Halloween is coming, and our minds are turning to scary games. But which titles are genuine fright fests? Our writers decided to find out in the most ill-advised way possible Shepton Mallet prison in Somerset is the world’s oldest correctional facility. It is also reportedly one of the most haunted. Between its opening in 1625 and its closure in 2013, it saw hundreds of inmates, from Victorian street urchins to wayward American GIs to the Kray twins. Now a tourist attraction, it occasionally opens to paying guests who want to spend a night behind bars. Some are paranormal investigators, some are brave tourists, and others are video game journalists with a silly idea: how scary would it be to play five recent horror games all night, locked in a haunted prison? Carrying just a torch, an electromagnetic field (EMF) detector, and a laptop, we wandered the prison finding spine-chilling locations in which to play these immersive supernatural masterpieces. Here is what happened … Continue reading...

In 2004, Fable was as famous for what it didn’t deliver as for what it did. But this Python-esque fantasy game deserves to be remembered for more than that In 1985, brothers Dene and Simon Carter vowed to each other that they would one day start their own development studio together. The game they imagined was ambitious, as Simon outlined in a developer diary: a fantasy role-playing game, “populated with compelling and convincing characters with real personality, people who actually reacted to what you did … We wanted each and every person who played our game to have a unique experience, to have their own stories to tell.” The idea of a living, reactive game world was an obsession for many game creators (and players) at the time, largely because it had never yet been done. In the 1980s, a virtual fantasy world like this was far beyond the realms of technological possibility. Thirteen years later, they got the opportunity to make the game of their dreams, at their own studio Big Blue Box. Working with British studio Lionhead and its well-known co-founder Peter Molyneux, they put together the fantasy game they had imagined – or a version of it, anyway. Fable was finally released in September 2004, published by Microsoft on the original Xbox. Continue reading...

MachineGames’ long-awaited tie-in looks set to deliver the most authentic Indy adventure yet. And with George Lucas and Steven Spielberg on board, hold on to your hats for an unforgettable ride It’s the spring of 1977, and George Lucas is petrified. Having just wrapped work on his third feature film, Star Wars, he retreats to Hawaii, unable to face the early reviews. Yet as he frets in a five-star resort, Lucas bumps into another Hollywood hideaway – Steven Spielberg. Making sandcastles together under the Maui sun, Lucas pitches Spielberg a story that riffs on the simpler era of 1950s’ serials, an action-packed spectacular about a James Bond-esque archaeologist. This crypt-robbing Casanova’s name? Indiana … Smith. The hero’s moniker certainly benefited from some finessing, and the action-packed Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981) raked in $354m at the box office. Yet as great as Indy’s influence was on cinema, it might have had an even bigger one on video games. It inspired Lara Croft’s tomb-raiding antics and Uncharted’s wise-cracking Nathan Drake. There have also been games starring Indy himself, most notably LucasArts’ brilliant graphic adventures from the early-90s, but it’s been decades since the last interactive Indiana Jones adventure that wasn’t made of Lego. This December, he’ll finally get another crack of the gaming whip with Indiana Jones and the Great Circle, from the studio behind Wolfenstein II: The New Colossus – in a game that actually looks like the films. Continue reading...

Rebellion’s game imagines the aftermath of a UK nuclear disaster that mixes folk horror and 50s sci-fi with a dash of Last of the Summer Wine When Atomfall was first revealed at the Xbox Games Showcase in June, it led many to ask: is this the UK’s version of Fallout? “In some respects, yes. In some respects, no,” says Ben Fisher, associate head of design at Rebellion, the Oxford-based studio behind Atomfall, as well as games such as Sniper Elite 5 and Zombie Army 4. He explains that Rebellion head Jason Kingsley’s initial idea was to look at the freeform, self-guided experience of Fallout and think how it could be applied closer to home. The difference with Atomfall is in the structure. “It’s a much denser experience,” says Fisher. “One of our reference points has been Fallout: New Vegas in that it’s a more concentrated experience than, say, Fallout 3 and 4, and largely builds one story that’s interconnected and has layers that are influenced by the choices the player makes.” Rather than taking place on one giant, open-world map, Atomfall features a series of interconnected maps, similar to the levels of the Sniper Elite games. “That’s the kind of map that we excel in,” says Fisher, adding that many of the game’s most interesting secrets are buried in bunkers deep underground. Continue reading...

When two horror movie fans took the leap into game development, the last thing they expected was for an actual movie production company to want to get involved In 2020, when the Covid-19 pandemic hit, Crista Castro and Bryan Singh were moved to think about what they really wanted from their lives. An animation director and programmer respectively, the couple had worked on other people’s cartoons and video games at big studios for years, but both had nursed ambitions to make something of their own. They had collaborated on weekend projects here and there, but felt if they really wanted to make a game together, they’d have to quit their jobs. So in 2021, galvanised by lockdown-induced introspection, that’s what they did, forming a husband-and-wife development team under the name Cozy Game Pals. And just to raise the stakes further, they became parents at around the same time. They gave themselves two years. At the end of it, in 2023, they had made something: a short game called Fear the Spotlight, a 90s-inspired horror adventure that looks like a lost PlayStation classic and feels like a teen ghost movie. They released it on Steam, to a very positive reception from the few people who played it – but they didn’t know how to market it, and it didn’t sell much. “We were like, OK, I guess that was it,” Bryan tells me. “Let’s go find jobs again. And then Blumhouse showed up.” Fear the Spotlight is released this autumn on PlayStation 5 and PC This interview with Cozy Game Pals took place at Summer game fest in Los Angeles. Keza MacDonald’s travel and accommodation expenses were met by Amazon Games Continue reading...

Cyan Worlds Inc; PC, Mac, PlayStation This satisfying reboot of the sun-baked puzzle adventure now features VR clifftop walks, new solutions and star turns from fan Ronan Farrow and more The bestselling PC game of 1997, Riven now seems like an artefact from a lost creative era. Set on a sun-baked archipelago – the sort to which flocks of Instagram influencers would now stampede, were it real – it combined computer-generated postcard stills with live-action footage to form an elaborate, island-scale escape room. Spread across five compact discs, it was a technological marvel, albeit one whose depths would only be witnessed by the tenacious and persistent who also excelled at lateral thinking. Few other designers since have had the ingenuity or capacity to make Riven-alikes; its memory sank like a pebble in a still sea. Three decades on and this remake resurfaces Riven’s arcane, alluring world as a fully realised destination. No longer are these islands explored by clicking through a series of richly rendered stills, but by walking along its baked clifftops and stone-cool tunnels (with the option to play via a VR headset, for those with the stomach and equipment for it). The essential beats and rhythms will be familiar to fans: again, you must play with a mouse in one hand and notebook in the other, unscrambling ciphers and figuring out how the world’s creaking, underlying mechanisms fit together. But a great deal has changed too, including the solutions to several puzzles. There are also new characters, including a star turn from real-life investigative journalist Ronan Farrow (who, with his mother, the actor Mia Farrow, is a keen fan of Riven and its predecessor, Myst). Continue reading...

The haunting songs of the video game and TV series get to the heart of Joel and Ellie’s story. The man behind them talks about the ‘magical’ process of composing The Last of Us is a story about tension – the tension between love and loss, violence and intimacy, protecting and destroying, life and death. It’s a study of how impossibly delicate life is, but also the terrifying stubbornness of our will to survive. As its composer, Gustavo Santaolalla’s job was to navigate and soundtrack that tension, a mediator between the game’s warring themes. His mission was to score music for a video game that was doing something different, and really had something to say. Santaolalla tells me that when he was a child in rural Argentina, one of his tutors quit on him after just a few lessons, telling his parents “there is nothing I can teach him”. His career proper began in 1967, when he co-founded the band Arco Iris, which specialised in fusing Latin-American folk with rock. Later, after leading a short-lived collective of Argentine musicians in Soluna, he began striking out on his own, releasing solo albums and composing for TV shows, adverts and, eventually, films (most notably Amores Perros, 21 Grams and The Motorcycle Diaries). Continue reading...