First-person horror games like Amnesia and Outlast are great, but less obviously-immersive styles of games can do very interesting things with the genre too. The top-down Darkwood is fantastically freaky, the sidescrolling platformer The Final Station has a wonderfully creepy ambiance, and the retro point-and-click adventure The Last Door is a genuinely unsettling tale of Victorian-era evil.
Re:Turn - One Way Trip, unwieldy title aside, looks like it might pull off something similar. A 2D horror-adventure rendered in 16-bit style, it tells the tale of five college friends who embark on a camping trip to celebrate graduation. But things take a dark turn when one of them awakens in the middle of the night to find that everyone else has disappeared: Lured deeper into the woods, she stumbles across an abandoned train, and falls into a bizarre journey between the past and the present, filled with dark mysteries and danger.
You're obviously not going to be screaming hysterically while mutated horrors chase you down dark halls, but even so I think the trailer looks promising. The audio seems very effective (nothing gets my attention quicker than a distant "thump-thump" while my concentration is focused elsewhere) and as a side-scroller, Re:Turn may be more accessible to players who might enjoy thrillers but don't want to subject themselves to full-on first-person nightmares. (Which I can absolutely relate to: It took me the better part of a decade to recover from Amnesia: The Dark Descent to the point that I was able to jump into Soma.)
Re:Turn – One Way Trip is slated to come out on September 29, but a demo will be available from June 16-22 as part of the Steam Festival: Summer Edition. For a closer look at what it's all about, hit up redego.com.
