What is Song of Horror like? Most of the games I'm seeing listed are well-known ones but I've genuinely never heard of that.
.......
So in order to give back a bit, I decided to give short reviews of ones I've played. These are all for the Nintendo Switch:
Breathing Fear - A pixellated side-scrolling indie horror (basically looks like what happens when you fullscreen a Game Gear game in an emulator) where you're exploring a house. It seems interesting but you quickly realize it has what I call the "Dark Seed" problem--the game is basically designed so you're gonna fail until you've figured out the absolute right order of things to do to reach one of the endings (the biggest issue being that your flashlight drains just too damn fast so you're not really allowed to explore but rather forced to rush from place to place doing what you can). Fortunately this onee often goes on sale--most recently it was only five cents.
Perception - This one had a unique premise: you play as a blind woman who sees via echolocation, but you have to be careful not to beat the stick too much or one of the Nazgul will come and eat you. You're exploring a house you keep having dreams about which it turns out has a dark history. I actually had a lot of fun with this game, especially considering its usually on sale cheap, with only two things I would consider major issues: One, sometimes its not really clear what the game wants you to do (though I usually did figure it out). Two is I kinda thought the final revelation was lame and presented some kinda awkward morality. SPOILER:
Basically it turns out the house is haunted because a woman was executed after being falsely accused of witchcraft. You're supposed to see this woman as sympathetic.... ignoring that her curse wound up harming a lot of people who had nothing to do with what happened to her. But at least the house actually IS haunted and its not some lame "personal self-inflicted purgatory" scenario.
Never Again - This one starts out kinda interesting, You play as a little girl who has asthma and keep getting transported to what I think are hallucinatory worlds where you're chased by monsters. Unfortunately I didn't finish this one because the second area kinda bugged out on me and I wasn't able to progress. That said I had a feeling it was heading towards that twist I mentioned hating so much.... also the second enemy was so goofy looking she made me laugh rather than tremble in fear. I officially dubbed that enemy "the Rubber Chicken Witch."
Slender the Arrival - I'll say it: I like this game. That said, this is a case of a game that got better later on, as some of its chapters weren't in its initial release (so if you only know the game via people like Markiplier, playing it yourself will still be fresh to you). Part of what makes the game interesting in its current state is I get the feeling Slender isn't the only thing going on in this area but may be a symptom of something else. That said, one issue I do have is that the "find X pages/generators/whatevers" stage can be luck-dependent (that said, apparently there is some skill.... I struggled with the first Eight Pages level on normal, but afterwards I never struggled with them again, not even when I bumped the difficulty up).
It's too bad the concept of Slenderman has been run into the ground.... the creepypasta community proves you don't need to be a Netflix employee to be an uncreative hack.
Getting away from Switch games, here's some classic horror experience:
Amber: Journeys Beyond (Windows 95/98 ) - This one is awesome. You go to a house to help a friend on a ghost hunt, only to find she's dead and the equipment she set up really is picking shit up. This game came out around the time Myst was popular though and you can see the influence... it ends up being that there's a bunch of spirits you have to help pass on, and you do that first by unlocking the place where you can contact them, then by exploring the world of their memories and forcing them to confront something they'd rather not. Some of the stuff can be disturbing, although at times it feels more like a fantasy adventure than a horror game. I seriously feel like I should run through this again.
EDIT: Is there a way to prevent KF from automatically turning things into emotes? I had to edit the mention of Windows 98 because it came out as 9
Alone in the Dark (MS-DOS) - This game has aged terribly and its controls are clunky, but there's a bunch it does that I wish modern horror had kept up with... like rooms where the monsters are just sitting in chairs and won't bother you unless you bother them. For some reason I find those kinds of things way more creepy than monsters that make beelines towards you with intent to kill, as it feels like there's an alien intellience while your average horror monster in games could just be replaced with a sabertooth tiger most of the time.
