Earlier this year, I reviewed EA Motive’s Dead Space remake. As I said at the time, we’ve been drowning in remakes, remasters and re-releases this year, with no sign of the trend slowing. If anything, we can only expect it to grow in the coming years: with ballooning budgets and lengthened development times, fewer publishers are willing to risk it all on something completely new.
And where does that leave horror games? Sure, it’s exciting to see unquestionable classics like Resident Evil 4 and System Shock with a brand-new coat of paint, their monsters and gore rendered with grotesque beauty. But familiarity is a dangerous thing: there’s only so many times you can trot out SHODAN or Pyramid Head before they lose their bite. Horror thrives when it either tosses you into the unknown, or spins the familiar until it takes on a new, unsettling shape. Big-budget games haven’t completely lost their fangs, but they’re duller than ever before.
Thankfully, we don’t have to rely on the marquee $70 blockbuster! Over the past decade and a half, low-budget indie horror has truly blossomed, delivering hundreds of scrappy, terrifying adventures that push the envelope. There’s plenty of variety, too: want an eerie funhouse ride with jump scares? A horror-comedy that pokes fun at the classics, all while finding the occasional opportunity to freak you out? Or maybe you’re looking for something more cerebral, a game that knows when to pull back so your imagination fills in the blanks. A quick trip to Steam or Itch’s storefront will give you everything you’re missing from the AAA market, and so much more.
Frustrated by our current deluge of remakes, I took my own advice and found four unique indie horror games. I also ensured that each game came out in either May or June, so I could take a snapshot of the indie horror scene as it exists today! As you’ll soon see, I was more than happy with the results.
Killer Frequency
Whenever I think about my favorite horror films, my mind frequently drifts to Pontypool. It’s a low-budget indie movie about a Canadian shock jock working the morning shift at a small-town radio station. Things quickly turn to shit outside of his studio, and as he takes listener calls during a zombie epidemic, he finds himself in the unenviable position of covering a disaster happening outside his doors, one that is all too eager to break in and invade his humble studio.
While I’ve never found myself asking “What would I do if I were in my own Pontypool scenario?”, I was more than happy to embody that role in Killer Frequency. It trades the zombies for a slasher movie villain, takes on a more comedic tone and takes place in America, but the setup is largely the same: you’re a bigshot disc jockey forced into a small-town job after pissing too many people off, and you’re taking calls from folks who are trying to save their own skin. The biggest divergence? With quick thinking and a little ingenuity, you have the chance to save most (if not all) of your listeners.
It’s a brilliant setup, and for the most part, Killer Frequency sticks the landing. This is a game where deaths hurt: I only got one chance at saving each caller, and if one of them fell to The Whistling Man? I had to move on, throw a new vinyl on the turntable, maybe play an ad from one of our sponsors and catch my breath before the next call came in. And much like Pontypool, I hardly felt safe in my own studio. It was only a matter of time before the killer slid a threatening tape under the station door, and when I started traipsing through the office, looking for any outside resources to aid my audience, I held my breath, hoping beyond hope that there wasn’t anyone lurking around the corner.
Exploration aside, what we have here often boils down to an interactive radio play. And while I spent the brunt of my time behind the microphone, there were plenty of things to poke and prod within that space. While strangers were on the phone, begging for their lives, I found myself shooting hoops with crumpled pieces of paper, fiddling with knobs, and even hitting the laugh track on my soundboard during the worst possible moments.
After saving a majority of the town (apologies to that one innocent teenager, but this is why you don’t plan dates in a cornfield), Killer Frequency made me realize I could probably handle a Pontypool situation just fine! I only wish the VR version wasn’t trapped on the Meta Quest 2: it’s 2023, and companies like Meta and Sony still haven’t figured out that making games exclusive to one set of goggles is hindering their plans for mass adoption.
The Tartarus Key
If Killer Frequency found an interesting, interactive way to put its own spin on Pontypool, then The Tartarus Key is the closest I’ve ever seen a video game capture what Saw’s all about. (Yes, there are official tie-in Saw games. No, they’re uniformly awful.) You won’t see anything particularly grisly here, but you’re wandering through a mansion divided into a series of escape rooms. At the end of each escape room chain, you’ll find strangers stuck in devious traps: one false move, and they’ll shed their mortal coil before your very eyes. Whether you get them out safely depends on how good you are at noticing the little details.
Going in, the key thing you need to understand is that this is a notebook game. You’ll want a pen and paper for this, jotting down occult symbols, dates, and anything else that looks particularly important. It’s one of the reasons why I loved my time with The Tartarus Key: thinking out a solution with my hands is a gratifying, rare event, especially when so many games tell you the answer if you sit long enough. Unfortunately, I also learned the hard way that notebook games aren’t great fits for handhelds. Just try lounging on a couch with an open Moleskine laying against your chest and a Steam Deck in your hands. It doesn’t work at all!
The mansion itself is a treat. Rendered with the same low-polygonal, wobbly-texture look you’d find in many a PS1 game, it’s a space that opens up as you solve puzzle rooms and retrieve animal-themed keys. It scratches that same itch as a classic environment from Resident Evil: there’s something magical about working your way through a closed-off building, uncovering the many layers, secret rooms, and carefully-hidden traps until you’ve mastered it. And even though your fellow survivors are paper-thin caricatures, it feels immensely gratifying to free them from peril, then watch them crowd up your designated safe room after each successful trip.
Much like Killer Frequency, The Tartarus Key will simply move on if someone dies. But failing to save even one guest puts you on track for the worst possible ending, and given the nature of that ending? You should just save before the pivotal moment in each rescue attempt, then reload if it doesn’t go your way. I try to accept the hand I’ve been dealt with most bad endings, but given that this one locks you out of an additional two hours of puzzle-solving, you should save yourself the time and save-scum until you get the best outcome.
Even then, the best outcome still leaves something to be desired: it plays out suddenly, expecting you to care about the fate of a cast that was never properly fleshed out. But when I flip through my Tartarus Key notebook pages, filled with numerical codes and puzzle solutions I worked out by hand, its weak endings scarcely matter to me. Let’s just hope that whatever they do next has a meatier story attached!
STASIS: BONE TOTEM
Believe it or not, I’m about to recommend a game called STASIS: BONE TOTEM. Even typing it out makes me wince! But “don’t judge a book by its cover” is in full effect here, and the name won’t stop me from recommending this gem of a horror game.
Taking place in the distant future, STASIS: BONE TOTEM (sigh) is an isometric horror adventure game, much like the 1998 PC classic Sanitarium. You follow a husband-and-wife pair, Charlie and Mac, two junkers who find derelict structures and salvage whatever they can for profit. They stumble into a seemingly abandoned oil rig, and despite every instinct telling the two that hey, digging into this thing is a terrible idea, they go ahead anyway. Predictably, disaster ensues.
Despite a few clever jokes peppered here and there, calling BONE TOTEM dark would be the understatement of the century. The couple is actually a trio of sorts: an animatronic toy bear named Moses is along for the ride, equipped with a few modifications that make him an expert hacker. This little guy happened to be at the scene when Charlie and Mac’s young daughter drowned, and because his emotional intelligence is comparable to Winnie the Pooh, he repeatedly brings up her death, unaware of how his reminders hurt them.
As you descend through the bowels of BONE TOTEM’s massive “oil rig,” it keeps unveiling new, unsettling layers that compound into an unbelievably morbid picture. This is a world where the corporation and church have fused into one hideous monster named Cayne, throwing workers’ families into debtor’s prisons to make them toil away in exceedingly dangerous jobs. These workers can technically receive free medical treatment that heals every wound, but only if they reach a threshold of 95% injuries, which leads to certain desperate folks crushing their own hands and burning their own skin to reach said threshold. I could keep going, and I haven’t even delved into the body horror at work here, but you get the picture by now. Shit’s grim, to the point where all you can do is shake your head and laugh at some of the reveals.
In spite of the overly tragic picture this game paints, it still manages to find moments of levity. And the part where it’s a point-and-click adventure isn’t half-bad, either: by flipping between three different characters, each separated from the other in unique, occasionally horrific ways, you can solve surprisingly expansive puzzles with surprising ease! But its ragtag cast and bleak future are where STASIS: BONE TOTEM truly shines, even if it takes a strong stomach for misery make it to the end.
…I can finally stop typing BONE TOTEM. Thank Cayne.
Homebody
Years after Game Grumps surprised everyone with Dream Daddy, an affectionate romcom visual novel, they’ve released Homebody, which trades the comfort of dating cute dads for a young adult caught in a time loop with a masked killer (which isn’t entirely unexpected of them: fans of Dream Daddy may remember hearing about a serial killer plotline that was cut before release). It’s a cleverly designed puzzle box where the house resets on each loop, but each clue and puzzle solution sticks with you through a memory pinboard. And once you’ve been through a loop or two, you know when and where the killer arrives, which lets you plan around his presence. You have a clear path forward, right?
Except later, the killer starts arriving before he’s expected. And every time you quit and resume the game, a different, unsettling mix of the past plays out in dreamlike fashion. And Emily, the heroine of this little adventure, has neuroses portrayed so honestly that I felt my breath leaving my body whenever they cropped up.
Right after the opening dream sequence, Homebody cuts to Emily pulled over on the side of the road, thinking of excuses to turn around and head straight home. It’s not as if Emily has a premonition of the serial killer time loop she’s trapped in: the truth is, she’s heading to the house so she can spend the weekend with her friends. And spending the weekend with friends, a (formerly) close-knit group she dearly loves, terrifies her.
Eventually, she pulls herself together and makes it to the house. Inside, her friends give her an uneven welcome: at least one person is exuberant over her arrival, but the rest are either superficially warm, testy, or outright hostile. Every time Emily is asked questions like “What are you up to these days?” or “Why aren’t you ever around anymore?”, she can only pull from the superficial answers that move the conversation along. Answers meant to appease and dance around honest hurt, but only frustrate both participants.
As miserable as it is to be hunted by a serial killer, what comes next is so much worse. Whenever the loop resets, Emily’s conversation topics fill with questions about whether anyone remembers the serial killer. But every time she opens her mouth, more small talk emerges! She’s presumably being affected by the loop’s rules, but it’s merely an amplification of the way she already talks to her friends. In her dialogue choices, she’s crying out for help. All that comes out is small talk.
Out of everything else on this list, Homebody was the only one that left me shaking in my chair. I didn’t just see myself in Emily: I am Emily. Like her, I’ve pulled over on the side of the road, thinking of excuses to get out of a promising hangout session. Like her, I deploy small talk to paper over the hurt in my chest, afraid to open up in front of people who have known me for years. And like her, I’ve had nightmares where I urgently need to tell someone, anyone how I really feel, only for meaningless observations to tumble out of my mouth as my friends lose patience with me.
The most potent horror doesn’t involve loud, orchestral stings as a monster pops out, or relentless killers pursuing you through an inescapable environment. It’s a mirror, one that only reflects your worst fears and anxieties. Homebody is my mirror.
I don’t normally write articles like this. But after seeing the Dead Space, Resident Evil 4 and System Shock remakes, I needed to remind myself that there will always be an inventive new horror game lurking around the corner. The four games I settled on weren’t exactly perfect: I wish I could play Killer Frequency the way it was designed without buying yet another VR headset, or run through a version of The Tartarus Key that gave its characters the same attention to detail its puzzles received. Even as they stumbled, they painted a vibrant picture, one that reminded me that the indie space is still filled with love and a scrappy, experimental attitude.
As for Homebody…well, it made this little experiment worth the effort. Seeing my neuroses and hang-ups rendered this accurately in a horror game is a feat no AAA horror game will ever manage.
