Horror News, Tips, Tricks & Ideas

Indie studio Clapperheads has announced its new horror game, Zoochosis. The self-published horror simulation game takes place in a zoo where the animals are afflicted by a mysterious ailment that transforms them into truly petrifying monsters. As the zookeeper, the player must protect the animals throughout the night with all the terrifying happenings captured on the player's bodycam.

It's been nearly a decade since Supermassive Games released Until Dawn as a PlayStation 4 exclusive. The British studio has since moved on to other franchises, chiefly their The Dark Pictures horror anthology. Before the release of Man of Medan, Supermassive CEO and Executive Producer Pete Samuels commented on the many requests for Until Dawn 2:

The Tribe Must Survive, a "tribe-builder" with a survival roguelike twist, is the first management sim of its kind to really pique my curiosity in, well, I can't remember how long it's been, and it's launching into Steam Early Access on February 22. 

Sony is continuing to mine its back catalog of games for movie adaptations while persistently forgetting that Bloodborneis right there. Its next game that's bound for the big screen is Until Dawn, a 2015 interactive horror title that Supermassive Games developed and Sony published.

A PlayStation horror classic is being reborn as a film. The choose-your-own-nightmare from Supermassive Games, Until Dawn, is one of the latest video games announced to make the jump from your living room TV to the big screen, though this one seems far more straightforward.

The chill and appropriately titled sailing game Sail Forth was originally released in December 2022 on basically all platforms, but it was only recently given out for free via the Epic Games Store on PC. This freebie went live on January 11, 2024, and that same day the game's player count had apparently jumped a staggering 282,041% according to creator David Evans, who says he's been "blown away" by the response.

PlayStation Productions is developing a movie based on the PlayStation 4 horror game Until Dawn with Screen Gems and Shazam! director David F. Sandberg the companies announced.

It has been announced that Until Dawn, the choice-driven horror title by Supermassive Games that first launched way back in 2015, currently has a movie adaptation in the works, and will be helmed by Shazam! director David F. Sandberg.

Game Pass subscribers have had plenty to celebrate in January. The service saw some heavy hitters arrive in the first half of the month, including Assassin’s Creed Valhalla and the Resident Evil 2 remake. But it’s not done yet. More games are coming to Game Pass to round out January.

Until Dawn is the next popular video game to get the live-action treatment.

Just like the gangly, spider-like monsters that scurry through its industrial corridors, Lethal Company appeared to come out of nowhere. Created by a solo developer who goes by the alias Zeekerss, the video game became an absolute sensation on platforms like Twitch and garnered more than 239,000 concurrent players on Steam within months of its October release.

Developer Supermassive Games' branching-narrative horror, Until Dawn, which exclusively hit PlayStation in 2015, is the latest video game to get the film adaptation treatment. The Hollywood Reporter reports that Shazam! and Annabelle: Creation director David F. Sandberg will direct the Until Dawn movie. 

The Scream 7 cast may not include Mindy Meeks-Martin actress Jasmin Savoy Brown, who co-starred with Jenna Ortega and Melissa Barrera in the previous two films.

Creepshow started in 1982 as a feature film written by Stephen King, and now King's son, writer Joe Hill, is returning to the Creepshow franchise with a story of his own as part of Skybound Entertainment's Creepshow comic book line based on the current Shudder streaming series.

Dead by Daylight, the multiplayer survival horror released back in 2016, has had some eclectic crossovers in its eight years. From Chucky, to Halloween's Laurie Strode, to Nicolas Cage, it's giving Fortnite a run for its money.

Clapperheads has announced Zoochosis, a bodycam horror simulation game in which you play as a night zookeeper. It will launch for PC via Steam in Q2 2024.

Welcome to Stygia! Stroll along the tranquil corridors of this once luxurious resort planet, serenaded by the sweet sounds of explosions and gunfire. Sit back and take in the vivid colors of the sunset – the secret ingredient is gamma radiation! Why not make some new friends? Our friendly cannibal gangs would kill to meet you.

A Resident Evil 2 speedrunner has done the unthinkable and beaten the game on Hardcore difficulty without taking any damage whatsoever - but it was a stressful journey.

Lovecraftian horror game The Sinking City is now back on PC storefronts following a dispute with its original distributor.

Skybound Entertainment's Universal Monsters line of comic books will expand this April with Creature from the Black Lagoon Lives!, a four-issue limited series that will serve as a full-on sequel to the original film series, including a very classic looking take on production artist Millicent Patrick's beloved Gill-man design. The series arrives just in time for the original 1954 film's 70th anniversary.

Controversial horror game Martha is Dead is getting a movie adaptation.

GSC Game World has confirmed another delay for Stalker 2: Heart of Chornobyl.

The 2022 World War II horror game Martha is Dead is the latest video game getting a film adaptation. The game’s Italian developer LKA, is partnering with production company Studios Extraordinares to bring the psychological adventure to the big screen.

Microsoft has announced the next wave of games coming to Xbox Game Pass, taking subscribers up to the end of January and into early February 2024.

Here's a pitch for you: a spec ops shooter, except it's haunted. Well, that's exactly what early access co-op FPS Contain is going for, where four of you gear up in tactical clobber and clear corners of military chumps and anomalous… rumps? It's a mixture of Rainbow Six, a bit of Stalker, and maybe a touch of Control, with gameplay showing real promise. It's also got me thinking about unexpectedly scary moments in shooters, too.

Take-Two Interactive, the owner of Grand Theft Auto 6 developer Rockstar Games, and Remedy Entertainment, the studio behind Alan Wake 2, are locked in a trademark dispute over their R-depicting logos.

Indie horror game Martha Is Dead is the latest title to be adapted for a feature film. The news came in today from Italian developer LKA and UK publisher Wired Productions, who will be partnering with Swedish film-production company Studios Extraordinaires. This company appears to be focused entirely on adapting games; they've already announced partnerships with Fallen Leak to make a movie based on Fort Solis and with Graewolv Games to develop a feature film based on VEIL, a newly announced cooperative horror tactical first-person shooter game.

EA and Respawn's battle royale smash hit Apex Legends is back at the head of the Steam Top Ten.

Nintendo Switch owners have gotten not one but three Kirby titles within the past couple of years, as well as the first original 2D Mario platform game to hold a 90+ Metacritic score since Super Mario World. It’s fair game to say that Nintendo fans have been eating well, but will their appetite be satisfied going into 2024? Fans across all platforms should have plenty to be excited for and these represent some of the platform games that Wccftech considers highly anticipated throughout the new year.

Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth just dropped a new trailer ahead of the game's launch on February 29, once again readying us for heartbreak. We see Tifa falling, face full of shock, as Cloud bellows out her name in horror. Square Enix knows we're worried about her taking [REDACTED's] place and the new footage only adds fuel to the fire.

Neve Campbell hasn’t ruled out a potential return to the Scream franchise, provided the right circumstances were met. She pulled out of Scream 6 over a pay dispute, meaning the latest installation was without its original final girl Sidney Prescott.

Lethal Company took the gaming community by storm towards the end of last year.

Pokémon Scarlet and Violet’s series of post-launch content finally wrapped up on January 11 with the release of The Hidden Treasure of Area Zero‘s epilogue. Now, having played through it, I find it to be a fittingly odd end to one of the weirdest generations of the Pokémon series ever.

Movie distributor NEON is keeping horror fans on tenterhooks with a series of cryptic teasers for a mystery movie. 

A fan-made VR mod for Lethal Company is out now, so you can fully immerse yourself in your work for the Company.

True Detective is the rare show that was much more exciting and complicated after seven episodes than it is after three seasons. What started out as a brooding series about detectives looking into the dark heart of senseless, seemingly occult killings eventually transformed into a detective show mostly about men being sad. What is remarkable about the show’s newest season, True Detective: Night Country, is that in just one episode, new showrunner Issa López has managed to bring back the creeping, supernatural horror vibe that gave the first season so much promise.

An artist who shook up the cultural world with a haunting female portrait created by artificial intelligence (AI) has decided she's had enough of the new technology for now. Working with AI to create art is ultimately "very frustrating and very limiting," Swedish-based artist and writer Supercomposite told AFP. For the moment, she has stopped working with AI and is writing a screenplay instead, saying her experience with AI art left her "burned out".

Stepping away from the constraints of corporate life and into the farms in Stardew Valley should be a meditative, healing experience - unless you mistake the shipping container for a chest, in which case the game takes a horror turn as you lose the most valuable possessions. 

Just a day into the new year, one haunted horror game is already making waves by disguising itself as a long-lost Nintendo 64 platformer.

Following a solid albeit not outstanding 2023, adventure games fans can look forward to the release of several long-anticipated titles throughout 2024. As usual for this genre, the selected titles offer a unique mix of intrigue and serenity (sometimes seamlessly intertwined) that you are unlikely to find elsewhere.

2023 was a landmark year for horror (check out Wccftech's Best Of here), delivering the super-ambitious Alan Wake 2, a pair of rock-solid remakes in Resident Evil 4 and Dead Space, excellent indies like Amnesia: The Bunker, and more. 2024 may not be quite as strong, but it largely keeps the ball rolling down a similar horrifying path, with a couple of new remakes (The Last of Us Part II Remastered and Silent Hill 2), new entries in fan-favorite series (Alone in the Dark), and some promising indies (Still Wakes the Deep). Those dark days when it looked like survival horror might be finished are definitely behind us, so steel your nerves. Here are Wccftech's picks for the games that will be keeping you awake in 2024.

Let’s dispel any trepidation you might have from previous seasons of True Detective, and all the baggage they carry: True Detective: Night Countryis astoundingly good television. A six-episode stunner where a macabre murder unspools into a layered exploration of an Alaskan town at the edge of Earth, its relationship with its Indigenous population, and the things the Arctic’s long night can do to a person, Night Country is about as good a start to television in 2024 we can ask for.

2023 was a big year for gaming in general, but it seems it was a particularly strong year for PC Gaming in specific. According to a report from VG Insights, which uses data from Steam and other sources to estimate sales with a fairly high level of accuracy, the global PC gaming market grew to $9 billion in 2023, an 18 percent year-on-year increase over 2022. This followed several years of steady yet slower growth.

Week’s done. Friday’s here. Time to chill, to rest, to reset and probably play some video games through the weekend, but What We Played is about what has gone before, not what’s coming up. I’ve been playing New Cycle, a bleak post-apocalyptic city builder, and I’ll have some thoughts on it next week. Besides that, I’ve been continuing my playthrough of TheWitcher 3 on Steam Deck, VR’ed my way further into Asgard’s Wrath 2, threw some punches in a spot of Street Fighter 6, and got in a hefty dose of Monster Hunter Rise that I’ve seen fit to restart from the beginning.

James Sunderland is not going to survive this.

Scaring players has helped put the small team at Red Candle Games on the map. Its first two titles, Detention and Devotion, impressed and terrified fans with frighteningly strong horror chops, but the team is leaving that behind to tackle something completely different in Nine Sols. This side-scrolling action platformer blends sci-fi with Chinese mythology and is Red Candle’s most ambitious project yet. This significant step forward affords an opportunity to look back on the studio’s young history, so we spoke with co-founder Vincent Yang to learn about how a small band of gamers in Taiwan formed one of the industry’s most promising – and, at one time, controversial – indie studios.

What is it? A surreal survival horror sequel that also ties into Control and Remedy's other past games.Release date 27 October 2023Expect to pay $50/£40Developer Remedy EntertainmentPublisher Epic Games PublishingReviewed on Nvidia Geforce RTX 3080, AMD Ryzen 9 5900X, 32GB RAMSteam Deck N/ALink Official site

Remember Snakes on a Plane? Well now there's sharks, and the plane is underwater.

Nothing.

Do you miss the days of physical magazines packed with demo discs? Would you like to see it perverted in sinister ways? PC Cursed 98 will give you the whole experience you’ve been looking for, it’s free, and it’s available for PC now.

The Independent Games Festival awards - aka: the only awards that are actually worth paying attention to - have announced the finalists for their 2024 cohort, and wouldn't you know it, there are lots of RPS-endorsed games in there, lemme tell ya. Cooking adventure Venba leads the pack with a total of four nominations, but it's closely followed by Cocoon, A Highland Song, Mediterranea Inferno and 1000xResist, all of which have scooped three noms apiece.

Well it's not every day that a PC Gamer writer stumbles across an indie horror collection themed around an alt-history and deeply cursed version of PC Gamer, but here we are (thanks Dominic Tarason for the spot). PC Cursed is an impressively elaborate and free grab-bag of 22 indie horror games which comes complete with a 60-page version of the imaginary magazine and even printable CD inlays (because the whole schtick is that this is a lost 1998 cover disc).

The upcoming sequel to 2022 horror hit Smile is rounding out its cast. After the news that Naomi Scott would be taking on the lead role, Lukas Gage has also joined the cast (per Deadline), along with Rosemarie DeWitt and Kyle Gallner. 

In the upcoming D.I.C.E awards, Spider-Man 2 takes an early lead by scoring nine nominations. The awards ceremony is scheduled for February 15 this year.

A return to the zombie-infested world of 28 Days Later has long been rumored, but we finally have something concrete. A sequel is in the works with Danny Boyle and Alex Garland, who directed and wrote the 2002 original movie respectively, working on the third film, 28 Years Later.

I'm pretty sure I've written about this somewhere already - I may have expressed it to a therapist - but when I was a lad, I had a recurring nightmare about a place called Snake World. It was a fizzing neon labyrinth that was both home to various evil snakes and sort of made of snakes in probably-Freudian ways.

Asymmetric horror game Dead by Daylight has added Alan Wake, the protagonist of Remedy Entertainment’s series of the same name, to its roster.

Tales of Seikyu, an upcoming co-op fantasy farming sim blending Rune Factory vibes with Japanese folklore, is the first new game of its kind to really catch my attention in as long as I can remember.

Buckshot Roulette is the first breakout indie hit of 2024, but the mind behind this lethal game of chance is also behind some other great horror titles. Have you finished Buckshot Roulette and want to check out more games like it? You’re in luck.

There’s been a ton of fan-made content from the indie-hit Lethal Company, one of them being this jaw-dropping animated cinematic trailer.

'Cosmic horror' and Call of Cthulhu are synonymous, so it's just as well that you can get the horror TTRPG and a library's worth of its books for a pretty absurd discount.

Warner Bros. has lined up David Bruckner to direct its reimagining of the iconic sci-fi horror The Blob. According to The Wrap, the filmmaker, whose previous genre titles include The Ritual, The Night House, and Hellraiser, will also pen the script to the modern take on the cult monster movie.

Humble Bundle's dropped another great TTRPG deal—this time for Lovecraft lovers with its Call of Cthulhu book bundle. At the time of writing, the bundle has raised over $22,000 for the World Wildlife Fund. It's also a pretty damn good deal from a buyer's standpoint, too.

The titular protagonist of Alan Wake 2 is going from one incredibly unfortunate situation to the next, as it's been revealed that Dead by Daylight is bringing him on as its next survivor just a few short months after he trudged through the Dark Place in Remedy's acclaimed survival horror game.

One day after dropping a teaser that shone a pretty clear light on what was coming next, Behaviour Interactive has made it official: Alan Wake, the long-suffering writer and star of Remedy's Alan Wake games, is coming to Dead by Daylight as a new survivor.

There are a few games that are so unusual and incredible that I wish I could erase my memory and play them again for the first time. While I haven’t figured out a way to achieve that goal, there’s a fun alternative — find projects inspired by those games, and appreciate them. Buckshot Roulette, a game made by Mike Klubnika, is a perfect example of this.

Through preordained fate or pure chance, 2023 will go down as one of the best years ever when it comes to the quality and quantity of games released throughout the year. Most of these games were likely originally targeting 2022 or even earlier, but the global pandemic threw everyone's plans in the air and forced us to wait until 2023. As they say, though, good things come to those who can wait.

The next survivor to find himself stuffed in Dead by Daylight‘s fog is distressed horror writer Alan Wake from the Alan Wake series. Making his way over from a widely successful sequel, Alan Wake 2, players can use Alan Wake as their next survivor.

Alan Wake is coming to survival horror multiplayer game Dead by Daylight in a collaboration that might actually be canon to the Alan Wake universe.

2023 saw the release of Alan Wake 2, the first full-on horror game from Remedy Entertainment, and if you have any success in the horror realm Dead by Daylight is going to hook you sooner or later. Today Montreal-based developer Behaviour Interactive announced Alan Wake himself is coming to Dead by Daylight later this month. You can check out a teaser trailer for Alan Wake’s DBD debut, below.

Behaviour Interactive is keeping the Dead by Daylight crossover train chugging with DLC based on 2024’s winner of some awards, Alan Wake 2. The eponymous wordsmith will be joining the game as a survivor.

Over the years, the Resident Evil series has become famous for more than its horror elements. From Chris Redfield punching a boulder to the cheesy voice acting in the original games, these moments are iconic in their own right. But the one that older fans will know and love is the infamous “Jill sandwich” line.

Big things are coming to Lethal Company down the line - namely, "lots of new creatures and map variation."

You don’t have to spend a lot to get a huge digital bundle of Call of Cthulhu RPG books and gaming aids. At Humble, the Lovecraftian horror RPG set from Chaosium costs $25 and includes 25 items, and is full of items catered to both new players and and returning fans. Proceeds for this bundle go to the World Wildlife Fund.

Amnesia: The Bunker has received a new accessibility patch in an effort to allow more people to experience the horror game. Frictional Games has confirmed that the update includes closed captions and aim assist, makes enemies less perceptive of the player, and non aggressive rats. Something that is always welcome. The video below shows custom settings from when that was added a couple of months ago.

Publisher Top Hat Studios and developer Casper Croes will release 90s survival horror games-inspired Alisa for PlayStation 5, Xbox Series, PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and Switch on February 6, the companies announced.

Has any other demo had the impact of Hideo Kojima's genre-redefining PT? That stunning playable teaser for the scrapped Silent Hills may be a decade old now (sorry, yes, that made me feel ancient, too), but its legacy is still undoubtedly shaping the games we play today. One of the latest to pay homage, Supernormal, says it's the spiritual successor to Allison Road rather than PT itself, another unreleased game that was heavily influenced by Kojima's aborted horror project. But doing the one thing Silent Hills and Allison Road couldn't, Supernormal has actually made it into our hands – and while it doesn't leave the same impact as its inspirations, it certainly has a few moments worthy of them… as long as you're prepared to get through its underwhelming first half to see them.

I knew I was in for a stomach-churning time with Divine Frequency's demo after I finally acquired my first weapon. I came up to a fenced hallway in the game's vast industrial underbelly and spied an ominous figure looming way down the hall. The light above it cut out, I turned around, and there it was: a horrible faceless mannequin an eyelash's length away.

January is a special time for horror fans. The holidays are over, the new year is just beginning, and the horror options at the box office are as much of a mixed bag as they’ll be all year. Some years, we get great conversation-starters like M3GAN, Missing,or Saint Maud. Other years, we suffer through another Grudge remake. But most of the time, January is a great spot for weird little curiosities like Gretel & Hansel, Underwater, or Infinity Pool — movies with tremendous bright spots that are a little too uneven to be great.

A couple months after bringing diminutive psycho-stabber Chucky to the multiplayer survival horror game Dead by Daylight, Behaviour Interactive is teasing something new—and a lot of fans are convinced that an Alan Wake crossover is on the way.