So Halloween may be done, but I’m not quite done with Halloween! I was sitting around thinking about horror-themed video games, and decided that I wanted to put together a list of some of my favorites!
Such a list is, of course, a personal one and is not intended to be some sort of list of the “absolute” best, as I haven’t played many of the most well-known. I wasn’t gaming during the early PS “Resident Evil” era, so I missed a lot of those classics.
So don’t yell at me that I didn’t include your favorite! However, feel free to share your thoughts on your own favorites in the comments!
The Lurking Horror (1987). Let’s start with one of the earliest games that can truly be called “horror,” in that it told a creepy narrative story! The Lurking Horror is an interactive text adventure released by the famed Infocom back in its heyday, and written by Dave Lebling. For those unfamiliar, “text adventures” were just that: stories told entirely through text, and with the player giving commands in the form of sentences, such as “go east,” “eat the spider,” and “hit the tentacle with the sword.”
The story is set at the fictional university G.U.E. Tech, modeled after M.I.T. and its name an allusion to the “Great Underground Empire” of the original Zork games, that started Infocom and the whole text adventure industry. The player is trying to finish a term paper in the computer lab while a fierce blizzard rages outside. While working, however, the paper gets corrupted with data from the Department of Alchemy, sending the player in that direction hoping to recovery the missing pages. With the storm outside, the player must navigate the steam tunnels below the university as well as its abandoned halls, and along the way finds evidence of a sinister and otherworldly force at work on campus. After surviving numerous perils, such as carnivorous rats and a murderous inhuman custodian, the player must finally put a stop to the evil and recover their paper in the process!
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