If You Miss Silent Hill, Here’s Five Horror Games From EEK3 That Should Fill the Void
We all miss Silent Hill, and that’s okay. Outside of an (actually pretty rad) crossover with Dead by Daylight the series hasn’t seen much love recently. Thankfully, there’s plenty of games close enough to Silent Hill that you may find someone else to love. EEK3 had plenty of games that should fit that feeling of stepping into a twisted and trying to survive, and here’s five of the most interesting ones.
The Lunar Effect
One of the ways to know you’re in Silent Hill is waking up in some hell house that doesn’t make any sense no matter how it’s laid out. Such is the case with The Lunar Effect, where you play as a man who wakes up in a house and has no clue how he got there or what the deal with it is. He does know one thing though: he needed to not be in this house like yesterday. So he searches for a way out, hopefully before he becomes trapped in there forever.
Including text messages from mom, dead bodies, and shadows running past you at very fast speeds, The Lunar Effect has a little something spooky for everyone. The game, which looks quite close to the classic PlayStation horror formula, should feature plenty of puzzles to get that brain moving, and plenty of monsters to make you want to get out. Also it brings back the wonderful concept of opening a door triggering a little cutscene where you get to see that door open in the void, just like classic Resident Evil. Turns out I missed that a lot.
The Lunar Effect is being developed by Negative Entities and you can wishlist the game on Itch.io here.
Ode to a Moon
What is it about harvest festivals that makes them always spooky, and always prone to going horribly wrong? It’s like a law. A law that comes up in Ode to a Moon, an upcoming first person horror game where you visit an otherworldly town that just got done with one of those harvest festivals that went horribly wrong. As usual. So now you’re an unarmed journalist that needs to figure out what happened and try to survive the cosmic horror along the way.
While its art style may not be anywhere close to Silent Hill, visiting a town with some type of cosmic crisis and trying to survive the otherworldly horrors certainly is. The game page on Steam notes that it’s inspired by real events, and that it plans to show that truth may just be a little stranger than fiction. Whatever the case, it seems like a strange and psychedelic adventure awaits.
Ode to a Moon is being developed by Colorfiction, who also put out first-person exploration games like ZeroNorthZeroWest, BECALM, and The Sands of Voltark. You can wishlist the game on Steam here
STILL RIDGE
There’s something important that comes in naming your fictional town. STILL RIDGE has a name that just oozes “horror”. I am absolutely certain that, if there is a real town with the name Still Ridge anywhere in the world, it is an otherworldly portal to hell in the same way that I’d be certain of any real town named Silent Hill would be. Or possibly the kind of place you’d live that would trap you in a looping house where a murder has undoubtedly happened.
While info on the game may be scarce, there isn’t even an official store page anywhere, STILL RIDGE makes it pretty clear in its trailer what inspired it. Omar is a man trapped in a hallway with a single right turn, and it’s pretty obvious that the game has taken a lot of inspiration from P.T. However, instead of being a first-person game, STILL RIDGE looks and plays closer to a classic point and click adventure. This alone is enough to make the concept fresh, and it should be interesting seeing what else it does to change up the horror classic.
STILL RIDGE is being developed by Jaybee, developer of games such as Cigar Break, Shrine of the Silver Monkey, and the upcoming COME ON! COME ON! COME ON!. You can follow his Twitter account here.
A Place, Forbidden
There’s an eldrict horror library made of the blood and memories of the people that get lost in it. Need I say more? A Place, Forbidden is a first-person horror game that combines low-poly art with some genuinely unsettling moments to deliver on something really interesting. You wake up in a cursed library and need to escape. Seems simple, but lets be honest, there’s a good chance that if you woke up in a cursed library then you’re supposed to be there for good reason.
If you want to escape, however, you’re going to have to put some work into it. The cursed library is full of all sorts of puzzles, and in many of them you’ll have to interact with former residents, bloody pillars, and other unfortunate victims to advance. After all, trying to figure out the order several people died in, or how to mutilate your hand so you can use it to open a safe, certainly isn’t for most people. Though if you want out of the library then you better be ready to do some drastic things.
A Place, Forbidden was developed by A Team Forbidden and is currently available on Itch.io for free. More content is being added to the game soon.
Korpus: Buried Over the Black Soil
You know what job must be awful? Inspecting abandoned houses. Especially when you have to do so in Eastern Europe. You just know all those houses are going to be haunted. Such is the case with Korpus: Buried Over the Black Soil, where you have to inspect an abandoned house in Eastern Europe that is so clearly haunted. Inspired by horror games from the 90s, you’ll be dodging ghosts and monsters in an effort to try and figure out the deep, dark, secrets that the house harbors.
The big twist, however, is the way in which you interact with the house. It has a long and contradictory history, and if you don’t like a certain version of the house then you just need to find a document that proves a different version exists. Need a bookshelf out of the way? Find a photograph or document that says the bookshelf isn’t there and bam, that bookshelf ceases to exist. It’s a good thing you have this skill, because it seems like the ghosts really don’t want you to discover those secrets.
Korpus: Buried Over the Black Soil was developed by Korpus and is currently available to purchase on Steam.
