// KOTAKU — GAMING
13 Short And Sweet Scary Games To Treat Yourself To Before Halloween
It took until this very week for a whiff of cool, autumnal foliage to finally blast by my nose, prompting me to pick up a pumpkin on the walk home. Frightening to think we only have a week until Halloween, when ghouls and ghosts roam cul-de-sacs for candy. If the holidays creeped up on you as well, it’s not too late to cram in some last-minute spooks.
Many players gauge video games on how many days, months, years they’ll be playing after release. Horror games, thankfully, seem to be the exception. A genre that rewards a well-timed exit. And while P.T. is tricky to come by, there are plenty of other short and sweet scares to get your shivers from. Here are thirteen little haunts, ranging from 20 minute screams to three hours nightmares, to cram in before Halloween goblins get ya.
What Balazs Ronyai’s Children of Clay accomplishes in a matter of minutes would humble games that stretch on for days. Akin to M.R. James’ A Warning to the Curious, you are studying a small, uncanny figurine in a dimly lit parlor. Intimate and ill-advised, you’ll refer to your notes to decipher the relic’s secrets, all the while the shadows inch towards you.
Jessica Harvey’s Paratopic is a Lost Highway-like waking nightmare. You swap between three perspectives, a hired killer, a smuggler and a birdwatcher. Living their moments in real time, from small talk to highway drives, you’ll find your surroundings begin to unfurl. Revealing alarming creatures, cursed video tapes and a conspiracy you may only be nibbling at the periphery of. If you have never encountered Paratopic before, or fiending for more, the remake/remix Overdub was released just last month.
Speaking of magnetic tape and oppressive vibes, Kitty Horrorshow’s seminal Anatomy is a study in the kind of fears only possible in a video game. You are in an empty, darkened, ominous house, with only white noise and old recordings to keep you company. Just as you begin to clue into your relationship with this space, it’ll twist and subvert around you. The game itself shaking off its rivets. Daring you to last long enough to see what’s in the basement.
Created by Red Candle Games, Devotion is a story about how potential, disappointment and resulting superstitions can make one family’s demons real. You explore the humbling apartment of the Du family, retracing their brushes with stardom when the daughter enters a singing contest. Unable to cope with unrealized stardom, the household turns to a cult for guidance. How much of this newfound spiritualism is snake oil is unclear, but their downward spiral left a psychic stain nasty enough to echo in their abode. Critically acclaimed, the game was pulled from Steam due to imagery believed to slight Xi Jinping. Thankfully, Devotion has been made available on the developer’s website.
Years before Silent Hill: Townfall, developers No Code (now Screen Burn) raised goosebumps with this collection of interface-bound creepers. Booting up a desktop to play “The House Abandon,” a retro text-adventure, you soon find the events of the game encroaching towards your computer room. In 2020, this effective kick off creeper was bundled into Stories Untold, a full anthology of other tales about bad things while looking at a variety of screens.
As the nascent genre of survival horror itself took shape, the enigmatic Human Entertainment ventured into some unknown territory on the Super Famicom. Inspired by Dario Argento giallo like Phenomena and Deep Red, Clock Tower follows four orphans with an appointment at the Barrows estate, hoping to find a new home. To their unpleasant surprise, the arrangement was a horrible trap, and it’s up to you to uncover the house’s secrets, save your friends and outrun the ‘Scissorman’ to survive the night. There’s numerous ways to play this classic, and a number of unhinged sequels, but for those comfiest on modern hardware WayForward released a faithful remaster in 2024.
This one’s just got a look that’s going to put you on edge. An adv