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Friday the 13th: The Game has come to the end of its official online life. And now Halloween: The Game has arrived on Steam. Released on 8 September 2026, it was developed by IllFonic and published by IllFonic Publishing alongside Gun Interactive. It offers both multiplayer and single-player. Now that enough time has passed, I can probably admit something. I liked Friday the 13th: The Game more than Dead by Daylight. I liked the less restrained death scenes. I liked Jason Voorhees having so many brutal, flashy and varied execution animations. They made it very clear that this was a slasher game. The atmosphere was much more sombre and serious too, and the survivors felt correspondingly more frightened by what was happening around them. Dead by Daylight, on the other hand... I don't know. Not long after it came out, it started feeling less like a horror game to me and more like friendslop comedy entertainment. If I had to compare it to a film, it would probably be Scary Movie. All t...

I played Dad 'n Me again for the first time in a very long time. And somehow, 21 years after the game came out, I finally beat it. Not because I spent 21 years training for this moment. I just happened to have a good run. Dad 'n Me is a 2005 Newgrounds beat 'em up where A and S are your attack buttons. The controls are simple, but there are quite a few combinations hidden inside those two keys. AAASA was particularly nice to watch. The protagonist pulls out a knife, raises it above his head, then brings it down. Actually getting it to come out reliably in the middle of a fight was another matter. Sometimes it worked. Visually, the protagonist is basically a slasher. He wears a mask, occasionally pulls out a knife, and spends most of the game attacking people. There is one slight complication. Most of the people he attacks appear to be children around his own age. So is this child abuse? Or is it simply violence between children? WELCOME TO ALMOND HANDS PARK greets him. Marc...

This review contains spoilers. I bought Nowhere House because Adria was cute. That probably deserves some explanation. On 31 August 2026, Dark Dome released nine of its games on Steam at the same time. Nine. If you searched through the newest horror releases around then, you were suddenly greeted by a long row of games with a very recognisable art style, all carrying the same developer name. That probably did more to make me curious than anything else. Later, while reading a review of one of those games, I came across someone who said they had already been a fan of it back when it was on mobile. That was when I realised what Dark Dome had actually done. These weren't nine completely new games appearing from nowhere on the same day. They were existing mobile games making their way onto Steam. That is hardly unusual in itself. Granny, for example, became enormously popular on mobile before eventually making its way to PC. I've seen quite a few mobile games come to Steam after fin...

This review contains spoilers. Straight after my Honrang review, here we are with The Abandoned House in Yeongdeok. And, just like last time, I still don't know nearly enough about Korea to recognise every cultural reference on my own, so I had GPT help me out with a few things. First, Yeongdeok. Apparently, Yeongdeok is a real place in South Korea, and it's particularly famous for snow crab. Which may explain why, at one point in the game, you encounter a ghost shaped like a crab with Yeongjin's head attached to it. I liked that. Very local. Very distinctive. The abandoned building itself is covered in graffiti too, nearly all of it written in Korean, so once again I took screenshots and asked GPT what people had written on the walls. Most of it was fairly meaningless graffiti. "F-word." "Your girlfriend." "I love you." That sort of thing. A few were slightly more unsettling. One warned people to watch out for organ trafficking, and I found no...

This review contains spoilers. I'd originally been playing Metro 2033 Redux and Skyrim a little at a time, but The Abandoned House in Yeongdeok came out in the meantime. It's a game made by Utane and 티민이, who previously worked together on Honrang. So before reviewing The Abandoned House in Yeongdeok, I thought it would make more sense to go back and review Honrang first. For the moment, then, I'm putting Metro 2033 Redux and Skyrim on hold while I get through a few newer horror games. I'd already curated Honrang some time ago, but for this review I went back and watched the footage I recorded at the time from beginning to end, reminding myself of what the experience was actually like. Before working with Utane, 티민이 had already released several horror games of their own: The Most Perfect Revenge in the World, Alone in the School, Welcome teacher and Heir to the Queen. I've only played Alone in the School so far, but I'd like to get around to the others eventually...

I'm not a professional marketer. Nor have I ever worked in advertising. I'm simply a consumer who's spent more than a decade browsing Steam for horror games. So everything that follows is written purely from a consumer's point of view. Something I've noticed over the years is that horror developers often seem reluctant to put their game's main threat, predator, villain, antagonist, whatever you want to call it, front and centre in trailers, screenshots or capsule art. I can understand why. Presumably, you're meant to encounter that thing properly for the first time inside the game, where the horror can play out exactly as designed. Quite often, that first encounter might even be a jump scare. So I've seen an awful lot of horror-game Steam pages where the developers refuse to show off the impressive antagonist they've put so much work into, and instead fill the page with dark, vaguely ominous screenshots of empty rooms, corridors and other lonely-look...

This review contains spoilers. This is a slasher game. So unless it were absolutely dreadful, there was very little chance I wasn't going to recommend it. Thank you to Nick Silencer for providing me with a copy through Steam Curator Connect. I actually played it as soon as I received it last December. Then the updates kept coming. Turns out it was in Early Access. So I played it again while preparing this review. Everything I'm writing here is based on the current build. Anyway. The basic premise is that a group of rather stupid influencers head to a campsite in Louisiana to find out whether the ghost of a serial killer is real. Then the player murders them one by one using a selection of increasingly imaginative methods. It's basically slasher horror combined with crafting. Most horror games put you in the role of the survivor. The antagonist is the killer. Or the ghost. Or the monster. Something hostile and threatening that wants to hurt you. Games where you are the kille...