'Shocktober' Game Recommendations 2025

Top L: Siren's Rest (The Chinese Room/Secret Mode, 2025). Top R, Bottom L-R: RATSHAKER™ (Sunscorched Studios, 2024), Ells Tales: Chairbound (Ells&Pills, 2025), Signalis (rose-engine, 2022). Screenshots by author.

Still Wakes the Deep + Siren’s Rest (The Chinese Room, 2024 + 25)

Playable on: PC (Steam + Epic), Xbox Series, PS5

A staple quality of horror in the present day is its frequent flirting with abstract concepts and its indulgence in our fear of the unknown. Whilst The Chinese Room’s most recent horror outing does take a lot from John Carpenter’s The Thing – the film associated with pioneering neuroticism in cinema – Still Wakes the Deep’s best quality is ultimately how it subverts nostalgia and weaponises what we find most familiar. Taking place on an oil rig, the developers have thalassophobia as a constant tool at their disposal alongside the body horror that comes from its The Thing adjacent, other-worldly concept. In Still Wakes the Deep’s base game, you see and play through the eyes of Caz as a worker on the oil rig and the protagonist of this first-person stealth horror game. Whilst being British myself certainly helped, I found that the game’s strong artistic and technical presentation thrived the most when I saw the familiar sights of gloomy weather and Reform UK propaganda and heard the profanities and greetings of working-class Scotsmen. This familiarity and subsequent comfort are decisively yanked from the player sometime into the game as the plot unfolds and the experience becomes more alienating and frightening. The recently released DLC, Siren’s Rest, recreates the most powerful feelings of the base game in a more conservative and internalised manner, recontextualising familiar sights and spaces through the darkness, decay, and verticality of the deep ocean to craft a delightfully horrifying and memorable experience worth buying into at any time, but especially for this Halloween.

RATSHAKER™ (Sunscorched Studios, 2024)

Playable on: PC (Steam), Xbox One + Series, PS 4+5, Nintendo Switch

There’s a good chance that you’ve heard of “anti-war war games”, but have you ever heard of “anti-cruelty cruelty games”? RATSHAKER™ is a short and eclectic – putting it lightly – horror game that explores and condemns abuse whilst making it so that your only means of engaging with the world is by abusing a rat. It feels easy to criticise the game straight out of the gate from this description alone for its inherent tonal dissonance; however, the game cleverly utilises the absurdity of its premise and its interactive tools to criticise what you, the player, extract from the experience. Are you being forced to shake the rat and make yourself uncomfortable, or are you choosing to do so by simply playing the game? Have you noticed that you no longer contemplate the context of your actions, shaking the rat out of habit to use him as a glowstick or squeezing him to open doors? Have you noticed that the motion you are doing with your arm in the real world with your computer mouse is the same as your player character's motions when shaking the mouse in the game? I strongly recommend playing RATSHAKER™ this Halloween, as it’s either going to make for a funny night spent with friends or an introspective one spent alone. There’s a lot to enjoy, a lot to hate, and a lot to think about.

Ells Tales: Chairbound (Ells&Pills, 2025)

Playable on: PC (Steam)

You’re tied down to a wheeled office chair at the top of a ten-story building, and you have ten minutes to escape before the bomb strapped to your chest triggers. You slowly kick your feet off the floor to push the chair around and falling over spells death. Ells Tales: Chairbound makes for a deeply suffocating and demanding few hours before finally assimilating the game’s kinks and secrets and habituating to the extremely obtuse control scheme. The perverse art style evokes a sense of wistfulness towards the vandalised brutalism of my suburban childhood. Every texture feels like it's had colour wrung out of it, and every space feels like my recognition of what’s being represented has been perversely disfigured into something enticingly unique. Like The Exit 8, Ells Tales: Chairbound is a distinct and singular piece of art that captures a novel vibe and interactive goal in a very short timeframe. Unlike The Exit 8, Ells Tales: Chairbound has a few glaring issues that make it a cautious recommendation and a few steps away from a perfectly tight experience. Whilst I don’t intend to spoil any of the game’s best moments – especially with its short runtime – the purpose of some of the game’s puzzle pieces is often hard to decipher, and trial and error will likely become necessary to beat the game. Furthermore, the addition of a female playable character, unfortunately, seems to prioritise fanservice over player choice and accessibility, as seen through the rather telling comparison of her design to her male counterpart. Despite these issues, if stating that you’ve never played a game quite like Ells Tales: Chairbound sounds like a recommendation, then it’s definitely a game that you shouldn’t skip.

Signalis (rose-engine, 2022)

Playable on: PC (Steam), Xbox One + Series, PS 4+5, Nintendo Switch

Remember Silent Hill? Signalis does. What about Dead Space? Arnold Böcklin’s Isle of the Dead and the accompanying orchestral symphonic poem by Sergei Rachmaninoff? Signalis is a survival horror game where you play as a capitalistic clone in pursuit of your lesbian lover on a mining planet after all has gone wrong and the rota-ed staff are near-zombies. Signalis is also an immensely profound piece of existential art, one that explores the value of humanity and memory, and attempts to navigate our relationships with the arts through music, poetry, prose, puzzles, its mixed-media visual presentation, and survival horror gameplay. Signalis is held together by every one of its elements. There’s an equally important thread that is woven through the game's design, stylistic choices, and narrative beats, and the context of German and Japanese cultures, alongside a rich history of art and philosophy, all matter to the game. Signalis is a masterpiece, and meaningfully capturing all the reasons it’s worth playing requires a remit far too large. It would also take enough time that simply buying the game right now would be a better way to spend your time than reading my incoherent ramblings about my new favourite horror game.