Plus rural noir and mouse murder.
Indie low-poly horror showcase EEK3 returned this year in the form of an hour-long selection of trailers for upcoming games, hosted as always by a purple skeleton named Skully. While the Nintendo Switch logo appeared multiple times, don’t worry, every game featured is coming to PC.
This year’s complement of trailers included a few games we’ve seen before, like GoldenEye homage Agent 64: Spies Never Die, as well as Ghostlore, which is basically Diablo 2 only with monsters from Southeast Asian folklore, and Signalis, which reimagines The Thing as a cyberpunk anime with Resident Evil’s inventory and Silent Hill’s atmosphere.
But there were plenty more we hadn’t seen before, many of which are now on my wishlist. Like Mother of Many (opens in new tab), in which you’re a mouse farmer who has to grow vegetables, cook food, and fight to end the curse your family suffers under by defeating hordes of enemies with a scythe. Or Loretta (opens in new tab), a rural noir adventure set in the 1940s that’s about covering up a murder. Or Fish Cymophis (opens in new tab), which starts out like an ordinary fishing game where you explore a lake on a motorboat, then switches to horror once night falls and you become the prey.
A bunch of the games highlighted at EEK3 are available to try right now on the latest Haunted PS1 Demo Disc (opens in new tab), which contains 18 demos in all. You might like to jump into retro FPS Enchain (opens in new tab), which gives you a hook on a to air-juggle skeletons after you’ve softened them up, or Sorry, We’re Open (opens in new tab), a supermarket management RPG where you hire a party of employees and set out to clean up a haunted retail establishment.
Of the ones I tried, my favorite was Fear the Spotlight (opens in new tab), a stealth-horror game where you’re trapped in a school after dark with a lamp-headed monster. Solving puzzles while playing my flashlight over the walls for clues was strongly reminiscent of Midwich Elementary School from Silent Hill in the best possible way. It’s due out this year too.