Horror often relies on putting the protagonist in immediate danger, throwing them in situations where one false step can cause them direct bodily harm. While games do give you direct control of these characters, making it so your reaction time is directly tied to their survival, there’s always still a layer of disconnect by forcing you to use a controller.
You can’t just jump like you would in your normal body, you need to press ‘A’ on a controller that’s held in your hands. This melts away in games with responsive and well thought out controls, but what if games emphasized that layer of interface instead of shying away from it?
Much like the screen life trend in films, there have been some games that have forced you to use computer-like interaction models to great effect. While this has been going on for a while, there are a few from this year worth highlighting, that all manage to say different things with the concept.
Despite being a very strange game with a unique core conceit, this might be the one with the most traditional elements on this list. You play a person who has recently moved to a city and works a rather strange job in order to scrounge for rent. There are first person sections where you walk around some limited environments, which warp and change in creepy ways as the game progresses, but the main gameplay hook is the job: data entry. You’re tasked with transcribing lost mail that can’t be easily read by the computer that normally does this.
Aside from being bored at work, where’s the horror, you might ask. It starts out simply, with you just transcribing addresses that are written with bad handwriting, but eventually you’ll be typing up postcards that get eerie or downright sinister. Little narratives emerge as you see a series of letters to or from the same person, full of menace or tragedy. While I won’t say the overall narrative of what’s happening to you is important outside of a few moments, this does create vibes that evoke notes found in games like Silent Hill. Dead Letter Dept. is only about two hours long, but there are multiple endings and a massive amount of letters, ensuring that each playthrough has something new.
What this game does with its unique format is make the horrors feel mundane in a way that makes them even more unsettling. There’s a monotony to the job of data entry, and as my character was complaining about the physical toll it’s taking on him, I was noticing my own hand aching. It’s this monotony that made my reaction to the strangeness feel even worse. As I’m reading letters about the best way to slice and cook testicles, my main focus is not the disturbing content of the letter, but rather the fact that I commonly swap Ls and Es at the end of words by accident, leading to typos that the computer rejects. This emphasizes the ways that jobs you take, especially when you’re desperate for money, can make you lose focus on the humanity of the things you’re doing. I’m just trying to make my quota for letters transcribed in a day, so I’m trying to ignore the content of them as I do it, which is its own unsettling and dehumanizing feeling.
While I don’t know if I could describe Dead Letter Dept. as ‘fun,’ I think the tone the game manages to achieve with its presentation and mechanics is so utterly unique that it’s easy to recommend checking it out.
One of my favorite games of the last few years was the excellent squad-based strategy game Aliens: Dark Descent. Instead of giving you direct control over your squad, you were able to move them as a group, issuing individual orders as they tried to sneak past or kill their way through hordes of Xenomorphs. Xenopurge takes that idea and gives it one further layer of abstraction. It’s a tactical roguelike where you clear out small maps infested with aliens, but you do so by giving them commands through an old school computer terminal.
You’re given a typical roguelike branching path that will present you with different types of missions and bonuses per level. Most objectives involve sending your squad to scout rooms for things like alien hives, extraction points, or important files, as creatures roam the hallways. It should be easy, but the game encourages you to take risks and split your small party because the spawn rates of enemies will continue to increase the longer you stay in a mission. Missions are pretty short, lasting only a few minutes, but can get hairy quickly as overwhelming forces start to bear down on you. Given that you’re only issuing your squad simple commands like “scout” or “regroup,” a lot of it comes down to good planning and familiarity with the system presented. As you progress, both through runs and between runs, you’ll unlock new soldiers, equipment, and even commands, giving you a better chance of survival against the dire odds.
For Xenopurge, the use of the interface is where the tension is built. Even though everything is abstract on your monitor, with different color points representing your squad and the aliens, there’s a true moment of panic when a red dot appears when a green dot turns down the hallway. They will automatically engage, battling out based on their stats, but if you want to get your squad together to support each other, it’s a series of panicky selections in the menu that will be required to regroup. It would be trivial to do if you could just click on them like a normal real-time strategy game, rather than forcing you to remember which unit you’re looking for and finding the correct command to issue.
The game is still in Early Access on Steam, but it feels like the bones of a good game are there already. I’m intrigued to see how it develops, both as I put in more runs to unlock more options and as the developers add more content, because it’s a unique kind of tension that I haven’t run across before.
Buckshot Roulette was a modest indie hit from last year, providing a uniquely grimy experience that eventually evolved into a multiplayer version. Now Mike Klubnika is taking that same style and tone to the world of computer hacking with his new game s.p.l.i.t. It’s a short, narrative experience that runs about an hour, putting you in the room with a series of terminals that you hack with various authentic-feeling commands. You play a hacker who is working with two other people on a mysterious job, communicating with them over chat while you search for data to help execute a malware attack.
It’s about fifty percent narrative, fifty percent puzzles, mostly presented on the screens of outdated looking monitors. The narrative portions come through chat windows, as you go back and forth with your team, slowly revealing details of the job, one which your character seems out of his depth in. There’s a unique pace to the dialog created by the fact that the game forces you to press buttons on your keyboard in order to advance the text for your character, as though you were the one typing out the prewritten messages in the narrative. The puzzles all present as hacking prompts, forcing you to navigate directories and execute commands as you dig deeper and deeper into a system that you as the player don’t fully grasp. Surprisingly, there were also cutscenes that show your character doing things around the room and the situation gets dire, and these are advanced by typing words that show up on the screen reflecting the character’s inner monologue. It’s similar to Dead Letter Dept. in that you’re also trying to scramble to type these words in time, which disturbingly dulls the impact of the macabre instructions you’re punching in.
For me, the use of the interface in s.p.l.i.t is about shattering the illusion of safety that the distance of the computer screen usually provides. Initially, it feels safe to hack from your terminal because you’re removed from the direct situation, but as more details come to light about the magnitude of what you’re doing and the surprising worldbuilding elements introduced, it quickly becomes apparent that what you’re doing is a matter of life or death in a way you couldn’t possibly have anticipated.
I love short little narrative games like this, and I’m glad the success of Buckshot Roulette allowed him to take the time to work on an experimental experience like this one. There were definitely moments where I felt like a “real hacker” after figuring out what I needed to do, before everything came crashing down around me in the best way possible.
VILE: Exhumed from Final Girl Games followed a format that I was more familiar with in this computer interface subgenre – the investigation game. Much like the recent games of Sam Barlow, like Her Story or Telling Lies, you’re going through a late 90s computer to see if you can discover the fate of a missing porn actress by the name of Candy Corpse. As you go through emails, websites and files, you’ll slowly discover the world of violent, horror-themed pornography that she trafficked in, and the disturbing individuals that occupied the space alongside her.
Much of the gameplay involves reading documents, some relevant to puzzles, some purely narrative. The puzzles are very cleverly diegetic, often involving figuring out a password based on a hint that forces you to dive deeper into the information presented. The dedication to the presentation here is top notch, featuring a crunchy pixelated interface, pixelated images, and even router sounds that brought me right back to the dial up days. The scuzzy nature of the websites feel truly vile, as the title suggests, with disturbing writing and convincingly staged blurry photos of mutilations and gore. The look and feel really give you the impression of delving into the darkest corners of the internet, something that wouldn’t be possible if it were not presented as an interface like this.
There’s well- observed elements of misogyny involved with the treatment of Candy Corpse by her fans, which leads to some of the most upsetting content of an already upsetting game. The fact that you need to keep actively digging into it well beyond the point of disgust is a strength of the game, drawing you into its dark world of sex and violence. There’s definitely some well-earned trigger warnings at the beginning of the game, so take heed of those before you dive in.
I love a game that gives me a mystery to solve, and the one in VILE: Exhumed was a darkly intriguing one. There’s moments and images in here that will stick with me long past its hour-long runtime, so it’s definitely worth diving into its bleak and upsetting world.
Have you found any other games that follow this trend of computer interfaced-based mechanics? Leave a comment and tell us how you liked it!
