Halloween could have been and gone, however there have been so many spooky treats that we didn’t have time to savour all of them. If you haven’t but had your fill of fright primarily based enjoyable then Kitty Horrorshow has you lined. She’s launched a free collection of four short, experimental games, all of which have one foot/tentacle planted firmly within the surreal. Kitty’s been making video games of an analogous ilk for over 5 years now, akin to Anatomy, Chyrza and Dust City, so she is aware of her stuff.
Each sport was beforehand launched as a reward for funding Kitty on Patreon, and – like the previous edition of Haunted Cities – the gathering acts as an commercial for that Patreon. Contributing $5 a month will web you each sport that Kitty makes sooner or later as they get launched. Here’s an interview with her from last year, the place she talks about how she began making video games and her artistic course of.
“I either have an idea in my head for a story that I want to tell and the idea itself might be something very simple, very basic, just like a sentence, or a phrase that just occurred to me and that I want to expand on, or alternatively I will start with an idea for just a place that I want to create, like an actual, explorable space. And then the story sort of populates it later.”
I’ve solely tried ‘Scarlet Bough’ to date, which actually speaks to that design philosophy. It units you wandering round a washed out, uninhabited little city the place gristly surprises await inside every constructing – although they aren’t meant to be bounce scares. For probably the most half, the sport is content material to let the stress construct by way of a creepy soundtrack and occasional notes that you just discover mendacity round with Lovecraftian overtones. There are different neat moments of environmental storytelling, too – at one level I handed an unenterable room with blood leaking below the door and a chair shoved beneath the deal with. The shortage of precise bounce scares makes the few that Scarlet Bough does embrace all of the simpler.
You can discover the newest Haunted Cities assortment, alongside Kitty’s different video games, on her Itch.io page.
