13 HORROR GAMES NOT TO TURN YOUR BACK ON IN 2014 

13 Horror Games Not To Turn Your Back On in 2014

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13 Horror Games Not To Turn Your Back On In 2014

There\'s something about horror, as a genre, that just won\'t die.

Burn it, stake it, expose it to the light, but it will always return for more. For a while horror has suffered at the hands of mainstream publishers. It\'s been bastardised by explosions, unnecessary co-op, and protagonists armed-to-the-teeth. Last Halloween, I wrote about the a renaissance that was creeping near, titled Where The Scary Things Are. It was about how horror had begun to thrive elsewhere – on PC, on mobile, on Kickstarter.

2014 is the year when some of these games make the leap to consoles. It\'s also a year that marks the return of Shinji Mikami to the genre he helped define, and sees mainstream publishers, like SEGA and Bethesda, once again dipping their toes in the genre.

The list below isn\'t an exhaustive survey by any means – it\'s a snapshot of games I\'m really looking forward to. You can read more about them below, or see them in action in the video below, if you dare...

PC, PlayStation 3, PlayStation 4, Xbox 360, Xbox One.

So goes the the tag-line. But what about sat in your underwear playing games? The likelihood is Alien: Isolation will elicit a whole manner of yelps and squeals, not to mention palpitations.

Taking its cues directly from Ridley Scott’s 1979 masterpiece of sci-fi horror, Isolation casts you as Amanda Ripley. Sound familiar?  That’s because she’s the daughter of Ellen Ripley. (She\'s even mentioned in a deleted scene in Aliens. She died while Ripley was floating through space. It\'s all very sad.)

Isolation has shades of Outlast and Amnesia, but what made it stand out for me was the extraordinary attention to detail; the environments induce strong feelings of deja vu, while the Xenomorph itself is terrifying and almost sentient.

Video game gods, I know you’re listening, please don’t let this be rubbish. Please.

Techland, Warner Bros. PC, PlayStation 3, PlayStation 4, Xbox 360, Xbox One.

Zombies. Open world. Apocalypse. As Morrissey so eruditely warbled: stop me if you’ve heard this one before.

And it’s true, as you parkour your way around rooftops during the day, gathering items and rigging traps, Dying Light does look a bit Mirror’s Edge meets Dead Island. But what\'s Alien, if not Jaws in space?

(Ignore me, I\'m getting sidetracked by reductive elevator pitches.)

Things become way more sinister, dangerous, and interesting when the sun goes down. That’s because during the hours of darkness, the zombies become more vicious, and the rooftop you once smugly hung out on is now next to useless. The zombies can now climb. Clever, undead girl.

Bad news: There’s been a terrible plane crash.

Good news: You survived a terrible plane crash and your new home is an idyllic island.

Bad news: The island is inhabited by a horde of ravenous cannibals.

Good news: Oh wait, there is no more good news – except The Forest looks genuinely brilliant.

You’re free to explore its dense, er... forest, chop down trees, craft items, build shelter and scavenge food. You can hide behind doors you have made or man up and  take the fight to the indigenous threat. It\'s Minecraft brought to you by Wes Craven and Tobe Hooper.

Taking inspiration from the likes of The Descent and Cannibal Holocaust, I expect The Forest to force you into some rather unsavoury situations and then ask you to justify your dubious actions. After all,

The hills may have eyes, but so does that tree, and maybe that rock. And for the love of god, do I have to go into that cave?

In the 1980s the future looked very much like the abandoned moon base in Routine.

The premise is simple: survive long enough to learn what happened to everyone stationed here. Where have they gone? Probably to a wine bar. That’s where everybody went in the 80s.

Anyway, what makes Routine even more interesting is that there are no health packs and no second chances – the permadeath system ensures that if you should encounter what actually lurks aboard the Lunar Research Station, you’ll probably have to start right back at the beginning.

Tango Gameworks, Bethesda. PC, PlayStation 3, PlayStation 4, Xbox 360, Xbox One.

While The Evil Within has a name redolent of a particularly vengeful curry, it actually represents something very special, indeed. It marks the return of Shinji Mikami to a genre he helped to define through his seminal work on the Resident Evil series. We’re talking about the man who directed Resident Evil 4 here...

It’s true to say that in recent years he\'s strayed from the genre, but has continued to produce work that is both memorable and often eccentric (Vanquish, Shadows of the Damned). The release of The Evil Within feels like a homecoming. So far the imagery has been disturbing, grubby, unsettling – as you\'d expect – but there also seems to be a generous helping of psychological torment slopping around with the more gruesome stuff.

Has the Master still got it? I hope so, and should it prove a success, I expect publishers to start taking the genre a little more seriously.

The Evil Within - Prologue and Perth House Survival Horror Gameplay

Among The Sleep is a fascinating independent horror adventure being developed by Norway’s Krillbite Studio.

You play as a two-year-old child, exploring their house at night. Hopefully the horror doesn\'t centre on crawling into your mum and dad\'s room late at night, after they\'ve been at the wine.

From early footage, it seems as if reality begins to falter, lapsing into dream and weird fantasy, the child\'s diminutive viewpoint warping the world around you in some creatively unsettling ways.

Among the Sleep - Surviving as a Baby in Among the Sleep

Like quite a few games here, Daylight realises that vulnerability is key to stoking fear. You’re equipped with no weapons or items, apart from a mobile phone. It’s your only tool and your only source of light. Just pray to your god that it’s got a better battery life than the iPhone 5. (Or maybe carrying a charger around with you constantly is a secondary mechanic.)

Set in that well-worn trope of an abandoned hospital, Daylight has procedurally generated levels ensuring play-throughs are always distinct.

Pitched more as a psychological thriller, it sees you wake up in an empty ward without any recollection of who you are or why you’re there (a bit like that time after your work’s Christmas party). You need to find a way out of this unique labyrinth, and I expect that means wading through some of its unpleasant mysteries.

Rumours of a private healthcare version with much shorter loading times are, however, unfounded.

Pale-faced girls with long black hair. Themes of revenge and rebirth. Sounds like the One Direction Twitter feed, but DreadOut is even scarier than that.

A class of high school students get stranded while on a trip. But the town is deserted, and main character, Linda, must embrace this darkness if her and the rest of the class are to make it out alive.

DreadOut looks ready to play with a whole range of Asian horror tropes, but it also reminds me of the classic Fatal Frame series but with a more modern approach – the analogue camera ditched in favour of a smartphone. Expect scares but hopefully a good dose of puzzle solving, too.

Psychological horror set in the Hanwell Mental Institute, a home for the clinically insane. Again, this sounds like familiar territory, but horror has always managed to squeeze new life from well-worn conceits and the Kickstart-funded Asylum looks poised to do the same.

It cites dark, baroque prince of horror, H.P. Lovecraft, as one of its main influence, so expect something much more sinister to be slithering away beneath the surface, with the horror stemming more from the cultivation of atmosphere and story-based revelations.

PC, MAC, Linux, iOS, Android, Windows Phone.

If you’re looking for something that doesn’t involve pointing torches from a first-person perspective, Fran Bow is definitely worth your attention.

It’s an offbeat point-and-click adventure, which reached its Kickstarter goal last August. You play as Fran, a young girl struggling with a mental illness and an unfair destiny.

After witnessing the horrific loss of her parents, she withdraws into the woods with her only friend – a black cat named Mr. Midnight. Things get worse: Fran winds up in an asylum, and to escape, she must solve puzzles by self-administering various drugs, lapsing in-and-out of psychosis.

It’s dark, disturbing stuff, yet it\'s wrapped up in this weirdly beautiful 2-D art-style.

Neverending Nightmares is a really personal horror game that was inspired by the developer’s own struggles with depression and obsessive-compulsive disorder.

Players awake in a darkened mansion, which must be explored to piece together a broken narrative. You have to sift through the darkness, sorting out what is real, and can be trusted, from what is the stuff bad dreams are made of.

Again, like Fran Bow, it has a wonderfully-distinct, pen-and-ink style with cross-hatching creating atmospheric shadows. Colour is used sparingly to highlight key objects and, inevitably... blood.

Pioneered by the likes of Lovecraft, Arthur Machen, M.R. James, Weird Fiction is a horror sub-genre that you don’t see explored too frequently outside of the written page. Combining the supernatural, the scientific and mythical in a unique way, it often creates that feeling of existential dread and suffocating awe. Oh yeah, sometimes there are tentacles.

The Vanishing of Ethan Carter is directly inspired by those brilliantly macabre tales. But it’s also a police procedural of sorts, casting you in the role of a detective who must solve the eponymous disappearance using a mixture of traditional police methods and his unique supernatural ability to see what happened at crime scenes. (Like that show Millennium, but hopefully better than that show Millennium.) We’ve only glimpsed the world in screenshots and three gifs, but it looks beautiful, ethereal and forbidding.

Can you save Ethan Carter before it’s too late? I can’t wait to try.

You may have already played Outlast on PC, or are looking forward to it shortly coming to PlayStation 4.

But more is coming, which seeks to fill in some of the narrative gaps in the history of Mount Massive Asylum. You play as the Whistleblower, whose tip brought the original protagonist Miles Upshur to the asylum in the first place. You’ll witness the experiments and abuse that led to the downfall. If you survive the initial outbreak, new areas will open up with terrifying new secrets.

Daniel is IGN\'s UK Games Editor. He quite likes horror, as you can probably tell. You can be part of the world\'s most embarrassing cult by following him on IGN and Twitter.

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