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What Horror Game Surprised You, for Better or Worse?
I haven’t quite gotten over just how good Until Dawn is, so in an attempt to help me move past it in time for SOMA, I’d like to hear about the horror game(s) that surprised you the most, either by exceeding your expectations or failing spectacularly to live up to them.
The last eight months left us with slew of titles that may qualify as victories for the genre, and it started with Capcom’s long-awaited course correction for their flagship “horror” series. The Resident Evil HD remake showed us what can happen when Capcom applies itself, the episodic Revelations 2 proved they’re still capable of innovation, and the recent confirmation of a Resident Evil 2 basically said they really are listening to us.
It took a while to get to this point. We should savor it.
Resident Evil is working on getting back to its fighting weight, but it’s hardly the only victory to come out of 2015. Dying Light sold enough copies to scare away its only competition, Killing Floor 2 got some blood in our eyes, and Bloodborne combined the immortal appeal of Nightmare Creatures with an overabundance of top hats and set it in an H.P. Lovecraft fever dream.
They haven’t all been winners, though I wouldn’t go so far as to call any of them bad. The Order: 1886 took itself too seriously, Zombi played fast and loose with the term “remaster”, and Lucius II is definitely a game you can buy right now, if you wanted to.
The surprises you go with don’t have to be recent releases. As far as good surprises go, my list would have room for Shadows of the Damned and Silent Hill: Shattered Memories. I might even include Amnesia: A Machine for Pigs, which drew more ire than it deserved. It made some unusual changes to the core gameplay, but I suspect we’ll eventually remember it more for its unnerving world and brilliant storytelling than the terrible idea that was that electric lantern.
Representing the ugly side of horror games is Aliens: Colonial Marines, Dino Crisis 3, and Atari’s pitiful attempts to make Alone in the Dark and Haunted House relevant again. If there’s room on this hate train for another passenger, Konami’s done more than enough this year to earn that spot.
Now it’s your turn. Tell me, which horror games surprised you the most?
All of us here at Bloody Disgusting are deeply saddened to learn that George A. Romero Foundation Founder and President Suzanne Desrocher-Romero has passed away.
GARF shared in a statement on socials, “It is with a heavy heart that we announce the passing of Suzanne Desrocher Romero. Suzanne passed away of natural causes on June 24 at her home in Toronto after a prolonged illness.”
The statement continues, “Suzanne was the fierce leader of the George A. Romero Estate and The George A. Romero Foundation. She worked tirelessly to preserve George’s legacy. Her work at the foundation will continue to inspire and live on for generations to come. The family asks for privacy at this time.”
Desrocher-Romero founded GARF in 2018, after her late husband’s passing in 2017, and has been a fierce advocate for his legacy and the arts. It was her mission to “strengthen horror as a serious field of global study,” and she was a tremendous fighter on behalf of Romero’s works and supporting new filmmakers inspired by his legacy.
It was Desrocher-Romero who spearheaded the recovery and restoration of The Amusement Park, and, as the person in charge of the George A. Romero estate, worked closely with author Daniel Kraus on completing unfinished novels like Pay the Piper and The Living Dead. She most recently celebrated the restoration of her favorite of Romero’s zombie films, Day of the Dead, and was hard at work producing the upcoming film Twilight of the Dead.
That passionate advocacy led to Suzanne Desrocher-Romero becoming family to Bloody Disgusting as well.
2023 marked the start of an ongoing partnership between Bloody FM and GARF on The Dead, a scripted audio series spanning multiple seasons that saw Desrocher-Romero working closely with the Bloody FM team and mentoring the series’s contributing writers with GARF. To say her loss will be felt internally is an understatement.
“Anytime George Romero is mentioned is good, because what we are doing is to provide a healthy legacy. We’re uplifting his legacy, we’re supporting the archive, and we’re also supporting the Horror Study Center. So, all of these three things are what the Foundation is striving to do. As far as I’m concerned, the more we say George Romero’s name, the better it is,” Desrocher-Romero recently told BD.
It’s the perfect encapsulation of her unwavering enthusiasm for supporting Romero’s legacy and the horror genre, and just a glimpse at how much she contributed to preserving it. She is, in short, an inspiration.
We send our deepest condolences to Suzanne Desrocher-Romero’s family, friends, and GARF.
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