandering around the abandoned (and increasingly hostile) town of St. Amelia.

It's the first extended cut of playthrough we've seen for Townfall, and it did not disappoint. The vibes, setting, and grotesque monsters all seem on point for a Silent Hill game, with the small exception of the game's firearms.

I don't think Simon's handling of the revolver was particularly disastrous. But after enjoying Silent Hill f, which had no guns, seeing Simon execute monsters in seconds reminded me why I prefer good old-fashioned melee fights.

I like suffering in Silent Hill games. I like being pushed to my limits, being put in almost impossible situations, and having to get up close and personal with the disgusting things I find wandering around in the fog. While there are never usually a lot of guns to be found, I still think they give players an easy way out of combat that can ruin the tension and fear from being constantly on the backfoot.

I can only think of one horror game that manages to stay terrifying while also giving its protagonist access to a gun—Amnesia: The Bunker—and even then I felt infinitely more confident when I managed to scrounge up more ammo. That doesn't mean games can't still be stressful. There's few things worse than firing at an enemy which is getting closer, only to run out of bullets before you manage to down it, but it's a different kind of fear, one that I'm more used to seeing in series like Resident Evil rather than Silent Hill.

It'll also be interesting to see how Simon gets his hands on firearms in Townfall. While the game is set a year before the handgun ban, St. Amelia is still just a small town in Scotland, there won't just be a guns lying around in a random appartments—this isn't the U.S. Hopefully, there'll only be minimal firearms and more melee combat and stealth for players to torment themselves with.

Guns aside, the rest of the trailer looked very good. I try to not get my hopes up too high before I've played a game, but I am truly morbidly excited to explore the town of St. Amelia, especially after seeing its blood red fog and strangely nostalgic streets.

The Sinking City was exactly the kind of ambitious but flawed game that deserves a sequel. Good ideas, middling execution? Give 'em another shot, I'm sure they'll do better second time around. What was ambitious was that it was a detective game but also a horror game about H. P. Lovecraft's Cthulhu Mythos set in a flooded open world where sometimes you have to get around by motorboating, and not in the fun way.

Fine idea, but it suffered from the classic open world problem of not enough butter spread across too much toast, quickly repeating patterns that become so familiar they were robbed of mystery and spookiness, which are things you rather need in a horror game about a detective.

The Sinking City 2 wisely bins most of that, and is instead pretty much pure survival horror in a series of constrained locations. It's Resident Evil right down to puzzle locks and zombies who sometimes come back stronger after being shot, only set in the 1920s. Which is no bad thing. Resident Evil: Roaring '20s Revelations is a solid videogame pitch, and now we don't have to wait for Capcom to make it.

Arkham—the city from Lovecraft's stories, not the asylum where Batman locks up Condiment King—has flooded, which is a problem for many people, but notably for hat-wearing occult adventurer Calvin Rafferty. A brand new protagonist, the only references to the original Sinking City in this sequel being easter eggs, Cal's out to revive his partner in occult adventure and also life, Faye Bennett. She's in a supernatural coma after a trip to the Dreamlands.

By the time the game starts Arkham's evacuation is almost complete. It's just you and a handful of other weirdos who refuse to leave, still hanging around to discover that the worm-like creatures who showed up with the flood have started clambering inside corpses to puppet them with homicidal intent.

This sets the scene for act one, where you boat across Arkham in search of a ritual to wake Faye, dock at abandoned buildings to shoot zombies and other gribblies, solve arcane puzzles, and scrounge for supplies. The combat's improved, with an actual dodge move and enemies desperate to be baited into charging so you can sidestep then get in a cheeky melee to save ammo. I do wish it had that 180-turn button the RE games have, but it definitely feels snappier.

The problem with the original's stealth being janky has also been solved—by ditching it completely. Cal stands resolutely upright while shooting monsters made of arms because crouching's for wimps I guess. The sanity meter's gone too, which seems more of a loss, though the idea madness can be measured like hit points did run a bit counter to the themes.

Given that Frogwares was responsible for the Sherlock Holmes games, it's interesting to see how much the investigation side of things has also been downplayed. Though you still have a mind palace, it's mostly for linking clues that lead to combination-lock codes and other puzzle solutions rather than murder suspects. Cal may dress like a detective, and be knocked unconscious about as often as a noir private eye, but he doesn't do any actual detecting.

Another borrowing from RE is the inventory grid you have to make space in for weapons, consumables, quest objects (a key shaped like a fish takes up as much space as a handgun), and crafting items. More than once I left a larger gun in a safe room to make space, then immediately found multiple caches of ammo for that specific gun.

Or I'd accidentally fill the inventory with crafting guff and not have room for something I needed. It's a pain, and as in most games with crafting systems bolted on, the crafting doesn't add anything except literal filler. How about instead of finding healing herbs and chemicals then combining them to make medicine, I could just, y'know, find medicine?

After the first area you travel to a hospital, and a couple of other staple survival horror locations after that. To my surprise you never return to the flooded streets, never have a chance to clean up sidequests you skipped, never open additional places to explore or find out more about the NPCs you left behind. I expected to see more than a sliver of the Dreamlands too, but instead the whole story ends in a rush, and then you're back at the start for a New Game Plus that doesn't let you keep your inventory upgrades.

There's a decent survival horror game you can wrap in under 15 hours here, one I mostly enjoyed while I was playing it, even if the finale had me asking, "Is this it?" An improvement over the original then, if an incremental one. Maybe the third time'll be the charm.

We're some ways out from the release of Resident Evil's Code: Veronica remake, but that hasn't stopped me or the other 1,999,999 eager players from wishlisting the game as Capcom celebrates an impressive milestone.

"2 million biscuits for the 2 million of you who've wishlisted Resident Evil Veronica, thank you," an official social media post reads alongside an image of that innocent old lady who definitely isn't Mother Miranda in disguise, nothing to see here guys.

The hype around Veronica may seem a bit strange at first. Back in the day Code: Veronica sold fewer copies compared to other Resi releases of the time (although that's probably thanks to the Dreamcast). Even with its positive critical reception at the time, some fans have looked back at its tricky design choices more unfavourably as of late. But I love three things in my life, Resident Evil, Chris, and Claire, so I'm pretty sure I'll love the remake.

In all seriousness, Code: Veronica's story, vibes, and locations were all immaculate, and its iffy controls are something I have no doubt the devs will improve, especially considering their track record. Yoshiaki Hirabayashi is producer and Kazunori Kadoi and Yasuhiro Anpo are directing the remake, all three of them previously worked on the Resident Evil 2 remake and the Resident Evil 4 remake; two games I was so sure didn't need remaking.

But somehow they managed to do them justice and make some ingenious changes that really improved my experience. One such example was how the team managed to make Ashley go from the most annoying thing to ever grace my screen to a helpful and likable companion who actually exhibited some personal growth over the course of the Resident Evil 4 remake. For that, I am thankful.

With that kind of expertise on hand it comes as no surprise to me that Resident Evil fans are eager to wishlist Veronica, even with just an announcement trailer to go off.

Another week, another fun tidbit learned about our new favorite gamer turned movie star, Inde Navarrette, who creeped us all the hell out in the smash-hit horror film Obsession earlier this year.

We already marveled at Navarrette cooly streaming her Call of Duty killstreaks on Twitch while wearing a Toad hat, and we were charmed to hear she (in part) learned to build PCs by watching Henry Cavill do it on YouTube.

This latest revelation is encouraging, too: Navarrette is a big fan of Resident Evil. Hey, so are we! Celebrities: they're just like us.

In a video interview with Variety's Tiana DeNicola, Navarrette talked about the first videogames she ever played—her mom bought her Shrek: Super Party for PlayStation 2 and her dad was a big Call of Duty fan—as well as what games she's playing now, like God of War Ragnarök.

Navarrette is also playing horror games these days, which feels appropriate considering how spooky Obsession was, and says she's currently "on a Resident Evil kick."

DeNicola asked if Navarrette had been contacted by anyone to do any acting in a videogame.

"Yes, and I'm starting my journey with that soon," Navarrette said, and though she wouldn't reveal which game she would be acting in, it sounds like it could be an indie game rather than a triple-A blockbuster.

"I want to try something smaller to kind of test the waters," she said, "because videogames are obviously an interest of mine."

As for playing a part in a Resident Evil project: "I love that world specifically, the Resident Evil world," Navarrette said.

"That would be perfect for you," DeNicola said. "I think that would be amazing."

"I… would die inside," Navarrette said.

Oddly enough, Navarrette hadn't heard about Zach Cregger's Resident Evil film coming out next month, but seemed delighted at the idea.

"I will buy a ticket," Navarrette said. "That's exciting."

I have to agree with DeNicola, Navarrette would be a perfect fit for Resident Evil, either in a film or a game. Her performance in Obsession required both the type of heightened emotion and the extreme physicality that would be right at home in Raccoon City. Hopefully Capcom will make it happen someday. You can see Variety's entire interview on YouTube.

First reported by Automaton, Spanking Exorcist developer Actor made a free "apology game" available to download after missing a planned July 24 release date due to overzealous Steam content moderation. In the simple apology game, you press a button to simulate spanking the developer as punishment.

Spanking Exorcist's trailer shows a game combining first person exploration, unsettling, sex doll-looking lady characters, and slightly less scary, Sadako-looking forsaken waif lady characters. It strikes me as a perfectly adequate, replacement-level gag horror game for streamers to react to, if a bit more risque than your usual fare.

"I consent," you say. "I consent," announces the anonymous Japanese developer, Actor. "Isn't there someone you forgot to ask?" asserts Valve. The uneven content moderation on Steam became a big story following controversial intervention by payment processors and the persecution of horror game Horses, but it's always been odd.

I'm fond of the theory that there's just one particularly zealous prude at Valve who really has it out for horny stuff from Japan. Anyway, you can still buy Furry Hitler (one and two), as well as Alex Jones' shitty videogame on Steam.

I was pleased to discover that Plantation Simulator was taken down (by its developer's request, not Valve's intercession) following negative reporting by Kotaku. Spanking Exorcist is fine by comparison. Harmless. Let my boy spank.

"We sincerely apologize for the delay in the release of Spanking Exorcist on this occasion," Actor wrote on X, "The Everything App" (auto-translated from Japanese). "As a token of our remorse, we've created a game where you can spank the butt of the developer, Actor … We would be delighted if you enjoy it."

In the interest of journalistic integrity, I followed the Google Drive download link and procured Apology.exe to try it out for myself, ignoring the protests of Google Drive and Windows. Computer, disable safeties, activate indie Japanese gag spanking game. Yes, I know the risks (I'm currently running a system scan as I write this).

There is not much to Apology.exe, just a cartoonish representation of a derriere viewed from overhead and surrounded by Japanese text. There's a link to Spanking Exorcist's Steam page, a button to quit out, and a button to make the butt jiggle in tune with a slapping sound effect. It is the slightest of droll diversions you could sample in this beautiful life, but I appreciate the bit.

And the story gets a happy(?) ending too. I'm thrilled to report that Spanking Exorcist proper is available for download on Steam, having released just six days after its initial target date. It's six bucks usually, $5.39 on a launch sale, and I'm probably not gonna get it.

One of the most magical parts of Silent Hill f was that never in a hundred years did I think it would be something that Konami would greenlight. Not because it's outlandish or a poor idea, I absolutely loved it, but because I just thought Konami had kind of set aside doing anything new with the franchise.

But I was wrong, and I've never been happier to be wrong, because Silent Hill f was exactly the kind of shake up this series needed—adding new twists to what we've come to expect from these games while also holding its psychological horror roots from Silent Hill 2 sacred. And because of this we've had not one but two new games over the last couple of years come out with Silent Hill f and now Silent Hill: Townfall—we are truly spoilt.

As it turns out, releasing new Silent Hill games which stray from the original format and location were exactly what devs wanted to do when it came to planning the series' comeback.

Motoi Okamoto, executive producer, explained during a lecture at CEDEC 2026 (via 4Gamer and Automaton) that the team wanted to avoid doing a "wait and see remake," which essentially means a remake purely for the sake of gauging interest in an old series. Okamoto believed that "at best, only about half of the original users will return with a remake" and if the company wanted to encourage new and old players to check out their new games they'd need to offer more than just nostalgia. This is why Silent Hill 2's remake was announced alongside Silent Hill f and Townfall.

Luckily, like Capcom has found with its Resident Evil series, Konami has also discovered a good cadence with Silent Hill—offering remakes alongside new standalone titles, with Silent Hill 2 preceding Silent Hill f and a Silent Hill remake being in the works.

The secret to it all working? Well, Okamoto does applaud Konami's development partners such as Bloober Team, Annapurna, Screen Burn, and NeoBards for their excellent work and skills bringing new and old Silent Hill stories to life. But even more important than choosing solid partners is having a solid base to work with, and that's where Konami began again with Silent Hill.

Clarifying Silent Hill's identity was of the utmost importance when beginning its revitalisation. The core concept Okamoto chose was "psychological horror", having a protagonist confront their worries, conflicts, and guilt in an "inner world" alongside encountering symbolic projections of trauma—wandering around the world they found themselves in was a metaphor for the psychological process aka Silent Hill. This is why Konami chose to kick it all off with a Silent Hill 2 remake, a game that embodied all of these traits.

Everything that Okamoto discussed here is clear as day when you look at what Silent Hill has recently put out. There's a coherence, experimentation, and freshness to what Konami is doing with this much beloved series, and as a long time fan I couldn't be happier.