10 Dead Doves
10 Dead Doves is a short, singleplayer, fixed-perspective horror story set in the heart of the Appalachian wilderness.
it’s 2004. The mountains are much older. Your name is Marcus Stetson, a seasoned backpacker who wants to relive the glory days of hiking the harsh Appalachian Trail– but you want more. You pool your resources together with your long-time trail buddy, Sean, to embark on one final outing, but your bond, will, and wits are put to the test when you receive a series of cryptic messages from a haunting, bird-like figure in your dreams.
Features
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Explore a fully realized short narrative full of mystery, heart, and mortal terror.
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Experience a thrilling psychological horror campaign with secrets tucked into every corner.
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Navigate the Wren’s peculiar Dove Dreams, and uncover multiple endings that will affect both your past– and future.
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Discover horrifically beautiful environments and uniquely flawed characters, all designed with charmingly disturbing ’00s-inspired 3D graphics.
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Grass.
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███ ███████████.
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Full voice acting and subtitles.
Explore the dark recesses beyond The Fence and attempt to survive the belly of the beast.
Read More: Best Lovecraftian Hidden Object Games.
Call of Cthulhu®
Lovecraft would be proud!
This game is not like most games that claim to be Lovecraftian but are just strange, horror games with no real plot or story-line. This one is quite the opposite. This game creates a rich story-line that gleans themes from many of Lovecraft’s most loved works, and it has the best sanity mechanic in a game I have played! As someone who has read all of his stories (multiple times) this game is as close as they come.
Pros:
Story-line, soundtrack, ambiance, sanity mechanic, replay-ability.
– Real player with 32.0 hrs in game
Read More: Best Lovecraftian Horror Games.
It’s aite.
Like just aite. Nothing else, nothing more.
It be like that sometimes.
“Scripted insanity is just middling sanity”
– Real player with 15.8 hrs in game
Dread X Collection 2
Score: 7/10
Dread X Collection games are a great concept. A horror house of mini-games that take 30-60 minutes to finish to unlock a larger narrative. The first game had a lot of duds and a few games that crashed and couldn’t be finished, and the same goes for this collection. There are far better games, but the duds are even worse this time around. At least there’s a larger hub world you can explore and get the games to require solving simple puzzles in a mansion you are locked in. It took me about 20 minutes to solve all the puzzles and find all twelve keys. It really doesn’t take much with some barely even considered puzzles. Each game is on a VHS tape locked in a box in the main room. You put the tape in the VCR and the game will pop up. It’s a neat concept and fun while it lasts, but you will spend the majority of your time with the smaller games. I will go through each one and let you know if they’re worth your time or not.
– Real player with 21.7 hrs in game
Read More: Best Lovecraftian Horror Games.
This collection takes place in a house with puzzles that you must solve to unlock keys to be able play the next game you desire. There is a free play mode if you don’t want to deal with the puzzles. There are 12 games in this collection and I will speak of each one in the order that I play them:
Squirrel Stapler
This was my first choice in this collection, its from the creator of DUSK, I enjoyed it. I will agree with a few others that the map seems like it could have been smaller, but at the same time the emptiness aside from the few squirrels and the vegetation and buildings made it kinda eerie to me. I always felt that I was being watched, and I was kinda right to think that. There are notes around certain areas of the map and they mainly have squirrel facts and some other topics. The main premise of the game is that you’re hunting squirrels for an “art project” involving your wife, and meeting god. How sweet of you. The game adds in new weird things pretty much each day, up to 5 days in total. The game isn’t super scary but it got me good a few times, especially the ending. Keep your rifle loaded; God is coming.
– Real player with 18.2 hrs in game
Lighthouse of Madness
Some secrets are older than humankind. Others are so obscure that would turn crazy even the most sane man. Are you ready to face what lies ahead?
You are Dorian Cannon, a lighthouse keeper responsible for repairing and implementing new autonomous systems in old lighthouses. During one of your expeditions, you’re tasked to bring the lighthouse keepers back to the continent. But when you arrive at the location, you realize that something isn’t right.
You find yourself on an island in the Innsmouth region with a big lighthouse and an abandoned mine. Explore the map, enter the buildings and try not to let the madness take over while you search for answers to what happened in this mysterious place.
Inspired by the Lovecraftian mythology, suspense and horror are in your way. How do you get to the lighthouse? What was in that mine? And what could have happened to the other lighthouse keepers? The island holds more secrets that you can imagine.
Equipped with your flashlight and a switchblade, explore the island, investigate the lighthouse, solve the puzzles that block your way to new areas and try to not go insane in this mysterious journey.
Ressifice
who made this?
– Real player with 8.5 hrs in game
Short old-school beat-em up game with no vertical movement whatsoever. Cool pixel-art, O.K. chiptune music, a little bit of light puzzling and the rest is a grind of timing and death. It even comes with a boss-fight. Don’t expect much, it delivers its premise. Plays like a heavily polished jam game. It takes an hour and a half to get through the whole deal.
(One of the developers is a friend of mine and I say you should keep an eye out on this studio for future releases.)
– Real player with 1.3 hrs in game
Sunless Skies: Sovereign Edition
Sunless Skies
**I seduced a woman who’s head was a jeweled skull while there was a spider nestled inside my eyeball. It was
! great fun, but sadly it took
! way too fuckin long to get there.**
Who is this game for?
If you like Britishness, the possibility of a decent story, nice environments or you like mildly spooky games AND you’re either willing to cheat or your time isn’t valuable.
Gameplay
Looking for diamonds in the rough.
– Real player with 249.8 hrs in game
My feelings towards this game are many and complicated. For background, Sunless Sea is one of my favourite games ever…and I can also totally understand why some people might absolutely hate it. Sunless Skies is in many ways an improvement over Sea, and yet, for me at least, it hasn’t quite recaptured the magic of Sea, and I’m not entirely sure I can explain why.
For people who haven’t played Sea, both it and Skies are games about exploring a world that is sometimes bizarre, sometimes charming, and sometimes terrifying. Both games have some of the best writing that I’ve seen in video games, with excellent worldbuilding. And both games are very slow-paced. A lot of time in these games is spent travelling from point A to point B, with only the occasional combat or random event to break up the travel. Depending on the person, this can either be a chill and relaxing experience, or an incredibly tedious one.
– Real player with 118.8 hrs in game
600Seconds ~The Deep Church~
More than any other, I think the word “odd” describes 600Seconds the best. More compelling than the sum of its parts, 600Seconds combines exploration with a fairly short and straightforward third person shooter adventure through a church. Exploring the empty church in the waking world for items for ten minutes before your siege in the nightmare seemed, at first, an unnecessary and kind of obnoxious feature (ten minutes is a long time!) though it does help set a certain kind of mood, but after dying in the nightmare once or twice the interest was made more clear to me.
– Real player with 11.6 hrs in game
First and foremost, I think it’s best to remember that this is StudioGekko’s first title. So know going in that it’s not very complex, not very long, and may be prone to jankyness. All that in mind, I still had plenty of fun with the game.
Item placements are not random, so learning the layout of the church and location of everything was really fun. I like that there’s no text or story to read and that I can just make my own assumptions about what’s happening, though maybe a little more to see would’ve been nice. After my first couple of unsuccessful runs, I thought I was done with the game but I found myself coming back to it the next few days to learn more and give it another shot.
– Real player with 5.3 hrs in game
Call of VII
⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ Short game
– Real player with 1.8 hrs in game
Really decent for a short game. Has great graphics and musics. The level design is great with a well-thought learning curve and difficulty design. Recommended.
– Real player with 0.4 hrs in game
A House of Many Doors
This has quickly shot to the top of my favorite games of all time list, and about 6 months after release it’s still there. That said, gonna do my best to be relatively objective about its good and bad points:
aHoMD has an amazing setting and top-notch worldbuilding, and digging through the narrative and trying to understand what has happened and will happen is as big a part of the exploration in this game as the physical exploration aspect itself. The House is a bizarre, fascinating place, so if you’re a fan of surreal fantasy, magical realism, and slipstream works that toss you a totally alien place and tell you to infer everything from scratch, you’ll absolutely love this. Additionally, the game tweaks quite a lot of itself based on your actions and choices, and much of what you do has consequences, from the innocuous to the absolutely devastating. I feel like each one of the characters I play is really a different character because of that.
– Real player with 164.0 hrs in game
HOMD is somewhere in my top ten best games of all time.
It is an unspeakably rich, vast and beautiful universe and I’m on my second playthrough. Having taken a couple of years since the previous run, I found it haunting my dreams constantly, occasionally I’d lie awake in bed missing it like a former lover, and I had to come crawling back.
But let’s start at the beginning.
HOMD is set in The House, a bizarre dimension that sucks in people from all kinds of universes, and dumps them into a world divided into vast Rooms many miles across, where people don’t need to eat, but prolonged exposure to the ever present darkness is lethal. Light is life, and the population (numbering in billions) have gathered in quite a few vast cities spread all throughout the House, while intercellular explorers, like yourself, move between Rooms in crawling vehicles.
– Real player with 116.1 hrs in game
A Place for the Unwilling
A Place for the Unwilling is an isometric story driven adventure game. I can recommend this game to players who have patience to read many dialogues and texts in a slow-paced world. The story is compelling to track from start to finish, but there are also missing pieces in the story. Depending on how you choose to progress in the game, the city player lives in changes and reacts differently. All characters introduced are vibrant, they all have stories to tell. They have the ability to manipulate player’s perspective in a direction based on your affinity to them. But the game doesn’t deliver its expected ending.
– Real player with 66.2 hrs in game
Solid exploratory adventure with deep, lyrical writing and time constraints.
The game’s aesthetics is absolutely delicious in its dark simplicity of the features, but lots of moving elements. It has the “cartoon Lovecraft” feel to it and the city streets simply beg to explore every nook and cranny. With all that beauty around, the controls are what dampens the overall fantastic first expression. Intuitive they are not. There is a mix of WASD and arrows involved, where every letter is not what you learned it to be from hundreds of previous games played… S acts like an “Enter” for example, and quite frequently you’d have to resort to “W – Arrow down – E” combinations which will result in lost money and/or some frustration. Since interaction of a character starts from him/her being turned to an object or a person in order to highlight them first, it’s also easy to imagine some annoying moments when you trying to angle your character just right. Perhaps, the only thing I’d want to lodge a complaint about.
– Real player with 47.2 hrs in game