'Shocktober' Game Recommendations
- Jay Weaver
- Oct 20, 2024
- 4 min read
Jay Weaver recommends games for the spooky season:
Mouthwashing (Wrong Organ, 2024)
Playable on: PC (Steam)
Apparently, suffering in the vastness of Space is as horrifying as suffering with a bad and low-paying employer. 2022’s How Fish is Made was a free-to-play experience that sought to capture the plethora of philosophies and beliefs people commit themselves to and condescend in their direction while also reaching out a hand of sympathy. Johanna Kasurinen, narrative designer and art lead at Wrong Organ, used marine life as a focal point to decry how the hostility and discrimination inherent to nature itself devalues the meaning people assign to their lives. However, the experience never lost sight of how everyone shares their thoughts and anxieties in the game of life. For September 26th of this year, the team at Wrong Organ came together once again to make everyone reflect on their ipseity and make people feel a tad worse, or perhaps better, about themselves, depending on who’s playing. Mouthwashing is a horror game with a Pulp Fiction-esque narrative structure that follows the blue-collar crew of the Tulpar spaceship after the captain has seemingly failed to crash the vessel in a suicide attempt. The decisive premise has allowed the team at Wrong Organ to craft a terrifying and captivating thriller that never explains itself until its final moments; the team has gone much further than How Fish is Made to explore how corporations, the 0.01%, capitalism, and the ‘9-to-5’ greatly devalue human life far more than parasites or disease ever could. Mouthwashing left me with a lot to think about and the images of its confident and surreally directed world have been stained deep into the many recesses of my mind for me to remember forever. You should play How Fish is Made, then, you should fork out the scraps from work to buy and play Mouthwashing.
Lorn’s Lure (Rubeki Games, 2024)
Playable on: PC (Steam)
Departing from a session of Lorn’s Lure leaves players with an image of a surreal, brutalist, dark megalopolis and little else to think about. This is more than enough to recommend the game. It follows a borderline defunct android as he navigates an empty, post-dystopian world to better understand his hallucinations; in gameplay, this journey is reflected through first-person precision platforming through various environments to simply reach the next area, all of which induce dread through their sheer imposition and immensity. Exploring and getting lost nets little to no material benefit but is persistently absorbing because each new vista burns itself into the player’s retina. I’m not used to controlling games with a mouse and keyboard in a way that reflects Lorn’s Lure’s tautness and mobility, so I don’t know how much time will pass before I eventually roll credits. Be that as it may, I recommend the game because the tightly woven anxiety and euphoria of exploring has occupied my mind for far longer than the time I’ve spent playing.
Grunn (Sokpop Collective, 2024)
Playable on: PC (Steam)
Almost every piece about Grunn published so far opens with the mantra: “Grunn is a perfectly normal gardening game and nothing else”, or words to that effect. Whilst the implicit joke here is appreciable, it does very little to market the game and provides little insight as to why it deserves the inherent financial cost and time to play. Grunn is a horror game that entrusts the player with tidying the garden surrounding a house. Optionally, the player can utilise the excess time that gardening won’t use on its own to peruse and nosey the many corners of the surrounding village to discover transcendentally impossible spaces, inaudible denizens, and cultic gnomes. All of which are still on the less nebulous and more digestible side of what Grunn is offering. The game’s world and its mysteries are riveting to unfold and easy to immerse oneself in; it recalls the best moments of some of my favourite horrors, particularly the Silent Hill franchise, Paratopic (Arbitrary Metric, 2018), and Fatum Betula (Bryce Bucher, 2020). Circling back, however, it’d be remiss to deny mentioning the raw exhilaration I felt meticulously cutting all the grass in the various gardens and removing all litter from the public bathroom’s floor as I strove for perfect cleanliness and 100% completion.
Luigi’s Mansion (Next Level Games, Nintendo) - Literally any of them
Playable on: Nintendo Switch (currently purchasable), or 3DS & GameCube (currently unavailable so 2nd hand purchases only)
While horror often feels like a key feature of Halloween, it’s also important not to deny the sense of community encouraged by the holiday, and thus the simplistic joy of hanging out with friends to indulge in the iconography of sweets, bedsheet ghosts, and jump scares. Luigi’s solo ventures have always been far less desirable and far more traumatising than Mario’s; however, the raw thrill of cosplaying a ghostbuster as an expressive and idiosyncratic Italian plumber to collect gold and beat up ghoulies is omnipresent in the Luigi’s Mansion series. Each entry has been a testament to the power of compact experiences, with memorable and animated side characters and bosses, tight level design, and visually dense spaces. In particular, Luigi’s Mansion 3 (Next Level Games, 2019) finds the edge of the Nintendo Switch’s technical limits and holds the hardware there for the entire experience without stuttering once, crafting a beautiful showcase of the game’s setting — The Last Resort — and Luigi’s horrifying journey. It’s just a bonus then that Luigi’s Mansion 3 has an excellent two-player co-op campaign and some mediocre four-player minigames to laugh at when playing with your friends during game night this October 31st.
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