Frequent Itch.io consumers can have seen the shop’s gotten fairly spooky of late. In the final yr, it’s change into near-impossible to maneuver for all of the retro-styled spookers – lo-fi horror games with few polygons and even fewer pixels. That’s largely right down to the devils at The Haunted PS1, a neighborhood of indie necromancers fiendishly resurrecting the aesthetics of early PlayStation scares. Now, they’re reviving one other long-dead format – free demos.
This Thursday, the group will deliver 17 scares to life with The Haunted PS1 Demo Disk, a free assortment of 17 brief, terrifying indie horror games.
Okay, so it’s not an precise, bodily disk. Put away your dusty previous consoles and emulators. Contained inside a unified executable, The Haunted PS1 Demo Disk contains 17 brief, bespoke slices of the neighborhood’s work, letting you pattern some horror earlier than placing cash down.
Hey everybody, excellent news! We’ve set a launch date for the Demo Disc and the listing of demos is determined.
The Demo Disc will launch on Thursday The sixth of February at https://t.co/1TAOXhRifN and can embody demos of the games listed within the cowl picture beneath! pic.twitter.com/S598UhOjaV
— HauntedPS1 (@HauntedPs1) January 30, 2020
Some of those, like Modus Interactive’s surrealist cat nightmare Neko Yume 猫夢 (via Itch.io) are already out in full. But for a lot of extra, this’ll be their first time within the stark gentle of day. I’m significantly anxious to see what the hell lies behind Tasty Ramen, and its uncomfortably compressed noodle soup jpeg.
I’ve had my eyes on Haunted PS1 for a while, and was even personally called-out by final yr’s unbelievable server-browser spooker No Players Online. It’s a mode I like, going again to the likes of Paratopic and Kitty Horrorshow‘s entire catalogue using bold strokes to paint a deep sense of unease in the player’s thoughts. I even tried bashing out an industrial horror engine of my very own for final summer time’s industrial horror jam.
Unfortunately, little nuisances like “work” and “life” and “working out how to make an interesting video game” bought in the best way. Ah, possibly subsequent time.
Lurking within the Haunted PS1 Discord, lots of work goes into making one thing look so convincingly dated. Many transcend slapping a easy pixel filter on Unity, emulating the PlayStation’s signature vertex wobble, lighting quirks and restricted color house. That faithfulness extends to the Demo Disk itself, which has gotten its personal period-appropriate front-end.
Every game featured will ultimately have a full, paid launch to maneuver onto. The Demo Disk will launch totally free over on The Haunted PS1’s Itch.io page subsequent Thursday, February sixth.
