Halloween is almost upon us, and if you're looking for some suitably spooky videogame fun then allow me to direct your attention to Playable Archive, a free "micro psychological horror experience" from Darkstone Digital, the solo studio behind The Mortuary Assistant.
As you might expect, given the title, Playable Archive bears a number of similarities to PT, the 2014 "playable teaser" for a cancelled game in the Silent Hill series. It takes place (almost) entirely within a single home, the situation starts slow and escalates quickly, and it's the product of a game that was ultimately cancelled and will never see the light of day.
"Releasing Playable Archive is really exciting, and it feels like some form of personal healing," Darkstone Digital owner Brian Clarke said. "After working for so long on something I cared so much about, it felt wrong to leave it sitting on the shelf like some cursed item.
"Although the full-scale game this demo was built for will never see the light of day and many pieces of it had to be left on the cutting room floor, I feel like it’s important to honor what was built. Immortalizing the project's memory with Playable Archive is my way of doing that while offering something new from me for horror fans this Halloween as I get to work on new projects."
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I took Playable Archive for a spin, and it is creepy. I'm keeping things vague to avoid spoilers, but it's a found-footage game about a young couple who purchase a dilapidated home and set about renovating it, leading to an unfortunate discovery and rapidly deteriorating circumstances. A big mid-game twist elicited a genuine wtf from me, and things went downhill even more quickly from there. The more I learned the worse I felt, and the more I wanted to know: What the hell is really going on here?
I had a similar meta-feeling about the demo itself, which made me wonder: Is this slice of a never-to-be-released game actually part of a feeling-out process, to see if maybe the game it came from should be released? So I asked—and the answer came back a firm 'no.'
"I loved the project, but I spent such time and effort on it that it would simply be too much to try to toil away on it again for who knows how long," Clarke told me. "I have no desire to revisit it at this point other than for inspiration. From the very beginning it was designed with Paranormal Activity in mind, so I'd rather spend my efforts creating something new than trying to force something new from an existing project."
Hunter Bond, director of publisher DreadXP, said effectively the same thing: "Brian was still haunted by the game he worked on for years not being publicly playable in any form. I asked if he agreed that it would both be a cool and amusing thing to do to just release it into the wild for free so that people could experience it. We feel good about the choice we made to support Brian and cancel it when he wasn't going to be given enough time to get it to the level it deserved. We all hope people enjoy it, but I wouldn't ask him to retread this ground. Instead I'm excited to see what he works on next now that he can have some closure with this."
Playable Archive doesn't have a save function, which should be fine for most people—it's a "micro" horror game, remember, with an estimated running time of just 30-60 minutes. I actually hit a snag near the end of that window, which I unfortunately didn't have time to figure out because I had to work. (Life is so unfair.) But it's interesting enough that I'm going to jump back into it tonight and take it all the way through to whatever end awaits: I know the mystery won't be resolved, but it's enough fun, in the horror game sense of the word, that I want to get as far with it as I can anyway.
Playable Archive is available now on Steam, and in case you didn't see it the first time—that happens sometimes, in horror games—it's free. Once you've got it wrapped up, be sure to check out our Halloween guide of other games to play, shows to watch, and costumes to wear to properly celebrate this year's spooky season.
