Playing a great horror game around Halloween is one of the best ways to celebrate the season. Whether you’re hanging out with Harry Mason, running from Mr. X, or exploring the remains of the USG Ishimura, there’s a variety of terrifying and worthwhile adventures to go on.
But this article isn’t about those. This article is about the schlock that passes itself off as horror games. The buggy, broken, and shockingly not scary games that should be ashamed to consider themselves part of the horror genre. So pour a glass of your favorite pumpkin-spiced beverage, and let's look at 5 games that you should avoid playing this Halloween.
Amy
Raising a kid is scary enough on its own, but raising a child with psychic powers? Yeah, that should be pretty dang scary. Unfortunately, this premise was handled by VectorCell, who made the godawful game Amy.
As you attempt to usher the titular Amy out of a zombie-ridden city – yes, the game is essentially one big glorified escort mission – you’ll not only have to deal with various zombified citizens but also this little girl’s busted AI. Amy is so incredibly annoying and dumb that it almost seems like she wants to get eaten. And when you’re not scrambling to keep her from being zombie chow, you’re trying to get through irritating stealth sections with garbage controls that fail immediately if one of the infected catches you out of the corner of their eye. Actual parenthood is way less infuriating than playing Amy.
Silent Hill: Book Of Memories
The first four Silent Hill games are some of the richest, most rewarding horror titles you may ever play. But we’re talking about Silent Hill: Book Of Memories here, and we’re deeply sorry about that.
Here’s a brilliantly stupid idea: Let’s take the world of Silent Hill, and drop it into a Diablo clone. After all, what says Silent Hill more than gathering loot to attack enemies in an isometric view? Obviously, Konami didn’t care, as they thought they could slap the franchise’s name on a lackluster dungeon crawler and call it a day. The mind-boggling part is that this disappointment was developed by WayForward, the company behind the Shantae series, and the excellent recent release River City Girls. They even managed to make a good game using another horror franchise in The Mummy Demastered. For whatever reason, they just couldn’t give the world a compelling reason to hack and slash with Pyramidhead.
Resident Evil 6
In hindsight, Resident Evil 4’s success was an albatross around the neck of the RE series for several years. RE4 was so good that Capcom assumed that all we wanted from now on was cool dudes and ladies with heavy weaponry blasting ineffectual zombies and bug monsters. Resident Evil 5 showed some cracks but was at least still a fun co-op adventure. Resident Evil 6 tried to go even bigger, and as a result, it became the biggest mess in the RE series, and maybe even in the history of Capcom.
The story was split among 3 different campaigns - and a secret, pointless fourth campaign - that tried to cram in as many Resident Evil goodies as it could. Zombies, bug-zombies, evil corporations, people turning into improbable giant bosses, it’s all in here. Sadly, the story was pretty poor, with most of the characters being either utter bores devoid of personality, complete idiots who should know better about these situations by now, or in the case of Jake Muller, stuffed full of so much cool-dude machismo that they’re a leather jacket and a broken jukebox away from being The Fonz. Considering this is a game where the President Of The United States becomes a zombie, it should have been much, much better than this. At least Resident Evil got back on track after this misstep.
Agony
If you’re going to name your game Agony, then you better make sure that it’s pretty dang good. Otherwise, you’re opening yourself up to a ton of bad jokes in every review. For example: This title is appropriate because playing this game feels like Agony. See how easy that was?
Agony is one of the most try-hard horror games out there. You’re trying to escape from hell, the walls are made of guts and gore, naked demons are wandering around everywhere, it’s all delightfully gruesome. But despite the nightmare-inducing scenery, Agony is repetitive and slow, with the majority of your time spent solving generic puzzles or hiding from enemies. And even though Agony’s version of Hell is initially haunting, after a while you get used to the pulsating flesh-walls and mutilated corpses. That’s truly the biggest problem with this game: It somehow made Hell boring.
Night Trap
Back in the 90s, Night Trap caused a significant amount of controversy upon its release. Its depiction of violence against young women was declared so disgusting and vile that politicians far and wide condemned it, even going so far as to hold congressional hearings about video game violence.
The 90's was a very stupid decade.
If any of the politicians had actually played Night Trap, they’d know that it’s not scary, violent or disturbing. It’s also not much of a game. It’s one of the earliest FMV titles, which explains why that genre stayed dead for so many years. Trying to keep track of these girls before they were captured by the goofy-looking vampires was frustrating, and although the hokey acting was bad enough to be entertaining, you’re better of watching a Youtube video of all the video clips rather than playing it. The fact that the US government threw a conniption fit over something like Night Trap is a pretty embarrassing event to look back on.
But it did have this theme song, so at least it gave the world that.