So yeah, I’ve had Darkwood and Resident Evil HD lined up for a while. I haven’t played RE since the Director’s Cut on PS1 so that’ll be interesting. I’ve got a category on Playnite set up specifically for when the darker evenings start creeping in. Struggling to remember many now but Little Nightmares is in there, The Cat Lady, Goetia, Sanitarium. Speaking of which, Strangeland is worth a look–it’s by the folks who did Primordia.
I’ll also take this opportunity to recommend a lesser known single-session game called Sagebrush. I don’t think it’s worth watching the trailer, or at least, not more than 30 seconds or so of it! I loved the slow-burn, especially the finale.
I fired up Song of Horror and the atmosphere is good. The difficulty levels are, cutely, named after authors, ranging from E.TA. Hoffman (whom I was unfamiliar with before), which features checkpoints to avoid permadeath, at the lowest to H.P. Lovecraft, which must be unlocked by beating the game on M.R. James or Edgar Allan Poe, at the highest. I chose James because I want to keep the permadeath aspect but don’t want to feel like the game is handing me some bullshit. We’ll see. The voice acting so far is not fabulous, but it’s certainly not horrible, either. The controls are a little clunky, with the character turning ponderously in a strange blend of natural and tank movement, and it can be annoying to get them to line up with an interaction prompt. Still, I’m looking forward to more.
It’s apparently been updated for full GOG compatibility. I want to play this on the couch but I also don’t want to deal with load times. I though I’d bought it as a PS One Classic ages ago, but apparently not.
Gave it a quick try: it’s got some cool stuff (the lack of Asian language ban, smoother videos, a zoom in option, and controller vibrations) but one HUGE drawback for me: the mapping of gamepad controls is “blind”, it won’t display in the menu what button is mapped to what.
Wow, Verok’s patch allows for language selection, and it really does seem (almost) fully voiced in Japanese (the one I tested), and apparently French, German, Russian and Spanish, which I would not have guessed. I say almost because even in Japanese Simon Templeman still shouts “Vae victis!”
And, of course, the annual playthrough of Costume Quest (or Costume Quest 2) – maybe not exactly the most frightening of games, but there is something very satisfying about the trick-or-treat sequences, collecting stickers and building costumes. It feels a bit like playing an old Halloween cartoon special on TV!
Being frightening is not required! I loved the original Costume Quest, and so did my girlfriend, although I didn’t play the second. Good game for the season!
Song of Horror is very enjoyable so far, although I wonder if I set the difficulty too low. I’ve only run into the Presence a couple of times, although I also worry that upping the encounter rate would turn it from a scary thing into an annoyance. I played some with my girlfriend on the teevee because she thought it sounded interesting, and that introduced the diagetic element of having to get up and put my head near the tv speaker when listening at the doors, which was fun, although let me say that the setting labeled “visual markers when listening at doors” seems like a big fat lie. Big thanks to @Papageno again for the key to this one.
Another bit of praise I’ll give the game is that the Husher mansion seems like a very realistically laid out place, although it has probably undergone some fairly extensive remodeling. The puzzles have so far been quite sensical as well.
I will probably finally get around to playing Costume Quest 2. I just loved the first one so much, and I was always putting off Costume Quest 2 to play when the mood is right, when it’s closer to halloween, etc. So maybe this year. This is the year!
And I might try to continue my game of Alien: Isolation too. In the spot where I left off, there’s no actual alien in it yet.
The Evil Within. I bought the DLC too in the last sale, so hopefully I get around to it.
I’ll probably try to get into the Fatal Frames again as well. I’ve had those installed on my PS3 for like 8 years, but they always end up too spooky for me and I quit lol.
Well I finally fell afoul of the double triggers mini game in Song of Horror that everyone complains about. First two times it was no big deal, and I wondered if they had patched it. Third time I did everything exactly the same as the first two times, yet I died for seemingly no reason. I was about five minutes from the end of the first episode, too, which is annoying. The whole first episode was structured very well in terms of either knowing where to go to do various things or just organically exploring. The last puzzle, however, was one of those “randomly wander around places you’ve already been to find things that weren’t there before but are now with no indication whatsoever that they will be” things, which is lame. The game suffers a teeny bit from the whole, “why would you not call the police in this situation” thing, but I’ll forgive it that. On to episode 2.
