Editorials
6 of the Best Free Horror Games!
When dealing with the real-life terrors of mortgages, student loans and the many challenges of simply staying alive, it’s understandable that some (if not most) of us horror fans aren’t able to keep up with AAA gaming’s financial demands. Hell, even those of us who can afford to lay down 60 dollars or more on the latest releases would sometimes rather try out something new without committing to oversized demo files or resorting to piracy.
Having dealt with this situation way too many times, I’ve compiled a list of six of the best free horror games available online today, so your wallets don’t have to suffer if you’re in need of a good interactive scare. While Free-To-Play games aren’t exactly rare on the internet, I’ve decided to limit this collection to fully-fledged gaming experiences. That means no micro-transactions, free trials, first episodes or flash games here, just solid horror offered up at no charge!
Also, don’t forget to comment with some of your best free horror games below!
With that in mind, let’s begin!
6. Spooky’s Jump Scare Mansion
Jump scares are considered by some to be the horror equivalent of toilet humor in comedy, appealing only to the lowest common denominator. However, much like toilet humor, in the hands of creative and capable artists, jump scares can also be a tool for building tension in both movies and games. Spooky’s Jump Scare Mansion certainly lives up to its title with 1000 haunted rooms and seemingly infinite ways of producing a scare.
It may be a minimalist take on horror, with simple graphics and cute designs, but the game works as a fascinating endurance test once you discover just how far you’re willing to go in order to reach the final room. It might not be for everyone, but Albino Moose’s experiment serves as proof that, even when you know it’s coming, it’s the anticipation building up to a scare that really matters.
Spooky’s Jump Scare Mansion was also renovated into a fun HD remake, but the original is still available on Steam right here!
5. Doki Doki Literature Club!
To be honest, I was never really into visual novels. This hybrid form of gaming, literature and anime always felt weird to me, as if it would have been better to focus on one of these elements instead of trying to be all of them at once (though I’m still looking for an English translation of that silly-looking Silent Hill VN on the Gameboy Advance).
Nevertheless, a close friend really insisted that I play Doki Doki Literature Club, claiming that I would love it but she couldn’t tell me why. It took a while, but I eventually got around to it, and it’s actually really freaking good! I can’t even tell you why it’s on this list without spoiling the experience, so you’ll just have to take my word for it.
Meta elements and breaking the fourth wall can make a lot of indie games feel pretentious, but Team Salvato uses the concept here with such mastery that you’ll enjoy the experience even if you already know what’s going on. That’s why I recommend that you download the game over on Steam, even if, like myself, you’re not really a fan of the genre.
4. SCP – Containment Breach
The SCP Foundation remains one of my favorite instances of internet horror. From surreal objects like the bouncing ball that breaks Newton’s laws of motion to genuine eldritch abominations, these online creations usually rely on the manipulation of senses and existential concepts in order to inflict fear and discomfort on unsuspecting readers.
With all these reality-bending creatures and locations, it’s easy to see how this universe can make for some unique gameplay opportunities, and that’s exactly what Joonas Rikkonen thought when he released SCP – Containment Breach back in 2012.
As the player is tasked with escaping a secret facility overrun by horrific metaphysical monsters (not to mention government agents hell-bent on eliminating witnesses), the game actually feels a lot like low-budget Half-Life. However, the escaped creatures themselves make this a one-of-a-kind experience where even your blinking must be managed in order to stay alive. It doesn’t get much more intense than this.
SCP – Containment Breach is available here!
3. The Chzo Mythos Games
Yahtzee Croshaw may be best known for his brutally honest game reviews (not to mention the popularization of the PC Master Race meme), but he’s also one of few critics to actually try their luck at producing some of the art that they usually write about. Starting with 5 Days a Stranger, Yahtzee went on to explore his love of complex gaming narratives with this memorable horror-adventure series.
Taking cues from Silent Hill, Clock Tower and even H.P. Lovecraft, the Chzo Mythos games experimented with elements from classic Point & Click and even Text Adventure titles to tell a genre-bending story, resulting in a must-play experience for fans of both cosmic horror and retro gaming thrills.
The futuristic 7 Days a Skeptic (the Jason X of the series, if you will) remains my personal favorite, but all four games are worth playing. Plus, if you enjoy Yahtzee’s take on minimalist gaming, I’d also recommend The Consuming Shadow, another terrifying Lovecraftian experience for gamers on a budget.
5 Days a Stranger, 7 Days a Skeptic, Trilby’s Notes and 6 Days a Sacrifice are available here!
2. Slender: The Eight Pages
After all the adaptations, jokes and all-around over-exposure, it may surprise some readers to know that the Slender Man meme was once one of the scariest tales on the internet. Back in 2012, independent gaming developers Parsec Productions presented the World Wide Web with a simple but effective horror experience that, alongside the Marble Hornets web series, greatly contributed to the meme’s viral success.
While Slender: The Eight Pages can be summed up as a highly atmospheric game of good-old-fashioned hide-and-seek, with the player tracking down the titular pages in a randomized nightmare, it’s also one of my favorite examples of Found-Footage in gaming. It might not be terribly complex, and the graphics aren’t anything to write home about, but it’s still a memorable take on the internet’s most infamous urban legend.
Parsec Productions would eventually team up with the writers behind Marble Hornets and produce a more complex sequel that I also recommend if you can afford it (it even includes an HD remake of sorts of the original game as a bonus level!). In any case, you can still pick up The Eight Pages over here. It’s easily one of the best free horror games around after all this time.
1. Alien Swarm
Few movies can claim to have had as big an impact on gaming as James Cameron’s sci-fi classic Aliens. Sure, some of us (myself included) still prefer Ridley Scott’s terrifying original, but it’s easy to understand why space marines facing off against horrific creatures is such a compelling concept. While countless games have paid homage to the Alien franchise, very few have managed to capture the unique dread of badass soldiers caught in a horrific war that even they can’t win.
Now, imagine my surprise when I decided to try out a little free-to-play squad-based shooter on Steam entitled Alien Swarm, and was rewarded with one of the most heart-pounding and intense gaming experiences of my life. Starting off as a mod for Unreal Tournament 2004, Valve was so impressed with the team’s work that they hired them to work on projects like Portal and Left 4 Dead, eventually releasing a standalone version of the game in 2010.
Some of the art direction feels generic (especially the titular alien designs), and the unforgiving difficulty isn’t for everyone, but the satisfaction you feel when reaching the end of a level with your buddies barely hanging on to dear life is almost indescribable. The game was eventually updated into Alien Swarm: Reactive Drop, with improved features and additional fan-made content, so I recommend you try out that version. After all, who can say no to Souls-Borne-level thrills for the low, low price of absolutely nothing?
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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