Image: Black Tabby Games
Halloween is right around the corner! Spooky season is coming to a climax and then an abrupt close, but that doesn’t mean you can’t keep enjoying horror experiences for the remainder of the fall. Thanks to Steam’s ongoing Halloween sale which runs till November 4, you’ll even have some more time than usual to sort through the wealth of great deals and pick out the perfect horror experience for yourself. We’re also here to help, so here’s a handful (or two) of great sales on horror games going on Steam at the moment.
The latest game from Her Story creator Sam Barlow, Immortality, is also easily his most horrific. Following the disappearance of actress Marissa Marcel, you are mysteriously gifted footage of her only three movies, each resembling a similar film or style of film of its respective era. There’s an erotic thriller based on the actual Gothic novel The Monk, a Klute-like detective movie set in New York, and a feature that cast Marissa as both a pop star and her lookalike. As you sift through the footage of the films—as well as behind-the-scenes content, wrap parties, table readings, and production meetings—disturbing revelations about what exactly happened to Marissa come to light through what can only be described as supernatural tricks and devilry.
Immortality is occasionally maddening as it challenges the player to match-cut scenes and characters in order to produce a logical timeline of events, but it is also bewitching. It’s unlike anything I played before it, and it’s unlike anything I’ve played since. You can see what I mean by picking up Immortality for just $10.
What’s scarier than other people? The other people that you find in DayZ, specifically. This long-running survival-horror MMO feels like the only experience to really capture what The Walking Dead’s world might feel like in a game. Zombies, which populate the dilapidated post-apocalyptic Russian overworld, aren’t the real threat. The real danger is the need to survive the elements, stay well-fed, and ultimately, outlive other players scrounging for the same weapons and resources as you.
A few DayZ clones have come and gone since the initial ARMA 2 mod was released, but it still remains the king. I regularly get videos on my Tiktok or Twitter algorithms of people who are still logging in to DayZ for its unrivaled immersive qualities. Whether you want a deep roleplaying experience out of it or just a taste of a hardcore survival game, DayZ might just be the perfect horror game to pick up this season, and you can get it for $25 now.
A few years ago, Phasmophobia appeared out of nowhere and took the world by storm. Before I knew it, everyone in my friend circles was trekking through haunted locales and screaming at the top of their lungs as unseen paranormal forces stirred and struck them down one by one. I still haven’t tried my hand at Phasmophobia, but it damn sure has been fun watching my friends try their hand at ghostbusting and utterly failing in hilarious fashion. The game just made it to consoles, but if you’ve got a PC and a fun group, why not pick up Phasmophobia for just $15?
Phasmophobia casts players as wannabe ghost hunters, but Lethal Company takes a slightly different approach to a similar premise. In it, you are workers dropped into settings that are known to be plagued by certain monsters. In fact, you are explicitly sent in pursuit of scrap and resources to sell to an ambiguous “Company” despite the fact that these monsters will almost definitely get to you. Turn on proximity chat and get into the habit of regularly shouting for your friends throughout the barren halls of the abandoned factories the work sends you to. The job will almost assuredly go wrong to hilarious effect.
I have been gored by monsters, left behind because I was thought dead, blown up, and I believe shot by a friendly turret the majority of the times that I’ve played Lethal Company. If you prefer to be hunted by increasingly bizarre and horrifying monsters rather than ghosts,, Lethal Company’s a great time with friends and it can be yours for $7.
Upon emerging from your walk in the woods, you find a cabin on a hill. You enter that cabin and descend down into its basement to find a woman chained to a wall. Only that’s no mere woman, that’s the princess you’ve come to slay, and this job isn’t going to be an easy one.
Slay the Princess is an exceptionally clever visual novel that has so many branching possibilities that it’s hard to put names to them all, let alone chart how they feed into one another. You will become intimately familiar with that cabin and that princess as you play through those events I outlined again and again and again. Much as it can feel like you’re going in circles, though, every one of those loops brings you a step closer to the truth about your own motivations here and those of the princess…or whatever she really is. Slay the Princess is an exceptionally winding horror tale and it just got expanded upon, entirely for free. Now it’s discounted for Halloween, and you should pick it up while it’s $14.39.
There isn’t much that needs to be said about Left 4 Dead 2 at this point in time. It’s still one of the most popular multiplayer games on Steam, enjoys a healthy mod scene, and is a triumphant sequel that built on the already impeccable foundation of its inimitable predecessor. By now, it should just be software that’s already downloaded onto freshly delivered PCs and consoles. Left 4 Dead 2 is quite literally $1 right now, so quit playing around and get it already.
One of my favorite horror settings in games is in Hollow Knight, a Souls-ish Metroidvania that is definitely not a particularly scary game. Still, at a certain point in your travels, you are bound to fall into Deepnest, a horrifying pit in the heart of Hallownest, Hollow Knight’s underground bug kingdom. There is little light here, obscuring some of your view, and there’s not really any music here either. Instead, you’re forced to constantly listen to the chitter of bugs that can be seen writhing in the foreground of the environments. It is the worst place imaginable, and one of the greatest highlights of the immensely varied and deeply layered world of Hollow Knight, the second best game ever, just behind Bloodborne. You can own Hollow Knight for $7.49, and you should.
I’m a sucker for a game that looks and feels vintage, and Crow Country is definitely that. Styled after PS1 games, and more specifically classic Resident Evil, it features a low-poly look, fixed camera angles, and obscure puzzles that feel like true sendups of the survival-horror genre’s roots. It’s the latest in a recent string of indie success stories that have been deliberate throwbacks, showing that there’s an audience for the stuff that we thought we’d outgrown, when really there’s a place for the old and new. To see what I mean, pick up Crow Country while it’s $16 right now.
I first played I’m On Observation Duty at a friend’s birthday a little over a year ago, and while I was zooted out of my mind for most of the trip, the experience of playing it has stuck with me with resounding clarity. While we were all huddled together around a couch in our Airbnb, one of the members of our group took the reins of the game, which grants players access to security cameras around a certain setting. Sometimes it’s an office, or a house, but there’s always something wrong with it, or at least there eventually will be. You scan the perimeter at first to see what it all looks like when things are normal, and then eventually, “anomalies” occur that either subtly displace things or visibly worsen the situation.
At first, I was struck by how mundane it all was. I’m On Observation Duty’s action felt a bit slow to start, and I think the room was feeling it too, since we were mostly divining what object had moved two inches to the right. But just as it felt like we might turn in, things escalated. Things began to appear, and elements of the environment became visibly distorted. The barks from our crew grew from murmurs to full-on shouts, as the anomalies of the game became more aggressive and haunted. At least one person nearly lept off the couch out of fear, and before long, I’d noticed that my grip on the couch’s arm had tightened over the session. Whether I cared to admit it or not, I was scared and having a wonderful time.
I’m rarely a passive participant to horror in games. I’m typically on the sticks myself, and usually alone in a room when I do play a horror game, but I’m On Observation Duty was one of my favorite experiences because it was time spent getting spooked with some incredible people. Horror is such a social genre, it only makes sense that one of the few times I open myself up to enjoying it with other people in the room, it blows most other titles out of the water despite its simplicity. If you do pick it up, corral your funniest friends into a call or the same room, because it’s a blast this way.
I’m On Observation Duty is a series of short horror games, and most of them are discounted for the ongoing Halloween sale for anywhere between two to three dollars. Alternatively, if you’ve decided that this premise sounds like your kind of shit, you can pick up a collection with all seven titles in the I’m On Observation Duty series for about $33.
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