Editorials
Bloody Disgusting’s Neil Bolt Selects the 10 Best Horror Games of 2021
Unfortunately, 2021 was still largely haunted by the ghost of 2020, and as such, escapism remained a vital component of day-to-day life. Luckily, there was plenty of it on offer.
2021 marked a huge year for perhaps the biggest name in horror games, Resident Evil. Not only did the series celebrate its 25th anniversary, but the eighth mainline game was also released and proved there was still plenty in the tank for the franchise’s future. Elsewhere, Silent Hill 2 turned 20 with rumblings of new entries in the franchise sadly still just that. Nostalgia was well rewarded in 2021, with ports and stellar remasters of revered classics such as Alan Wake, Quake, and Zombies Ate My Neighbors among the restored hits.
Whilst it’d be nice to just swim in a sea of hazy sentimentality, 2021 had plenty of new games to discover as well. One thing that struck me this year was the sheer variety of horror experiences on offer. So much so that I struggled to keep it at just ten. So first up, a few honorable mentions that, for various reasons, didn’t quite make the final ten.
HONORABLE MENTIONS
Werewolf: The Apocalypse – Earthblood: Shallow as a puddle in so many ways, but let me tell you, I really enjoyed being a hulking eco-warrior who can turn into a regular wolf and a monstrous werewolf.
Deathloop: Look, Deathloop is fantastic. I love it a lot, and slapped the whole 5 skulls on it for this very website, but it would be a bit much to have it adorn a top 10 of the year for horror. Violent, bloody, and excellent it may be, but it leans further into sci-fi than horror.
The Last Stand: Aftermath: A solid apocalypse survival game that plays out like a serious take on Death Road to Canada.
Nix Umbra: A deceptively simple score attack game setup leads to an unsettling, visually-captivating folk horror experience
Jupiter Hell: Doom as a top-down, turn-based game? That’s essentially what Jupiter Hell is, and it pulls it off pretty well.
Christmas Massacre: Right at the death, Puppet Combo dropped a festive score attack game where you are a serial killer, racking up kills against the public whilst dressed as Santa. Exquisite.
Right then, onto the Best Horror (and yes, sometimes horror adjacent) Games of 2021. Obviously, these are my personal picks, and as such, if something isn’t here that you think should be, I didn’t play it or didn’t get on with it as much as the rest. As ever, your own personal picks for games of the year are more than welcome in the comments section below!
Tormented Souls (Developer: Dual Effect – Format: Multi)
A throwback survival horror with a PS2-era attitude, Tormented Souls is sincere enough with its schlocky melodramatic attempt to recreate the likes of Haunting Ground and Rule of Rose to be forgiven for some of its technical misgivings.
The work of a small studio is quite impressive here, especially in the detail of its creepy old private hospital setting. I doubt it will end up gaining anything like the cult status of the games it’s inspired from, but Tormented Souls invokes the spirit of them superbly.
Returnal (Developer: Housemarque – Format: PS5)
More sci-fi action than horror? Yes, you could indeed say that of Returnal. Yet my biggest takeaway from it was that of horror. From the Giger-esque environments of its alien world of Atropos, to the cosmic horror monstrosities that inhabit it, and in the strange occurrences that blight protagonist Selene, Returnal is all atmosphere and dread.
What really sells it is the punishing arcade-inspired combat. Every movement feels important to Selene’s ongoing survival, and knowing the consequence of falling to the tendrils or energy blasts of one of Atropos’ nastier inhabitants is a trip back to the start that manages to be exhilarating where it could easily have been frustrating.
Back 4 Blood (Developer: Turtle Rock – Format: Multi)
To try and capture the lofty heights of Left 4 Dead is a bold choice, and this year alone, there have been a few attempts, but for Turtle Rock Studios, to do so was personal. Having its own storied history with Valve’s zombie shooter series, there was much expectation at hand when it announced Back 4 Blood.
Was it met? No, it never really could, but the effort to continue that legacy is sincere, and at its best, Back 4 Blood doles out explosive, nervy co-op action in spades.
Bloodwash (Developer: Black Eyed Priest, Henry Hoare – Format: PC)
Torture Star published this punchy, grimy slice of retro horror set almost entirely in an isolated laundromat in the dead of night. The remit of Torture Star is short sharp horror games with an unsettling throwback aesthetic and Bloodwash ticks those boxes whilst still managing to be its own thing.
What I especially enjoy about Bloodwash is how well it captures the feeling of existing in the mundane during the hours when everyone else is asleep or partying. Bloodwash’s 24/7 laundromat and neighboring stores exude a seedy, back of beyond atmosphere long before a killer shows up.
In Sound Mind (Developer: We Create Stuff – Format: Multi)
To make any kind of statement in first-person horror games these days, you either have to shake up the usual ideas or show a meticulous understanding of how to utilize them properly. Both together would be nice, though…
In Sound Mind largely goes for the former, by carving its trippy story into several distinct sections, each informed by the mental issues of a particular patient of the psychiatrist protagonist, who is himself cursed with a supernatural entity forcing its way into his psyche.
Yes, there’s smatterings of the trope-laden stuff that makes you roll your eyes, but it’s used as cement for the more interesting bricks of ingenuity and vibrancy used to build the house of In Sound Mind’s often psychedelic journey into madness.
Sunshine Manor (Developer: Fossil Games – Format: Multi)
While Sunshine Manor takes more obvious inspiration from games such as Earthbound and Undertale, its spooky mansion setting, full of ghosts to bust, and secrets to uncover, brings to mind Luigi’s Mansion by way of Resident Evil’s Spencer Estate.
Key to the game’s appeal, however, is its dark humor placed next to its adorable 8-bit visual style. You certainly wouldn’t expect a game about a psychic child surviving a house of a possessed serial killer and spirits to look this cute.
Resident Evil Village (Developer: Capcom – Format: Multi)
Without doubt, Resident Evil Village is the biggest horror game of 2021, and such expectations hang heavy on it. So it’s quite a relief that Village doesn’t get too bogged down with that weight, and offers surprises among the familiarity.
Sure, going in expecting a whole heap of meme magnet Lady Dimitrescu would leave you disappointed, but I’d argue the game’s strengths lay away from the tall vamp. Village ends up getting the balance of absurd melodrama and gore-splattered nastiness that makes a great Resident Evil just about right.
In the game’s second area I found one of the best things to come out of a Resi game in years, and it’s a departure from formula to boot. You know the place if you’ve played it. How could you forget?
Spookware (Developer: Beeswax Games – Format: PC)
The more observant (or just more invested) among you might look at Spookware in this list and go ‘hang on there for a minute, you put this in last year’s honorable mentions!’ and you’d be right in a way. This is still Spookware in the sense it has the same basic idea of a goofy horror version of Wario Ware, but it’s a whole other game that’s bigger and better.
Now the Wario Ware-style micro-games are just an ingredient in a genuinely amusing RPG about a trio of skeleton brothers going on an afterlife-changing road trip that takes in high school graduation, cooking, and a murder mystery on a cruise ship.
Everything that made the relatively small iteration of Spookware from last year so endearing is present here, and boosted by a proper fleshing out of the world the micro-games inhabit.
Mundaun (Developer: Hidden Fields – Format: Multi)
I must admit, despite loving the pencil-drawn style of Mundaun, I found it a tough game to get into at first. Thankfully I got to a point where it all clicked and became one of the year’s most unique horror game setups.
Exploring a rural Swiss mountain town rife with cult activity is an enticing premise on its own, but throwing in Mundaun’s distinctive visual style elevates it into something otherworldly. You start with an investigation of your father’s death, but things take an increasingly weird and horrific turn that stands out when compared to its first-person horror contemporaries.
Inscryption (Developer: Daniel Mullins Games – Format: PC)
A card game you know nothing about played out in a candlelit cabin against a wild-eyed figure, cloaked in shadow. That’s how Inscryption begins, and for a little while, that’s all it seems to be. Then the strange things start happening. The cards begin to speak to you, and they offer a chance to escape; to give anything more away would spoil a deeply engrossing experience.
What I love about Inscryption is how it keeps hanging little morsels of a supposed truth in front of you, begging you to snaffle them up and fall deeper into the game’s mysteries. A quick round of its rather violent card game is out of the question as curiosity leads you elsewhere, and certainly not where you’d expect. The places this game goes are truly exciting because it never settles on one path, but manages to make a coherent whole by the time things wrap up.
Unnerving, unsettling, compelling, chaotic, and downright mind-boggling, Inscryption is an easy choice for my Game of the Year.
Twice a month Joe Lipsett will dissect a new Amityville Horror film to explore how the “franchise” has evolved in increasingly ludicrous directions. This is “The Amityville IP.”
A bizarre recurring issue with the Amityville “franchise” is that the films tend to be needlessly complicated. Back in the day, the first sequels moved away from the original film’s religious-themed haunted house storyline in favor of streamlined, easily digestible concepts such as “haunted lamp” or “haunted mirror.”
As the budgets plummeted and indie filmmakers capitalized on the brand’s notoriety, it seems the wrong lessons were learned. Runtimes have ballooned past the 90-minute mark and the narratives are often saggy and unfocused.
Both issues are clearly on display in Amityville Karen (2022), a film that starts off rough, but promising, and ends with a confused whimper.
The promise is embodied by the tinge of self-awareness in Julie Anne Prescott (The Amityville Harvest)’s screenplay, namely the nods to John Waters’ classic 1994 satire, Serial Mom. In that film, Beverly Sutphin (an iconic Kathleen Turner) is a bored, white suburban woman who punished individuals who didn’t adhere to her rigid definition of social norms. What is “Karen” but a contemporary equivalent?
In director/actor Shawn C. Phillips’ film, Karen (Lauren Francesca) is perpetually outraged. In her introductory scenes, she makes derogatory comments about immigrants, calls a female neighbor a whore, and nearly runs over a family blocking her driveway. She’s a broad, albeit familiar persona; in many ways, she’s less of a character than a caricature (the living embodiment of the name/meme).
These early scenes also establish a fairly straightforward plot. Karen is a code enforcement officer with plans to shut down a local winery she has deemed disgusting. They’re preparing for a big wine tasting event, which Karen plans to ruin, but when she steals a bottle of cursed Amityville wine, it activates her murderous rage and goes on a killing spree.
Simple enough, right?
Unfortunately, Amityville Karen spins out of control almost immediately. At nearly every opportunity, Prescott’s screenplay eschews narrative cohesion and simplicity in favour of overly complicated developments and extraneous characters.
Take, for example, the wine tasting event. The film spends an entire day at the winery: first during the day as a band plays, then at a beer tasting (???) that night. Neither of these events are the much touted wine-tasting, however; that is actually a private party happening later at server Troy (James Duval)’s house.
Weirdly though, following Troy’s death, the party’s location is inexplicably moved to Karen’s house for the climax of the film, but the whole event plays like an afterthought and features a litany of characters we have never met before.
This is a recurring issue throughout Amityville Karen, which frequently introduces random characters for a scene or two. Karen is typically absent from these scenes, which makes them feel superfluous and unimportant. When the actress is on screen, the film has an anchor and a narrative drive. The scenes without her, on the other hand, feel bloated and directionless (blame editor Will Collazo Jr., who allows these moments to play out interminably).
Compounding the issue is that the majority of the actors are non-professionals and these scenes play like poorly performed improv. The result is long, dull stretches that features bad actors talking over each other, repeating the same dialogue, and generally doing nothing to advance the narrative or develop the characters.
While Karen is one-note and histrionic throughout the film, at least there’s a game willingness to Francesca’s performance. It feels appropriately campy, though as the film progresses, it becomes less and less clear if Amityville Karen is actually in on the joke.
Like Amityville Cop before it, there are legit moments of self-awareness (the Serial Mom references), but it’s never certain how much of this is intentional. Take, for example, Karen’s glaringly obvious wig: it unconvincingly fails to conceal Francesca’s dark hair in the back, but is that on purpose or is it a technical error?
Ultimately there’s very little to recommend about Amityville Karen. Despite the game performance by its lead and the gentle homages to Serial Mom’s prank call and white shoes after Labor Day jokes, the never-ending improv scenes by non-professional actors, the bloated screenplay, and the jittery direction by Phillips doom the production.
Clocking in at an insufferable 100 minutes, Amityville Karen ranks among the worst of the “franchise,” coming in just above Phillips’ other entry, Amityville Hex.
The Amityville IP Awards go to…
- Favorite Subplot: In the afternoon event, there’s a self-proclaimed “hot boy summer” band consisting of burly, bare-chested men who play instruments that don’t make sound (for real, there’s no audio of their music). There’s also a scheming manager who is skimming money off the top, but that’s not as funny.
- Least Favorite Subplot: For reasons that don’t make any sense, the winery is also hosting a beer tasting which means there are multiple scenes of bartender Alex (Phillips) hoping to bring in women, mistakenly conflating a pint of beer with a “flight,” and goading never before seen characters to chug. One of them describes the beer as such: “It looks like a vampire menstruating in a cup” (it’s a gold-colored IPA for the record, so…no).
- Amityville Connection: The rationale for Karen’s killing spree is attributed to Amityville wine, whose crop was planted on cursed land. This is explained by vino groupie Annie (Jennifer Nangle) to band groupie Bianca (Lilith Stabs). It’s a lot of nonsense, but it is kind of fun when Annie claims to “taste the damnation in every sip.”
- Neverending Story: The film ends with an exhaustive FIVE MINUTE montage of Phillips’ friends posing as reporters in front of terrible green screen discussing the “killer Karen” story. My kingdom for Amityville’s regular reporter Peter Sommers (John R. Walker) to return!
- Best Line 1: Winery owner Dallas (Derek K. Long), describing Karen: “She’s like a walking constipation with a hemorrhoid”
- Best Line 2: Karen, when a half-naked, bleeding woman emerges from her closet: “Is this a dream? This dream is offensive! Stop being naked!”
- Best Line 3: Troy, upset that Karen may cancel the wine tasting at his house: “I sanded that deck for days. You don’t just sand a deck for days and then let someone shit on it!”
- Worst Death: Karen kills a Pool Boy (Dustin Clingan) after pushing his head under water for literally 1 second, then screeches “This is for putting leaves on my plants!”
- Least Clear Death(s): The bodies of a phone salesman and a barista are seen in Karen’s closet and bathroom, though how she killed them are completely unclear
- Best Death: Troy is stabbed in the back of the neck with a bottle opener, which Karen proceeds to crank
- Wannabe Lynch: After drinking the wine, Karen is confronted in her home by Barnaby (Carl Solomon) who makes her sign a crude, hand drawn blood contract and informs her that her belly is “pregnant from the juices of his grapes.” Phillips films Barnaby like a cross between the unhoused man in Mulholland Drive and the Mystery Man in Lost Highway. It’s interesting, even if the character makes absolutely no sense.
- Single Image Summary: At one point, a random man emerges from the shower in a towel and excitedly poops himself. This sequence perfectly encapsulates the experience of watching Amityville Karen.
- Pray for Joe: Many of these folks will be back in Amityville Shark House and Amityville Webcam, so we’re not out of the woods yet…
Next time: let’s hope Christmas comes early with 2022’s Amityville Christmas Vacation. It was the winner of Fangoria’s Best Amityville award, after all!
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