Editorials
The Best Bite-Size Terrors From the New Haunted PS1 Demo Disc
Back in the original PlayStation’s era, nothing was more full of promise than a good old fashion demo disc. In the days before downloading demos became more commonplace (then went back out of fashion), getting the opportunity to try out a handful of games was always a treat.
The new Haunted PS1 Demo Disc captures that same feeling, giving you a large sample of demos to try out, all wrapped in a thematic package. Upon launching the game, you find yourself walking around a museum filled with doors to rooms where you access each of the demos. The rooms even go as far as to recreate a small part of the game in the museum’s wonderfully blocky and low res style, and there’s a great little manual that comes with the download to give you a quick overview of what to expect from each demo.
Here are a few highlights from my time with the latest Haunted PS1 Demo Disc.
AGONY OF A DYING MMO
I’ve already played and enjoyed another short horror game set in an MMO (No Players Online), and it’s definitely a premise that can be easily mined for horror. Rather than making it about a literal supernatural haunting, Agony instead focuses on the wide variety of communities that pop up around MMOs. There’s not much going on gameplay-wise aside from some simple first-person navigation, but the well-written dialogue gives you everything from graphic depictions of sexual awakenings to truly disturbing talks of shooting up schools. It’s very clear that this game is influenced by the developer’s real-life experiences playing games in the genre, and that authenticity creates something that’s truly chilling.
THE LUNAR EFFECT
I adore horror games that utilize fixed camera angles, and The Lunar Effect is another game to add to the list of ones that do it well. Harkening back to the days of the original Alone in the Dark, players wake up in an old house where something evil is clearly afoot. While the game doesn’t feature any combat, there’s a slow creeping sense of dread that permeates the house. Most of the gameplay revolves around collecting items and solving puzzles to slowly unlock rooms throughout the house in an attempt to escape the night alive. If developer Negative Entities is able to keep up the clever variety of puzzles while telling a haunting little mystery, this game will end up being something really memorable.
PEEB ADVENTURES
To me, Peeb Adventures is the one that most fits the “haunted” description. The game presents itself as a pretty standard mascot platformer, but slowly starts ‘glitching’ to add more and more surreal elements to unnerve the player. The tone of it reminds me a bit of the YouTube series Petscop, making you feel like the game is breaking down around you in sinister ways. The wildest part of the demo is that in addition to making a pretty neat horror game, the platforming portion is also extremely polished and unique, with an interesting grappling hook mechanic that could be a ton of fun on its own.
CHASING STATIC
While this was a bit shorter than I wanted, Chasing Static felt like one of the most polished experiences in this collection. The dialog was natural and well-delivered, the game always let me know where I should be going, and the lo-fi aesthetic looked perfect. The setting of a small diner on a long stretch of highway in rural Wales is the ideal mix of mundane and eerie, making for an excellent sample of a game I can’t wait to play. Watching the trailer for the full game has me excited for the possibilities of further exploring this world and unlocking its mysteries.
THE CHAMELEON
Stealth and horror are two genres that can provide a large amount of tension, so I’m always excited to see them melded together in a game. In The Chameleon, you’re trying to escape from a research facility that’s swarming with guards ready to kill you on sight. While you may look like a mundane human, you have the power to briefly take the form of a guard, adding a smart wrinkle to the stealth. It’s not as versatile as Agent 47’s disguises in the Hitman series, but a well-timed transformation can be the difference between life and death. There would have to be some more wrinkles thrown in to make it last for a full game, but the brief bit I played worked great.
ARD: ANOMALOUS RESEARCH DEPARTMENT [HIDDEN GAME]
When I found the computer in the museum that was asking for a password, I became obsessed with finding how to crack into the machine. If you look around the museum for a bit it’s not too hard to unlock this hidden game, and I’m glad I did because it was one of my favorites. For part of the game, you’re exploring emails, pictures, and videos via an old-school computer interface. These emails and pictures give you brief, spooky tidbits that feel in line with SCP-style stories. Once you open the video file, you take control of it from a first-person, as you relive an incident in a hotel room where you’re menaced by a sinister visitor. The whole experience is very surreal and takes under ten minutes to complete, but really managed to stick with me long after playing.
Some movies are just so beloved that you can experience them through cultural osmosis without ever sitting down to actually watch them. From loving parodies to meticulous recreations of iconic scenes, memorable filmmaking lives on even after the curtains close on the silver screen. And when it comes to horror, few films can compete with the massive impact that Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining had on popular culture as a whole.
Whether or not you think the flick is a good adaptation of Stephen King’s seminal novel, 1980’s The Shining slowly but surely grew into one of the most influential genre movies ever made, inspiring everything from surprisingly heartfelt sequels to classic episodes of The Simpsons. However, not all The Shining references are created equal, and today I’d like to shine a light on six unexpected homages to Kubrick’s iconic film.
In this list, we’ll be focusing on references and Easter eggs that either came out of the blue or came from creators that you wouldn’t expect to be fans of this classic ghost story. That being said, don’t forget to comment below with your own favorite references to the Torrance family and the Overlook Hotel if you think we missed a particularly memorable one.
With that out of the way, onto the list!
5. A Nightmare on FaceTime – South Park (2012)
Regardless of the brand’s iffy reputation among former employees, the death of Blockbuster Video was a serious blow to fans of physical media. Of course, some folks were more affected by this than others, and South Park’s Randy Marsh definitely took things a little too far in the twelfth episode of the show’s sixteenth season.
Titled A Nightmare on FaceTime, the main plot of this 2012 story is a surprisingly faithful recreation of The Shining where Randy purchases an empty Blockbuster store and begins to go mad once he realizes that his investment may not have been a very good idea due to the rise of streaming and the now-defunct RedBox storefronts.
4. The Overlook Hotel Level – Ready Player One (2018)
I was never really a fan of Ernest Cline’s Ready Player One, so I viewed Stephen Spielberg’s divisive adaptation of the novel as an improvement over the source material despite having its own narrative issues. In fact, I actually prefer how Spielberg changed the story by removing several references to his own work and replacing a lengthy Blade Runner detour with an over-the-top homage to The Shining.
A CGI-heavy recreation of the film’s most iconic moments that feels like a big-budget ghost train ride set within the Overlook Hotel, this intense sequence is more of a recreation of the freaky aesthetics of The Shining rather than its mind-bending narrative. However, it’s still fun to see Spielberg make a heartfelt tribute to a filmmaker that was once his close personal friend.
3. IKEA Singapore Halloween Ad (2014)
It makes sense that commercials don’t typically borrow from the horror genre, as it might be a bad idea to scare away potential customers, but some references are just too much fun to pass up.
That’s probably why the publicists behind this Ikea ad from Singapore were allowed to turn their commercial into a genuinely unsettling recreation of Danny’s tricycle scene from The Shining. After all, nobody cares if your store is haunted so long as it offers late-night shopping hours and a large selection of merchandise that you can become lost in forever and ever…
2. The End of ‘Bondage and Beta Male Sexuality’ – Community (2014)
Community is no stranger to recreating iconic movie moments within the show, and the series had previously tackled horror tropes in episodes like the fan-favorite Epidemiology. However, the most laugh-out-loud moment on this particular list comes from a brief gag towards the end of the season five episode ‘Bondage and Beta Male Sexuality’.
The majority of this episode has nothing to do with scary movies, but there’s a brief subplot involving supporting character Chang and a possible encounter with ghosts that leads him to question his own existence. This subplot culminates in the episode’s hilarious ending where the camera zooms in on a black-and-white photograph of Chang in period clothing at some kind of celebration, just like Jack Nicholson at the end of The Shining.
However, the picture’s subtitle eventually reveals that it’s merely a conveniently placed keepsake from the ‘Old Timey Photo Club’.
1. The Overlook Hedge Maze Sequence – Zootopia 2 (2025)
Disney movies are pretty far removed from both the gruesome horror of Stephen King and the heady filmmaking of Stanley Kubrick, so I don’t think anyone was expecting the climax of last year’s Zootopia sequel to take place in an animated version of the snowy hedge maze from The Shining.
In this unexpectedly intense sequence, friend-turned-villain Pawbert Lynxley (an unhinged lynx cat played by Andy Samberg) chases our protagonists through a creepy labyrinth in a loving recreation of Jack Nicholson’s icy demise outside the Overlook Hotel. The actual ending here might be a little more child-friendly than what’s being referenced, but it’s amazing that the filmmakers were able to push the horror elements as far as they did – especially since the scene doesn’t really have anything to do with the rest of the movie.
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