Fear and dread are common sensations in 'A Quiet Place: The Road Ahead', where the player must avoid flightless batlike entities who knuckle-walk like apes. — Stormind Games via The New York Times
You’re utterly alone. Blood drips onto snow. A fanged entity slashes your significant other. A monstrous chase ends in death. Just in time for Halloween, five affecting horror games full of harrowing alienation and loneliness.
Life Is Strange: Double Exposure (PlayStation 5, PC, Switch and Xbox Series X|S)
Forget the jump scares in the narrative-rich Life Is Strange: Double Exposure. Not exclusively a horror story, this supernatural thriller presents unsettling moments from the get-go. It marks the welcome return of the smart sleuth Max Caulfield (voiced brilliantly by Hannah Telle). In the opening scenes, Max and her wry friend Safi explore an abandoned bowling alley. You can almost smell decades-old dust and mold in the ramshackle structure, which is complete with a creepy smiling bowling ball mascot and graffiti proclaiming “Hail, Satan!”
Max, with brown shoulder-length hair and a camera always with her, is a well-liked artist in residence for a bucolic college. It’s Christmastime, and a lone skater glides across a frozen pond. Yet members of Abraxas, a student group, seem to be plotting something. The campus’s visual beauty hides ugly human lies and something sinister to come. Everyone, including Max, has secrets to conceal.
When Safi is found murdered on a snowy bluff, Max begins an investigation using her signature cunning, hints from texts and something like Discord. But it’s a new superpower, the ability to move between timelines, that helps the most.
One of the times that Max enters a starry portal, she’s able to thwart a nosy investigator looking for clues. He has cornered Max’s friend Moses. In a parallel timeline, Max saves Moses, a holiday-light-loving nerd, by sneaking into his lab, stealing evidence and leaving before the investigator notices.
The effect of moving to a parallel timeline is like opening a glowing golden curtain to another dimension. This time-renting game play never becomes boring.
The plot and dialogue, curious and twisting, were written primarily by a team of women and queer writers, a rarity in games. The budding romances are full of hope, desire, fear of loss and (occasionally) witty repartee during flirtatious moments. (But once, a line of dialogue intended to be humuorous completely spoils the gravity of a dark moment.) Exchanges about relationships and mental health issues, including Safi’s difficult childhood, make this series as important now as Sassy magazine was in the 1990s. Telle, the voice actor, said in an interview that playing Max allowed her “to embrace my struggle as an artist and step into my power as a woman.”
“I have found strength,” Telle added, “in portraying Max’s extraordinary powers and I’ve explored my own vulnerability through her moments of self-doubt.”
Just as there are varying degrees of subterfuge here, there is joy if you choose to seek it out while sleuthing the supernatural. Art fills the college’s halls and walls, including a photo exhibit by Max. And there are cat photos, cat paintings, cat fashion for Max and an adorable, hissing feline who shows up at her doorstep.
During interrogations, two or three questions to ask pop up onscreen, and the ones I posed were said to affect the story’s outcome, although I wasn’t precisely sure how. And although Max carefully quizzes almost everyone around her about the murder – friends, students, even a potential lover with a penchant for cheesy standup comedy – she uncharacteristically leaves Moses alone. Overall, though, Double Exposure is doubly stupendous.
During interrogations, two or three questions to ask pop up onscreen, and the ones I posed were said to affect the story’s outcome, although I wasn’t precisely sure how. — Square Enix
Mouthwashing (PC)
Because its grim, fatalist essence played devious games with my mind, Mouthwashing became one of my most nightmarish game experiences. It’s set in a cavernous, old space freighter that crashes, probably because the captain purposely veered off course. Though its graphics are of the original PlayStation era, the sparks that sprayed down as I ran through otherwise pitch-black corridors augmented a feeling of panic and claustrophobia.
The crew members were nervous and worried as they sniped at one another, concerned the food supply would run out. An odd horse mascot suddenly appeared in a doorway and said dubiously optimistic things in a garbled voice. Mouthwashing is weirdness done right.
Jimmy, the new captain, is disliked by the small crew. He bakes a cake for his own birthday, but the party is anxiety-ridden, somewhat like the family Thanksgiving no one wants to attend. Curly, the original captain, is wrapped in oozing bandages but still alive on a gurney, an incongruous, beautiful orange sunset mural behind him. One of his eyes bugs out as I open his mouth to deliver Oxy, dulling his pain. I was keeping him alive, but he has put the crew on a path to certain demise.
Once, when I gave Curly his drug, the screen went black and screams were heard.
Jimmy may be losing it himself, and his fraught hallucinations are among the most affecting I’ve seen. During one, Jimmy walks through a mazelike cargo hold. The use of sound during an unlit sequence is utterly unsettling and disturbing. What is it? An insane stowaway? The ship imploding? What Jimmy eventually sees by the dim blue light of his code scanner is terrifying. The crew’s existences get much worse from there.
'Mouthwashing' is weirdness done right, creating a feeling of panic and claustrophobia on an old space freighter. — Wrong Organ via The New York Times
Fear the Spotlight (PC, PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Switch, Xbox One and Xbox Series X|S)
Fear the Spotlight, crafted by a husband-and-wife team, tells the tale of two teenagers, one punky, one bookish. Set inside a 1990s Sunnyside High that becomes only somewhat frightening, the old-school puzzle-solving adventure is the first published by Blumhouse’s game division.
While it is mild fun with its Ouija board, haunting phone calls and stealth action to avoid death, it will be scary primarily to a middle school audience who likes Goosebumps. Moments that hit home included one teenager’s need to use an asthma inhaler when things became tense. And the bond between the teenagers as they conquer the fire and monsters felt warm and real.
In 'Fear the Spotlight', creepy entities lurk in the dark. — Blumhouse Games
A Quiet Place: The Road Ahead (PlayStation 5, PC and Xbox Series X|S)
The Road Ahead features Alex, the film series’s most compelling character. Yes, there’s another inhaler here, needed when Dark Angels are near. You must be completely silent because these flightless batlike entities who knuckle-walk like apes have super sensitivity to sound. And the desire to kill you.
The game’s pacing, however, feels uneven. Fear is most palpable early, when you’re navigating a mysterious ranch and don’t know the controls well. The key here is to proceed extremely slowly. In the first minutes, a likable boyfriend shockingly meets his demise, leaving Alex to fend for herself. She’s smart and capable, but the pair could have endured great terror together.
I enjoyed pouring sand over water puddles to silence my sneaking movements. The dread returned in the last half-hour, which was rife with wild trepidation as I avoided a Dark Angel looming just a foot away. But the ending was too depressingly bleak and the minimal hope offered didn’t satisfy.
Until Dawn: (PlayStation 5 and PC)
Until Dawn, a remake of a 2015 horror tale told in one-hour chapters, is most notable because it stars Rami Malek as the bro-ey owner of a sprawling mountain lodge. The eerie environs are inhabited by a sadistic killer and sharp-fanged wendigos. Between chapters you meet an over-the-top psychoanalyst, often better in his role than the actors are during their stories.
The eerie environs in 'Until Dawn' are inhabited by a sadistic killer and sharp-fanged wendigos. — Sony Computer Entertainment
This version features enhanced graphics but retains the sometimes groan-worthy dialogue of the original. I pressed action buttons to avoid gruesome calamities until I found an ending not in the original. But the controls can be wonky. I couldn’t even shine a flashlight on a sign on a dark road. It was as though my brain had no control of my muscles. – ©2024 The New York Times Company
