The next step in my plan was to look at other forms of media similar to mine. I’m going to be reviewing other games and videos with varying genres and aesthetic. Some
Exhibit of Sorrows
I initially found out about this game when I was fairly young and was tricked into thinking it was a cute point and click game. The Exhibit of sorrows is a 10 minute horror game set in a circus-themed exhibit, each room showcases a unique clown doll and the player must interact with a certain component in the room to continue onto the next room. However, as the game progresses, evidently, it becomes more and more unsettling and you as the player are made to do these cruel things to the clowns in order to escape.
As mentioned, I played this game before when I was younger and remembered being creeped out and disturbed by this game. Initially, the game starts off pleasant, you interact with these objects in each doll’s room, a nice touch that this game has is that in each room, it has a plaque card to display what each doll is.
This routine is kept up until the end of the exhibit; just as you leave, the power cuts consequently, making the room dark. This is when you turn back and leave the rooms the way you found them (you need to undo what you had done to the doll). Once you have gone back all the way to the start, you try to escape but there’s something stopping you from doing so. Now you have to find another way out of the exhibit and the only way is through the rooms you were just in. However, this time it feels more sinister… Just as before, you interact with the dolls, but the first doll that you were introduced to seems to keep inflating, he gets bigger, bigger and bigger until, he explodes. The plaque card is replaced and Mr. Floaty is no more. It is now called an “Industrial pump”.
The plaque card replacement is such a simple touch, it adds to the cruel and twisted essence of the game; and as the player you have feelings of overwhelming guilt because the dolls on display are cute, they’ve done nothing to you and to an extent they present a form of sentience. My favourite exhibit in the game is Mr. Handy because I think he has the worst fate out of all the other exhibits.
Mechanics: Click and interact – player has to interact with the exhibit and try to get the key that unlocks the next room.
Paper Lily
Paper Lily is one of the games I found on Steam out of curiosity and wanting to get into the RPG genre more (the fact that it’s free, is a crime). If I had never played this game, I don’t think I would’ve been as fascinated by RPGs as much. Paper Lily is a top down, pixel RPG that is story rich and where your choices matter. This game took me roughly 12 hours to complete – not including the other paths the player can deviate from – and I loved every minute spent playing this game.
As the player, you venture the world as Lacie, who is a girl that is supposedly “cursed” and attempts to find answers on how to lift the curse and find out who placed it. The journey starts off with Lacie receiving a golden letter with instructions on summoning a bus that goes past midnight. This bus will take Lacie to another world where there is no return, In this game, the player has to interact and explore the surrounding environment, collect objects, solve puzzles and meet new characters. It’s also important to note that this game is a psychological horror. Although the horror isn’t in your face most of the time, I felt paranoid when playing this game. Despite the cute visuals and charming characters, something has always felt off; whether I was exploring the train station, her home, or Mrs Knives house. Then I realised, the true horror behind this game wasn’t in it’s creatures (although some of the creatures here were terrifying at points!), but within the art and timing of certain cues. For example, when the player is already paranoid, the tension is released by the drop of a glass bottle or a painting on the wall changing completely. This form of gaslighting is affective as it questions the player’s own sanity and makes them think, are they really alone?
My favourite part of this game was exploring deeper into the forest, the area felt magical and whimsical. It was part of the game where there was a big tree in the middle of the map and the roots would enter different areas. This didn’t completely disperse my paranoia though, in the different corners of the map, there would be other environments to explore, each with different puzzles and tribulations to encounter.
Mechanics: Puzzles, sneaking, exploration
Homicipher
I stumbled across this game through TikTok and was drawn to the characters and their design, this is because the characters in this world are monsters. Homicipher is an interactive adventure, dating horror, and language deciphering game. You play as a woman who doesn’t know how she ended up in this environment in the first place. The goal of the game is to survive for as long as possible and try to escape what seems to be another dimension whilst also talking to the other monsters and decipher their language.
This game has one of the most unique mechanics I’ve seen in games (in probably my life), you as the player have to try to decipher their language, however, you aren’t going in here completely blind. In certain rooms, there will be monsters that are willing to help you understand their language. By clicking on certain objects, you can view what it is and input what the word means. For example, when the option is available, you can click on an object in the room and replace the foreign language with English. However, this game will have a few mistranslations as the original game is supposed to be in Japanese. Not only that but the monster’s language seems to be very simple and doesn’t have most words. A monster could mean to say “Can you give me your heart?” but when inputting the words it comes up as “You give me heart?”
Homicipher takes a lot of patience and problem solving to decipher the language as it’s not guaranteed that the player will get the word the first time. Admittedly, I got really frustrated, especially in the beginning, but this is because I’m generally an impatient person. It took a lot of trial and error to get to a place where I could grasp the concept of what the monsters were saying, but in the end it paid off.
Mechanics: Language deciphering, problem solving, click and explore.