It's fair to say I've not been the conveyor belt of reviews that I was once upon a time, but I always kind of made an effort for dropping a horror review on Halloween. And this year is no different; that was 100% my plan. The only issue is the seemingly perfect game I picked up to write about is a cringy bowl of arse, and I don't want to play it anymore (which is a statement of itself when I limped through Heavy Rain one year). So, to try and salvage something, I'll present a list of the applicable horror games I've played in recent memory enough below. Instead of voting - because maybe two people will read this in the first place - whoever gives the best reason for covering one of these games will make it my choice. Feel to also say nothing, and I'll carry on playing through the Lucasarts back catalog. I'm up to the bad Monkey Island games...

Kuon.

Just the 20 years post-release. Kuon is clumsy mechanically, but is an aesthetically excellent horror. It's subtle and clever in how it creeps you out. As an experience, it's great. As a game, it's bumpy.

Rule of Rose.

Wanted to play this for decades. It's a bloody awful videogame with one of the most interesting, subtlety told tales I've ever unraveled.

Haunting Ground.

You may be seeing a pattern here as I work through the PS2 horror games I missed back when. This one was okay, somewhat saved by hilariously out of place jiggle physics. Most of what I wrote might just be about hilarious jiggling in the face of abject terror.

Grim Fandango.

Go to the Mexican underworld, steal everyone's stuff and solve obscure puzzles with them. I loved this game back when, and I love it just as much now I've played the 'remaster'.

Tails Noir

Bad pixel furry extensional horror that starts bright and, my gosh, works very hard to crash spectacularly.

Alone in the Dark.

I wrote this series off after Illumination. I said so in my review of that game. There's no coming back from this, I said. But it did come back. Here's the twist ending: I'm glad it did. This is a good game. No one saw that coming.

Deep Fear

SEGA actually released a Resident Evil inspired game on the Saturn to compete with the new survival horror genre. The mistake was, it was a Saturn game and thus I was the only person I knew who had played it. And then, crazed with power after getting a fiddly Saturn emulator to run after trying for literally a decade, I played it again. It's an experience.