In gaming as in cinema, all of the most personal, creative and risk-taking horror can be found away from the mainstream. And happily it’s also a genre in which budget constraints can be turned into an advantage
eaf through the history of independent video games and the pages are drenched in horror. It was there in the 1990s shareware era ofand Hugo’s House of Horrors. It was there too in the Flash games of the early 2000s: Exmortis, the House series, the now lost Hotel 626. And it is here now, in the modern indie age. Lone coders and small development studios have always explored dark stories in haunted houses, lonely forests and seemingly abandoned spacecraft populated by demonic entities.
There are of course sound financial reasons. Fledgling studios often use horror in the same way film-makers such as Peter Jackson, Kathryn Bigelow and David Lynch once did – as a means of making impact on a low budget. “There is an element of horror being cheap, with certain approaches,” says Sam Barlow, developer of, who cut his teeth as a writer and designer on the Silent Hill series.
The uncanny is also there when we re-encounter childhood beliefs, possessions or experiences as adults and find them eerie and degraded. An old family home that’s now derelict and rotten; a favourite china doll now tattered and oddly staring – these are familiar staples of horror novels, movies and games which turn nostalgia into something fearful.
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