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Which Horror Games Have Gotten Better With Age?
This weekend, I decided I’d take a break from all these exciting new releases to play something I had played before. It had been at least five years since I had last played Condemned: Criminal Origins, so I was surprised when it took me all of five seconds to get the hang of it again. Ten minutes in and I was bludgeoning crazed homeless people with a pipe I tore off the wall of a storage room. I crippled so many NPCs that day, I can still hear them screaming as I type this.
I assumed Condemned would’ve aged poorly, and it had, visually. I also didn’t expect to be impressed by what gritty, realistic visuals looked like in 2005. What did sneak up on me was how viscerally satisfying the combat still is. It also reminded me of how badly we need a new Condemned game.
I’ve had similar experiences with the underrated Saw: The Video Game — whatever your opinion is of the films, the first game is actually pretty good — and even Nightmare Creatures, which I can confirm is still a helluva lot of fun to play after nearly twenty years.
Alan Wake seems destined to join this club at some point. It’s not there yet because it’s only five years-old. The aging process hasn’t had enough time to really take effect, but when it does, it’s going to be a good thing. It’s common for weird things to go unappreciated for some time.
I’ve come up with a theory to explain this, and the gist of it is it’s all our fault. I like strange things, and I still occasionally make snap judgments of stuff I don’t immediately understand. I think it’s the quirky nature of these things that keeps a lot of people from wanting to try it. I have friends who never played Alan Wake solely because they saw a trailer for it back in 2010 and they decided it was too weird.
This has happened to me, too. I wasn’t able to glean much enjoyment out of Silent Hill 4: The Room until I returned to it with an open mind a few years ago. I still don’t love it, but it is easier to appreciate its strengths, such as the music, atmosphere and enemy designs.
How about you? Which horror game(s) do you think have gotten better with age?
Let’s start with the good news. Lockbox looks far better than its misleading marketing materials suggest, a supernatural horror movie so darkly lit and color graded that you’ll have to squint your way through jump scares. It’s also anchored by reliable genre performers. That’s also about where the good news ends with this rote adaptation of Knifepoint Horror Podcast story “Winthrop.”
The empathetic Carla Gugino gives her all as Ellen, a saint of a woman with boundless patience who takes on life’s hard luck with a kind smile. After giving up her career as a fashion designer to become caretaker for a dying mother, she’s then forced to reinvent herself once more when her caretaker role ends. That catches us up to the events of Lockbox, where Ellen is asked to take in a cousin she hasn’t seen in quite some time who’s dealing with severe PTSD.
Just as Ellen finally establishes a real connection with Winthrop (Lou Taylor Pucci), it’s interrupted by the arrival of peculiar neighbor Vahna (Katharine Isabelle), who spells clear trouble. When Vahna shows up dead, it sets in motion a supernatural battle of possession.
Image Credit: Aura entertainment
Director Daniel Stamm (The Last Exorcism, Prey for the Devil) and screenwriter Justin Yoffe approach Lockbox in the broadest of brushstrokes, dooming it from the start with clunky storytelling and woefully underdeveloped themes of heady topics like PTSD. Winthrop is a character that comes loaded with emotional baggage and trauma that’s piled on throughout his tragic life, but much like its title, his interiority and history are treated like a tightly guarded secret meant to prolong the supernatural mystery.
The problem here, though, is that Lockbox is too sparse to sustain mystery at all, and it instead robs Winthrop of characterization. It winds up trapping the talented Pucci without anywhere to go, toggling between wounded animal and mentally disoriented.
From there, Lockbox bounds through plot developments without any sense of stakes or purpose, peppered by a smattering of haphazard paint-by-numbers jump scares. The only unwavering constant is Ellen’s resolute faith, and Stamm seems to leave it entirely to Gugino to guide confused audiences through this inconsequential story right up until its supernatural climax.
Image Credit: Aura entertainment
To give more credit, Lockbox at least injects an unconventional exorcism here; just don’t expect much in the way of explanation. When the film finally reveals the meaning behind its title, it dangles a fascinating carrot it has zero interest in delivering. More than a severe lack of fleshing out its characters beyond plot drivers or devices, this faith-based flick also seems terrified to offer any worldbuilding whatsoever.
Yoffe’s script stretches the short story beyond its means instead of fleshing it out, and Stamm fills out the gaps with cheap CGI scares and overwrought performances; Isabelle’s Vahna is beyond cartoonish in her villainy. It’s also pretty nonsensical, treating only Ellen’s faith with the utmost sincerity and largely squandering its typically reliable talent. So much so that the final imagery, pure sunkissed saccharine sentimentality, leaves you with the feeling that this horror movie might be better suited as an entry in Chicken Soup for the Soul.
Lockbox releases in select theaters on July 3, 2026.
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