PAX West 2024: A Horror Showcase

PAX West 2024 has come and gone. Another year, another fantastic showcase full of gaming culture and beyond. As it is every year, PAX West 2024 provided a bountiful feast of all things nerd. If you love tabletop games, there was an entire convention center dedicated to it. If anime is more your style, a dozen booths were showcasing a plethora of anime merch, both obscure and common. Video games tended to be the main attraction, with almost too many developers to count gracing the Seattle Arch Convention Center. There were speedrunning competitions, cosplay shows, keynote speakers (the big one this year being Xbox CEO Phil Spencer), and an overall feeling that your particular taste in geek culture was represented, regardless of how niche.

One thing in particular that constantly impresses me at every PAX West I attend is the wide variety of excellent horror games that are always showcased at the event. Indie game development and horror games go together like bread and butter, and this year’s PAX West did not disappoint. 

Ysbryd Games 

Love Eternal

One look at Love Eternal’s extreme 2D pixel art style and I was hooked. It was otherworldly, it was familiar with an alien twinge, and frankly, it freaked me out. As such, when Ysbryd Games was kind enough to reach out to me to give Love Eternal a try, I jumped at the opportunity. I sat down with Toby Alden, Love Eternal’s designer, programmer, writer, and sound designer. As I played through the game's bizarre world, I was able to ask them some questions about their trials and tribulations of how Love Eternal came to be. 

First, a little backstory on what the game is all about. Love Eternal is an unsettling 2D psychological platform horror with an emphasis on puzzles, traversal, and atmosphere. I very quickly got the feeling that I was playing a wonderful amalgamation of Super Meat Boy and Gravity Rush mixed with Silent Hill, as my character zipped around the interesting level design and flipped planes to navigate through the puzzles in deeply disturbing vistas and strange environments. While the incredible art design (done by Toby’s brother) may have been what drew me in initially, what made me fall in love with my time in Love Eternal was the buttery smooth gameplay. When I started the demo, I lamented to Toby how I wasn’t particularly good at these sorts of difficult puzzle platformers. When I finished the demo, they told me that I had the fastest completion time they'd yet seen (granted, this was pretty early on the first day, but I’ll take the compliment). I promised them as I promise you, it wasn’t my skill that caused me to best the challenge – it was how incredible it felt to play. 

This speaks nothing of the metric tons of atmosphere that ooze from every corner of Love Eternal. Right off the bat, things within the world feel distinctly wrong. The way the 2D characters move, the way their portraits present themselves, the huge and foreboding backgrounds that oppress you as you wind your way through the levels, and the strange, unearthly creatures who permeate the run time all come together to make an exceedingly uncomfortable and memorable experience. 

Toby told me that this game has been in development for over six years, with it’s original inspiration being a project that’s nearly eleven years old. You can really feel how long this experience has been in the oven while you jump through the levels and soak in the atmosphere. I only played Love Eternal for about 20 minutes, but it’s stuck with me ever since. I can’t wait to fully immerse myself in the world once again when it releases sometime in 2025. Toby promised me their game would subvert expectations and be quite unlike anything else on the market. That is easy to believe based on how well it played at PAX West. 

Critical Reflex

Mouthwashing

AAA horror games tend to rely on flashy visuals and over-the-top situations to build up their horror. While this has resulted in some unbelievably tense and iconic moments in video game history, I think it can sometimes force these experiences to overstay their welcome or be too loud and bombastic to really elicit a deeply rooted fear reaction. Mouthwashing, on the other hand, quickly establishes itself as an experience that relies on the subtleties of a situation to scare you to your core. 

I sat down with Kai Moore, one of Mouthwashing’s developers and project managers. We discussed how one goes about creating a game as interesting as this one. He told me his team’s goal is to create weird and wonderful games that give people a genuinely unique experience, subverting expectations and challenging what they know as horror. After about a year's worth of development, and my time spent with the game, I can say it is certainly a weird, wonderful, and unique experience.

Mouthwashing is a first-person horror title that takes place on the Tulpar – a spacefaring cargo vessel carrying a vast multitude of unmarked boxes in its cargo hold. The five crew members of the Tulpar find themselves stranded in space with no supplies, no help, and very little hope. While this is an environment and set up we’ve seen before, the mysteries surrounding what the Tulpar is hauling and why, as well as why the vessel itself has been stranded, is delightfully twisted and unique. The visuals have that positively unsettling aesthetic of a PS1 game, with slightly wobbly, pixelated textures and polygonal models. There’s something so gloriously creepy about Mouthwashing’s art direction – the way the characters are modeled and move, the excellent and disturbing sound design, and the surreal retro-future of the entire ship - harmonized into something that truly does feel special and delightfully weird.

The story is told non-linearly, jumping back and forth between the circumstances that have led the crew to the path they find themselves hurtling down. Through these flashbacks and jump cuts through time, you get a good sense of who the people of the crew are and what each of them brings to the table. You get just the slightest hint of what they’re like in the demo, and it’s enough to make you want more. 

If it seems like I’m being vague, it’s because I am. I enjoyed the hell out of Mouthwashing, and I don’t want to spoil any of it for anyone. As soon as the demo starts, you recognize the utterly bizarre nature of the experience and the twists and turns you’re in for while you’re on the ride. It's so much better to experience that sort of atmosphere than to be told about it. As such, I’ll end with a quote from Kai himself:

“If you’re interested in a movie game of sorts, this is going to be a game for you. This is going to make a lot of people happy with the storytelling, as it’s both fun and saddening to get to know the characters and see them twist into themselves. Their motivations, who they are and why they do what they do, will drive you forward.” 

Mouthwashing is out September 26th, and the demo is available right now; go check it out.

THRESHOLD

This is a weird one. Developed entirely by one French developer named Julien Eveillé, THRESHOLD sees you take control of one of the watchmen in what appears to be a post-apocalyptic wasteland. The game starts with you getting ready for your first shift in a locker room, filling out paperwork and signing wavers. After turning in your documents, you are put in an elevator and sent up to the surface. Emerging on the surface exposes a barren wasteland, what little you can see of it, as you step into what seems to be a shallow valley wedged between two brown and dead mountainsides. A train speeds through the underpass in front of you continuously, with a small stream babbling through the center of the valley. Another watchman approaches you and proceeds to write a note to you on a paper notepad. His note explains that there’s very little air on the surface; so little, in fact, that the watch can’t afford to waste air speaking, so they choose to write everything down. You follow your fellow watchman, and he explains your task – keep the train moving, no matter what. 

To do this, you must use a whistle to blow into a large machine that will cause the train to speed up. Blowing into the whistle uses precious oxygen though, so part of your duties are to retain glass oxygen canisters to be able to stay alive. The kicker is that each time you inhale these oxygen containers, you must bite down on the side of the glass canister, causing it to shatter and forcing your watchmen to spit out a large mouth full of blood and broken glass. It’s brutal, it’s visceral, and it hurts each time you do it. Everything in THRESHOLD felt uncanny and odd, but it wasn’t until I bit down on that canister and hacked up blood that I realized what kind of uncanny and odd I would be subjected to. I played THRESHOLD for around 15 or 20 minutes, and in that time I conceived a vast multitude of intriguing questions and was given very little in the way of palpable answers. 

THRESHOLD resembles a lot of games on this list, in that it intentionally looks extremely retro, with that familiar-yet-disturbing PS1-era quality of models, graphics, and animations. Everything looks desolate and barren, with nothing but a small stream of water to remind you that there is other life on this planet. While the location is never explicitly told to you, at the start you see a locker with a white t-shirt that reads “I *heart* Washington!” Whether this is a reference to Washington or Washington D.C. is hard to say, but the environment is far too dead and desolate to resemble any of those places in the way we might know them today. 

Speaking of environment, while I can’t confirm this, there are definitely some undertones of environmentalism scattered throughout even the early runtime of THRESHOLD. I was assured by the good people at Critical Reflex that there are tons of secrets and mysteries to discover in the world, and that anyone who plays it is in for a mind-bending time. I saw some other inexplicable oddities with my short time in the game, but I won’t say anymore because they definitely need to be seen to be understood. As you work your watch, aspects of the game change and different areas can be accessed and explored, all while you must keep the train moving and watch your oxygen intake. These changes are subtle, and you have to go looking for them, as the game doesn’t seem to give you straight answers on anything. 

If you’re a fan of surrealist horror with just a smidge of resource management to top it all off, THRESHOLD will definitely be for you. It should be out in the next few months.

Disordered Media

oneway.exe

oneway.exe is a first-person narrative horror game developed by Disordered Media. I talked to one of the game's writers, Spider, as well as a programmer named Bugs, about the inspirations for and difficulties of making a game like this.

oneway.exe has one of the most unique stories I’ve ever seen in a horror game, focusing on internet culture, both past and present, and creating horror around it (and yes, the “RAWR XD” version of the mid-2000s is in there in all its cringy glory.) You must discover what happened to UNTITLED.EXE, a horror game itself, and why you’re stuck in the middle of it. I explored one of the 7 different paths at PAX West 2024, and on more than one occasion, I was genuinely spooked, despite the crowds around me. The gameplay reminds me a lot of the point-and-click horror flash games I used to play as a kid. This makes sense, as in my discussion with Spider and Bugs, they let me know that the game did start as a point-and-click, but they realized that it wasn’t as fun as they wanted it to be, so they switched gears into a more explorative design.

The art style is fantastic, with tons of hand-drawn characters and time-appropriate text graphics, along with that amazing cute-yet-horrifying design that’s so difficult to master. oneway.exe is primarily a puzzle game, with each room presenting different puzzle challenges that get progressively scarier as you go along. For example, the first room had me starting with the simple task of opening a fireplace to find a clue and eventually led to me carving open the skin of a recently-flayed person in order to find a note. The more rooms you go through, the more the story is revealed. Your choices do matter, and oneway.exe doesn’t shy away from the more brutal aspects of surrealist horror.

The way Disordered Media captures the point-and-click fear of “solve something, turn around, something has changed” is exceptionally executed, and creates some real oh-God-I-don’t-want-to-turn-around energy that I appreciate, having not experienced it since PT. This is especially impressive considering 8 of the 9 team members had never made a video game before. Bugs informed me that she was learning how to program on the fly, so the fact that the game has come together so well is an incredible feat.

The idea of using the different eras of the internet is clever and unique, and it allows for some meta-commentary of how the game itself will become a time capsule of our current era of internet experiences. Yes, I feel like the oldest person in the entire convention while going through some of the earlier eras of the internet in the game. Is that a bad thing? Not at all! The games industry and the internet at large move so quickly that we tend to forget what came before, despite the fact that they are impossibly intertwined; oneway.exe is building up to be an entertaining and terrifying look into what made the internet into what it is today. 

To quote Spider, “We hope that people can find what they love and fear so much about the internet. I hope that people see oneway.exe as the passion project it is for us and that it translates well into the overall experience.” 

oneway.exe has a demo on the way soon, due out in September, along with a Kickstarter. The full game is set to release sometime in 2025. The devs are extremely passionate about the game, and I can tell you that it’s a unique and fun experience. Give the demo a look later this month, and consider donating to their Kickstarter!

DreadXP

Heartworm

Is there anything better than a good, solid ode to the excellent horror games of the '90s? In Heartworm, you play as Sam, a girl trying to survive and make her way through a world that’s out to get her at every step. I’ll be honest, a lot of the context of what Heartworm is really about is foggy at best in the demo I played, but that’s part of what makes it so intriguing. You start the demo by waking up on a neighborhood street in the middle of the night. Further down the street, you see a strange, glowing entity moving along the sidewalk. Thanks to the retro pixelated graphics, it’s really difficult to see exactly what it is you’re looking at at first. As you approach, you realize it’s a human (or humanoid) made entirely out of television static. The entity lumbers its way towards you, trying to attack you as you pass. Pulling up your weapon reveals something unexpected: a photo camera.

Using the camera on the entity stalls them for a moment, allowing you to escape. From there, you must solve environmental puzzles to progress through the destroyed neighborhood. You enter television static through the window of a building, crossing through some sort of threshold. Upon leaving the threshold, there’s another street, this time covered entirely in snow with no explanation. A little while later you find yourself in your grandparent’s house, the entire thing flooded and full of the static entities. 

The demo also gives you a little taste of boss encounters throughout Heartworm. It drops you into a pretty cool cutscene depicting Sam trying to hide from something in a bus. What is she hiding from? Well, an extremely strong giant spider of course! After nearly killing Sam by dropping her out of the bus, you find yourself facing the huge, horrifying, and deadly spider using nothing but your camera and some strategy. It’s a pretty challenging boss fight, forcing you to come to grips with how the controls work and how to use the obstacles in the environment to your advantage. It’s pretty fun, and satisfying to kill the spider after feeling like there’s no way you’d be able to do it. 

Heartworm feels like the original Silent Hill and Fatal Frame had a nostalgic 90’s baby, and I am definitely here for it. Tank controls are optional, but I highly recommend using them if you’re going to give the game a try as it feels so much more appropriate for this type of game. It’s as creepy and atmospheric as you would want it to be, and I’m looking forward to its release sometime in 2025. 

Amanda the Adventurer 2

Amanda the Adventurer 2 is a continuation of the story started with 2023’s Amanda the Adventurer. The PAX West demo of the sequel starts innocuously enough; you begin in a public library and are tasked with finding books throughout the room that have been defaced by a rambunctious library goer. Within the first few moments, as I was reading the library system to try to better pinpoint where these books may be, I very clearly heard something heavy scurrying through the drop ceiling. Looking around bore no answers, so I went back to trying to find the ruined books. From there, things just got stranger and stranger.

When you are finally able to watch the titular Amanda the Adventurer VHS tape, it’s clear right from the offset that something is very, very wrong with this kid’s TV program. Couple this with the immediate horror of acquiring the second VHS tape, and Amanda the Adventurer 2 succeeds in one thing over all else – it is damn creepy. 

I never played the original game, so I was taken completely by surprise at just how atmospheric and weird the world of Amanda the Adventurer is. The actual models for Amanda and her friends are so unnerving, being reminiscent of the old 3D animated kids shows I watched as a child in the early 2000’s, except turned up to 11 in the eeriness factor. Amanda’s expressions are so strange and alien, with her entire face distorting into a smooth horrific scowl when she’s upset, while being strangely static when she’s happy. Everything starts out innocently enough, with Amanda going through the usual kid’s show rigamarole. Out of nowhere, a possum shows up within the show and tries to steal something from Amanda (coins needed for her to “travel the world.) During the struggle, she calls the possum a “creep,” and emphatically ends their tussle with, “Who was that guy?”

If anyone is familiar with children’s programming, they would know that this isn’t how interactions on these shows go. This is the first time Amanda the Adventurer clearly outs itself as something far more diabolical than presented. It’s seriously impressive how the devs at MANGLEDmaw Games can create something that looks so inoffensive while creating a constant feeling of danger deep in the recesses of your mind while you play. 

The original Amanda the Adventurer has “Overwhelmingly Positive” reviews on Steam, and I can definitely see why. If narratively driven, creepy-as-hell games are your thing, give the original Amanda the Adventurer a try, and keep an eye on the second game coming out sometime late 2024. 

Thank you for reading. Are you looking forward to any of these games? Let us know in the comments. And please look forward to our continued PAX West 2024 coverage.