Halloween hello! Let's Watch horror games...

Hello my dear Halloween enthusiasts!

Don't be alarmed by my staticky voice. Being an eigenvalue-corrected noisy echo from a distant future tends to do that. Wait... Just a moment, let me patch image data through as well... There we go. My past form kindly allowed me to use their blog to communicate my message. Thank you, solid Janne.

Being stardust, lingering in space, going round and round at glacial pace, seeing stars come and go, well, you really come to appreciate the small things in life. Seasons are terrific things, they truly are. And believe or not, creatures such as you are still celebrating Halloween. So gather round, let the videos whirr by, take notes and spend the following few dark evenings with candles, cats or other pleasant nearby living creatures.

Many years ago, when Let's Plays weren't really a thing, Storpey was the first Let's Player that I ever saw, and I instantly saw the the appeal. He did feel like a likeable person, and the concept of being at a friend's house, watching them play was of course familiar. The game that brought me to his Youtube channel was Slender - The Eight Pages. It is a short but punchy first-person hunt for eight pages of notes, scattered around a very, very dark forest. You need to find them, but you don't want to face the Slenderman in the woods. If you do, I still don't know what you ought to do. Not look at it? Try to ignore it? Let's watch Storpey fail (or succeed?) while reminiscing a nightmare he'd had about Slenderman. Maybe fast forward to 7-minute mark, where the fun and unease begins?


Of course, for the best effect, shut down all the lights in your room and put headphones on. :o)

There's a lovely homebrew feel to Slender - the graphics are moderate and movement slow and not particularly fluid. But doesn't this precisely create tension and anxiety? In your nightmares, when you're running away from a monster, do you ever make graceful miracle escapes or just feel like you're running in quicksand and stumbling all the time? Maybe that's what the developers of Candles of the Dead thought as well? If you took some of the same underlying ideas, changed the setting for something more claustrophobic, and then put it on a mobile phone - that'll surely do the trick? A mobile first-person hounted-house horror-adventure, made in the land of short days and long nights, by people some of you readers might know rather well. ;o)

Sometimes Let's Plays work better without speak - so you can better hear the heart beating:


Speaking of Finland, there's a charming young Youtube let's-player called Paqpa, and I saw her once playing Little Nightmares. The game is a text-book example of a cute-but-grim Halloween game, so if you have older kids watching with you, hop in. But be prepared to explain what an inanimate man hanging from the ceiling means...


Well if it isn't Oxenfree! Our good old friend. If you missed last Halloween's special episode about Oxenfree, and even if you didn't and you remember it by heart, allow Chris of Errant Signal to walk you through it. I just clicked Play and couldn't stop for the music alone, so proceed at your own peril. But as soon as you feel that it's a game you want to play, stop watching and start playing already! If you start now, you can finish it already before Halloween is over.

If you liked Chris's voice, you'll want to see another one of his Halloween episodes. Stories Untold is a collection of small games and it's oozing with 80's retro-charm. A text adventure, maybe some throwbacks to the brilliant C64 classic, Killed Until De... [quantum system noise not error-correctable].

Okay, I'm detecting some coronal mass ejections from Sol, I think, it mu... [static] ... making the connection more uncertain. You would not want to lose that connection. [static] ... once asked the Witch when a star, its planets and moons, slipping from the galaxy's hold, are they leaving you or you leaving them? Are we inside or outside?

[quantum system noise level stabilised] ... this really tough. I'm losing my voice trying to shout across the universe with all this interference. :o) Okay, long story short, here you go, Stories Untold:


But before I go back to slumber, I want to leave you with some beautiful music from Dark Souls:

This was a real treat, to share the Halloween spirit with real, living organisms. We do have these sentient astronomical objects and cosmic structures, of course, but they don't often communicate at frequencies I understand. They're always nice and friendly, though, so that's good. I am happy here. Okay, but now I'll have to rest. All this excitement and horror and action is making me tired and sleepy.

Truly, thank you for listening. See you again.

Janne
as galactic spade dust, Arp-Madore 2026-42, distant future