I’ve only recently begun to realize that, despite what I’ve thought for most of my life, I might actually enjoy horror games after all. I’m not a fan of jumpscares – I have enough anxiety on my own without the added heart attack – but if you may creep me out and make me nervous, I might just be on board.
That kind of horror is exactly what I saw at the Limited Run booth atPAX Westthis year. The first game I played was a “port plus” ofClock Tower: Rewind, a Japan-exclusive from 1995 for the Super Famicom title Clock Tower, now with cutscenes, a run ability, extra decorative touches, and even more improvements while still keeping the pixel art style of the original.
Clock Tower: Rewind Preview - Play With Time Like Your Life Depends On It
When the game began, I was in a dining room with three friends, talking to each of them about how spooky the setting was before I ventured into the creepy halls myself. I almost immediately heard a scream, and turned back to realize that none of my friends were where I left them, and that the room was now dark and vacant despite nobody walking past me as I left through the only exit.
Tepidly stepping forward through the dimly-lit hallways, I was almost hit by the dead body of one of my friends falling from the ceiling, recently impaled by “The Scissorman”, the game’s big bad whose weapon of choice is a pair of scissors about the size of his body. I barely had time to be afraid before he started chasing me.
Terrified, I darted to hide by locking myself in a bathroom, but since my footsteps made noise, The Scissorman found and killed me. Thankfully, the titular Rewind ability came in handy there, allowing me to scoot back in time a few seconds and try again to stay still. This time, The Scissorman didnothear me, and I was free to sneak back out.
He randomly spawns around the map, though, and I could only wander for a few minutes until he found me once again. And if you go too far into the scene where you get killed, you may be locked into your decision, unable to rewind past a certain point. It was this that led to my grim demise when The Scissorman found me again, spearing me without a second thought, ending my life – and my demo.
There’s something oddly unsettling about horror games with pixel graphics. Maybe it’s just that I’m new to the genre, or maybe it’s that I know how scary old horror can be, but the fewer mechanics I’ve got to work with in a game, the fewer security blankets I feel like I have. Despite giving me the ability to run around and choose where I wanted to go, Clock Tower: Rewind felt claustrophobic at all times, since I knew The Scissorman was never far, even when things seemed relatively peaceful.
Ghosts Preview - Night Trap In Your Nightmares
Down but not out, I moved onto another title: Ghosts. As soon as the tutorial informed me I’d be manning the cameras on a television show about a house full of young women, I found myself hummingthe theme song to the iconic Sega CD title, Night Trap. I flipped the camera between rooms for a moment before the dev told me to get out of the van where I was running the operations.
I yipped in fright when I turned to see a large wooden desk with a plague doctor mask on it thatdefinitelywasn’t there when I started the game, and immediately got the feeling this wasn’t just a haunted house game.
With the camera screens drenched in blood when I turned back, I hopped quickly out of the van to find myself in an old, Victorian-era alleyway in the dead of night. I was told to make some sort of potion to offer to the plague mask, but the mortar and pestle I was given to do so spontaneously combusted when I finished the recipe. As soon as I gave the tonic to the plague doctor mask, it became adhered to my character’s head, and I watched through the eye holes of the mask as severed, bloody body parts rained from the ceiling on the van. The gore burst into flames, but the van door had turned into a brick wall like the one in the alley outside, and I was stuck in the vehicle slowly burning to death.
With a start, my character awoke in her bed, talking about how it was all a bad dream because I was nervous to start my job as a camera operator the following day. As she tried to get back to sleep, an unnaturally tall ghost drifted past the window outside.
The suddenness of everything was the scariest part of Ghosts – there was no possible way I could have predicted anything the game threw at me. Ghosts having more modern graphics than Clock Tower didn’t make it any less terrifying, and I truly don’t know which game startled me the most. All I know is that Limited Run brought some genuinely spooky games to PAX this year.
The devs of both laughed along in good fun as I jumped out of my skin, eager to show their games to a self-professed newcomer to the horror genre, and I think watching an unsuspecting newbie get scared while playing something is something a lot of horror fans have experienced and secretly (or not-so secretly) enjoyed. Limited Run will be publishing the games later this year, with both hoping for launch dates as close to Halloween as possible.
PAX West
PAX West began life as the Penny Arcade Expo, a celebration of gaming culture hosted by the creators of the titular webcomic. Held in Seattle, it draws over 100,000 visitors.
