A Different Kind of Platformer

I remember a time when Sony was constantly looking for new mascots for the PlayStation 2. Sucker Punch answered that call with a raccoon who steals from other thieves. That idea would eventually become Sly Cooper and the Thievius Raccoonus, a colourful PS2 platformer about Sly Cooper and his gang as they travel the world hunting down the criminals who destroyed his family and stole the pages of his family’s sacred book of thievery.

Sly Cooper does a great job of committing to that idea. Each world is built around one of the game’s zany villains, with their personalities reflected in the places they call home. You’re usually sneaking through castles, swamps, pirate ships, and other bizarre criminal hideouts, slowly learning how each area works before eventually bringing everything you’ve learned together to pull off the big heist at the end. Each villain has their own territory, complete with its own collection of challenges and obstacles to overcome.

And despite being a platformer, Sly Cooper actually feels like it cares about stealth. Unlike other platformer protagonists, Sly doesn’t simply run into every enemy and start swinging. No, he plays more by the books, staying hidden, using rooftops, rails, and ledges, watching out for the many patrols, and finding ways around guards. The platforming and stealth work in tandem with each other, making the movement itself feel like part of the heist rather than just a way to reach the next platform.

That focus is probably the biggest reason Sly Cooper is still so much fun to play. It’s not really a massive game stuffed with side activities and collectibles just to make it longer. It gives you simple jobs, puts you in a strange world full of exaggerated criminals, and gives you the freedom to figure out how to rob them blind. It never felt like Sly Cooper needed to be bigger to be better, like so many games of the era. It just needed to give you a world worth sneaking through and a few things worth stealing.

The Making of a Master Thief

Sly Cooper and the Thievius Raccoonus released for the PlayStation 2 in 2002, developed by Sucker Punch Productions, one of my favourite studios. I recall that at the time, Sucker Punch was a relatively small studio that had previously made Rocket: Robot on Wheels for the Nintendo 64. They eventually got the chance to plan their next game around giving Sony another mascot to put alongside the likes of Crash Bandicoot, Spyro, and Ratchet & Clank. They eventually landed on a sneaky cartoon raccoon who wants to restore his family’s honour by stealing it back from other thieves.

Sucker Punch had spent several years building the idea into a complete game, with its comic-book look and cel-shaded characters helping Sly stand out from the other platformers on the PS2. But the important part was the concept behind him. Sly isn’t some chosen hero saving the world from doom. He’s a thief carrying on the family tradition while travelling around the world with his best pals Bentley and Murray to recover the pages of the lost book, The Thievius Raccoonus, which was stolen by various villains known as the Fiendish Five.

Sucker Punch also found a clever way to make a thief the good guy. Sly doesn’t rob ordinary people. His targets are always other criminals, and each one has a unique part in his family history. That gives the game more than enough reason to send Sly and the boys around the world, roving from one ridiculous villain to the next, each with an equally ridiculous hideout.

Looking back at it today, its simplicity is definitely one of the game’s biggest strengths. Sly Cooper knows exactly what it is: a platformer about pulling off some of the best heists ever put in a video game, mixed with stealth, exploration, and cartoon storytelling, with everything else built around that same central idea. It never tried to overwhelm you. It just gives you a raccoon, a cane, a crew, and a bunch of criminals who got what’s coming to them.

A Family of Thieves

The story all starts with the Cooper family, a long line of master thieves who passed their skills down through the generations. Sly was raised on those stories and looked forward to the day he would eventually inherit that legacy, but it was taken from him when the Fiendish Five murdered his father and stole the Thievius Raccoonus. Years later, Sly sets out to recover the stolen pages with his two best friends, Bentley and Murray. Bentley is the brains of the operation, Murray is the muscle, and Sly is the one doing all the stealing.

Sly is never alone, and the game does a really good job of making sure that each member of the gang feels like more than just a gameplay role, but part of a family. Sly is dealing with the loss of everything he knew while trying to reclaim something that was taken from him. Meanwhile, Bentley and Murray have been with Sly from the very start, giving the trio a long history together. That foundational friendship gives the adventure some real personality, and the three of them actually feel like a crew rather than three random characters who happen to be working together for ulterior motives.

And then you get to the villains, and this is where Sly Cooper gets really good at giving its characters some depth. Every member of the Fiendish Five gets their own unique world, personality, and backstory, and the game even takes a little time to establish who they were before they turned to crime. Their histories explain how they became the people they are, and in some cases even throw in a little tragedy behind all the absurdity. They’re still cartoon villains, but the game gives them enough context to make it seem like they really had it out for Sly’s family.

And naturally, Sly also has a little bit of a love interest following him around. It comes in the form of Inspector Carmelita Fox, who’s constantly trying to catch him, showing up at the worst times and making an already complicated heist even tougher. Her pursuit of Sly becomes a running thread throughout the entire game, especially because she knows what Sly is up to and isn’t going to let him get away with it easily. Or is she?

Sly Cooper is mostly interested in giving you a memorable cast of lovable characters, a reason to travel to one bizarre location after another, and villains who actually feel like they belong in their worlds. For a game built around a raccoon stealing from criminals, there certainly is more here than meets the eye.

A Thief’s Playground

Most of your time in Sly Cooper is spent sneaking around the Fiendish Five’s hideouts, jumping across rooftops while trying not to get caught, climbing ledges, and fighting guards with your trusty cane. The platforming is pretty straightforward. Sly has a versatile set of skills that make traversing levels fun, and there’s plenty of thievery to take care of, from cracking safes and collecting clues to unlocking various upgrades for your thieving abilities. You’ll spend plenty of time slowly sneaking your way through levels, too. Those levels do a pretty good job of making you feel like you’re actually breaking into these places, which is kind of the whole point of Sly Cooper, so I’m happy to say they really do make you feel like a master thief.

One of the things I really enjoy about the platforming is how Sly uses his surroundings to get around. Rooftops, narrow railings, ropes, and ledges all become part of your path through each level, and there’s something satisfying about making your way across an entire hideout without ever touching the ground. Each location has its own little challenges, whether it’s avoiding spotlights, sneaking past guards, navigating traps, or finding the right route to reach your next objective. The hideouts themselves are also full of personality, with each one reflecting the villain who calls it home. You’re breaking into castles, exploring swamps, sneaking aboard pirate ships, and finding all sorts of unusual places to rob. It gives every level its own identity, and there’s always something new to discover as you work your way toward the next heist.

The game also throws in a bunch of variety, with levels that have you doing all kinds of different things. This includes racing the Sly van, driving all sorts of vehicles, and a few mini-games where you get to play as Bentley and Murray, which goes a long way toward making them feel like part of the team. Now, these aren’t always as fun as the regular platforming levels. Some make you want to pull your hair out, but with some persistence, you can get through them. I do appreciate Sucker Punch trying something different. It helps break up the gameplay and makes it feel like you’re actually making progress. Sometimes you just need a break from jumping across those rooftops to play a surprisingly frustrating racing level. You can win them all.

The boss fights, though, are some of my favourite parts of the gameplay because practically every one of them does something entirely different. Mz. Ruby’s fight is a rhythm game, something I haven’t seen as a boss fight in a platformer before. It’s an odd change of pace, for sure, but I certainly won’t be forgetting it anytime soon. Then there’s Clockwerk, the final boss, whose fight involves a freaking jetpack and some serious aerial combat, making for quite the boss fight in a 3D platformer. The other members of the Fiendish Five all have their own gimmicks, so each encounter feels like a completely different challenge. That gives you an actual sense of accomplishment when you finally beat them.

It’s all a really nice touch, especially in a game that really tries to keep its mechanics simple. Don’t get me wrong, some of these side levels can feel like a bit of a slog, but shortly after that feeling sets in, the game always ends up throwing something fun at you. Honestly, I like a game that isn’t afraid to experiment with its gameplay. Sometimes it works really well, sometimes it doesn’t, but at least Sucker Punch was able to get something interesting and fun out of it.

A Childhood Heist Finally Completed

When I started this adventure, I joked about finally putting an end to a childhood failure, and I’m happy to say I’ve finally done it. Sly Cooper gave me a few frustrating moments along the way, but most of the time I was having a blast. There’s something special about finally finishing a game you’ve carried with you for so many years, especially one that still manages to capture the same charm you remember from childhood. Now that I’ve finally crossed this one off my list, I’m more than ready to see what Sly and the gang get up to next. Bring on the sequels!

A Bigger, Bolder Killzone

Killzone 2 is bigger, much more ambitious, visually a huge step up, and far more committed to its depiction of gritty warfare than its predecessor. Guerrilla didn’t just make another Killzone game and make it look prettier. No, they went all out. The entire game feels like a studio trying to prove something, with every battlefield, weapon, explosion, and Helghast soldier trying to kill you packed with so much detail.

The first Killzone had already drawn plenty of attention as one of Sony’s major first-person shooters, so expectations for the sequel were high. Guerrilla had a chance to show just how much bigger and more ambitious the series could become on the PS3.

And a lot of that comes down to the PlayStation 3 itself. Guerrilla didn’t hold back this time around. They created a game that was clearly meant to show off what Sony’s new hardware could do. The environments are dense and filthy, the dark lighting gives everything a heavy industrial look, and the sheer amount of activity happening around you makes the planet of Helghan feel like it’s genuinely suffering through an invasion. I was actually taken aback by the visuals when I first booted it up, and they’re still incredibly impressive to this day.

But the technical achievement isn’t really the whole point. Killzone 2 uses the PS3’s horsepower to create a very particular kind of shooter. Everything feels heavy, from the explosions of grenades constantly being lobbed at you to the sound of your boots hitting the ruined streets. It’s not trying to be a fast, slick military shooter. It wants you to feel like you’re in the middle of a brutal invasion, struggling to survive while the world around you is falling apart.

That combination of technical achievement and deliberate combat is what makes Killzone 2 such a standout game on the PS3. Guerrilla had a brand-new console, a much bigger budget, and something to prove. They threw pretty much everything they had into making Killzone 2 one of the PlayStation 3’s defining shooters.

Guerrilla’s Next Big Step

Killzone 2 released for the PlayStation 3 in 2009, with Guerrilla Games returning as the developer. The sequel takes the fight to Helghan itself, putting the ISA right in the middle of the Helghast homeworld as they attempt to invade it. It’s a much larger game than the original Killzone, but the biggest difference, in my opinion, is just how much more confident Guerrilla had become as a developer.

The studio had grown considerably since the first game, expanding its team and gaining access to the resources and technical support that came with becoming part of Sony’s Worldwide Studios. They had also spent years developing new technology and figuring out how to bring their ambitions to life on the PS3. You can really see that growth in the finished product.

Guerrilla wanted Killzone 2 to feel bigger, much more realistic, and to look like a massive conflict between two factions. They wanted larger battlefields that felt like places you weren’t supposed to be, better animations for running, reloading, and reacting to incoming fire, and combat that felt grounded, like you were an actual soldier just trying to make it to the next day. Enemies would even react differently depending on where you shot them, with their movements blending motion-captured animation and physics. All of this helped make the shooting feel like it had actual weight to it. The PS3 was still relatively new, and Guerrilla was keen on showing everyone what it could do with the new hardware.

And you can absolutely feel that ambition throughout the entire game. Killzone 2 isn’t exactly subtle about wanting to knock your socks off either. The game still looks good despite being nearly 20 years old, the battles are loud and chaotic, and practically every part of the presentation is pushing the PS3 as hard as it can, slowly heating up my living room while sounding like a jet taking off. This wasn’t just another Killzone game; it was a studio trying to prove it could deliver on the enormous expectations surrounding the sequel and establish itself among the biggest names in the shooter genre.

Straight Into the Fire

Killzone 2 drops you into the boots of Tomas “Sev” Sevchenko, a soldier in the ISA’s special forces unit known as Alpha Squad. Sev and the boys are dropped straight into an actual invasion the moment the game starts. No lengthy introduction, no time to get comfortable. Straight into the battle they go! From the moment they arrive on Helghan, they’re thrown directly into combat, with everything going wrong at once.

The story follows Sev and his squad as they push deeper into Helghan, moving from one ruined battlefield to the next while trying to keep the invasion from completely falling apart. There’s a lot of military jargon, orders coming through your radio, and people screaming for help. It’s very much a product of its time, but it does give you a good sense of being in the middle of a massive military operation. From start to finish, this game gives you very few breaks. It’s all combat.

There are also a few surprises along the way that keep the campaign flowing nicely. Plans don’t always work out, situations change rapidly, and sometimes Sev and the boys survive through sheer luck rather than things going according to plan. The Helghast also feel like an actual force you’re fighting. They’re relentless in defending their homeworld, heavily armed, and more than willing to throw everything they have at the invading ISA forces. You’re constantly being pushed back by waves of soldiers, machine-gun nests, and armoured vehicles, making it clear that the ISA hasn’t exactly walked into an easy victory. There’s also something interesting about fighting an enemy on their own home turf. The Helghast aren’t simply defending some random battlefield; they’re fighting for their planet, and that gives the whole invasion a little more weight.

The story isn’t overly complicated, but it doesn’t really need to be. Killzone 2 is primarily interested in putting Sev and the boys through hell. It’s the kind of story where the battlefield itself is more of a character, and thankfully, Guerrilla knew when to let all that chaos speak for itself, with bigger explosions and more shouting.

A Fight for Every Inch

The biggest thing that stands out to me about Killzone 2 is how much the combat feels like a constant struggle to stay alive. The guns have real weight to them, you’re constantly outnumbered and outgunned, and you’re rarely just running through an area mowing down everything in sight. The Helghast are constantly digging into cover, pushing on your position, and trying to flank you from different directions. It makes even the simplest firefights feel pretty significant.

The weapons fit that feeling pretty well. The rifles actually kick, the heavy weapons feel appropriately heavy, and there’s a satisfying difference between picking off enemies from behind cover and being forced into a closer-range firefight. It isn’t the smoothest console shooter ever made, and the controls can sometimes feel stiff (stupid dual-axis valve turning), but honestly, it kind of works in the game’s favour most of the time. You’re not some unstoppable Terminator; you’re just a guy trying to survive a war that seems very determined to kill you at every corner.

That sense of desperation is probably what makes the combat work as well as it does. Enemies are never just standing around waiting to be shot. No, they’ll move from cover to cover, suppress you with gunfire, and occasionally catch you from the side when you’re too focused on what’s happening elsewhere. The battlefield is filled with nothing but gunfire, explosions, and enemies constantly pushing your position. Killzone 2 does a really good job of making you feel pinned down by enemy fire.

Guerrilla also breaks up the shooting with some larger set pieces, including turret sections and the chance to climb into a massive combat mech that lets you blast everything in sight. These moments are super fun and make the game feel like a classic blockbuster shooter, giving the combat some welcome variety. Between the heavy weapons, defensive firefights, vehicles, and constant Helghast attacks, Killzone 2 manages to make its clunky, old-school shooting surprisingly fun. It isn’t always graceful, but I think that’s sort of the point. Every firefight feels like a small battle of its own, and you’re constantly fighting to take and hold every inch of ground.

Final Thoughts

Looking back, Killzone 2 is still one memorable shooter. It’s a clear example of how far Guerrilla Games had come as a studio, taking what they started with the original Killzone and turning it into something bigger, bolder, and far more ambitious. They had something to prove with this sequel, and I’d say they absolutely delivered. The visuals still impress, the battles remain wonderfully chaotic, and that heavy, scrappy combat gives the whole experience a personality of its own. Sure, some of its rough edges have aged a little, but there’s something about fighting your way across Helghan that keeps the game fresh in my mind. It takes me right back to those days spent playing with friends, and honestly, that’s a pretty special thing for a game to do.

A Different Kind of Western

Have you ever watched a world you know and love completely fall apart? The dusty towns, sprawling wilderness, and quiet stretches of frontier that made Red Dead Redemption such an immersive experience are suddenly overrun with hordes of the dead, leaving the living to fend for themselves. With Undead Nightmare, Rockstar takes the beautiful landscape of the American West and turns it into a living hell.

What makes this expansion stand out to me so much is that Rockstar didn’t just slap a zombie outbreak onto an existing game and call it a day. No, they took a world we all know and love and fundamentally changed how we experience it. Rather than continuing John’s original story, Undead Nightmare offers an alternate take on the world and its characters, turning familiar towns into desperate strongholds and filling the wilderness with supernatural creatures. The original game was grounded in the harsh realities of the Old West, but now the journey across the frontier becomes a fight for survival against something far beyond the usual dangers. There’s a genuine sense of discovery in seeing this alternate version of Red Dead Redemption unfold, especially when so much of what you remember has been twisted into something completely different.

There’s also something intrinsically cool about bringing a zombie apocalypse to the Wild West, something I’ve wanted to see for years. Both genres are built around isolation, desperation, and the struggle to survive in a world where civilization is never entirely secure. The Old West was already filled with lawlessness and people desperately trying to carve out a life for themselves, so bringing the undead into that setting feels like a surprisingly natural fit. Rockstar had a great opportunity to combine two genres that work so well together without losing what makes either one special.

More than anything, though, Undead Nightmare stands as an example of what DLC can accomplish when developers are willing to experiment with a world they’ve already built. It’s a horror story, a supernatural Western, and a playful subversion of the original game, all rolled into one package.

Rockstar’s Wildest Experiment

When Rockstar Games released Red Dead Redemption in May 2010, very few fans could have predicted that its dusty frontier would become ground zero for a zombie apocalypse. That October, fans were delighted when Rockstar delivered exactly that with Undead Nightmare. The expansion follows John Marston as a mysterious plague grips the frontier, raising the dead and threatening the life he’s worked so hard to build. Alongside an entirely new single-player campaign, it introduced new weapons, enemies, missions, and even some multiplayer modes. There was an awful lot packed into Undead Nightmare, all coming together to build a new adventure in the Old West.

In an interview I dug up with Rockstar’s Dan Houser, he explained that the studio had wanted to make a zombie game for some time. Rather than building an entirely new game, though, they decided to introduce the undead to a world players already knew. The familiar characters and locations gave the story more weight, while the Western setting provided the perfect backdrop for some supernatural shenanigans. Houser described the idea as turning a Western into a survival horror game, using lessons the team had learned while working on Grand Theft Auto IV’s acclaimed expansions, The Lost and Damned and The Ballad of Gay Tony.

Rockstar also wanted to strike a balance between genuine horror and the silliness of its premise. Zombies can be pretty scary, but Rockstar wasn’t really interested in committing to serious horror. What we got with Undead Nightmare is something more in the vein of Evil Dead, with plenty of horror mixed in with absurd humor. As Houser explained, the team wanted the world to feel like a serious Western during the day, only for someone to invade the set at night and film a completely unhinged horror movie.

The expansion eventually received its own standalone disc release in late 2010, bundling Undead Nightmare with several of the game’s multiplayer expansions and allowing players to enjoy the experience without owning the base game. It went on to become one of Rockstar’s most memorable expansions and, admittedly, my favorite piece of DLC they’ve ever made. It’s pretty cool that what started as an experiment turned into such a standout example of how much life a developer can squeeze out of a world they’ve already built.

John Marston vs. The Apocalypse

Undead Nightmare takes place during the events of Red Dead Redemption, specifically around the period when John Marston returns home to Beecher’s Hope to enjoy his well-earned quiet life with Abigail and Jack. Sadly, that peace doesn’t last long. A mysterious plague begins spreading across the frontier, turning the dead into flesh-eating monsters and leaving John scrambling to save his family. He quickly learns that civilization has fallen apart, and finding a cure won’t be so easy.

Along the way, John ends up running into plenty of familiar faces, including Bonnie MacFarlane, Marshal Leigh Johnson, Nigel West Dickens, and the crazy Seth Briars, all characters from the main game. Naturally, the apocalypse hasn’t made any of them less strange, including Seth, whose obsession with the dead seems to have made him right at home in the middle of all this madness. Some of these survivors need help defending their towns, while others see the outbreak as yet another opportunity to take advantage of folks. John eventually makes his way to Mexico, where the mystery of the plague takes a strange turn involving ancient Aztec mythology. It’s a far cry from hunting down outlaws and collecting bounties, but it all fits into the world Rockstar crafted.

Of course, this is Rockstar we’re talking about, so zombies aren’t the only things wandering around the frontier. You might find yourself encountering a Sasquatch, the legendary Chupacabra, and, if you’re lucky, the Four Horses of the Apocalypse, which you can tame as your own. Each horse comes with its own supernatural ability, making them much more than just unusual mounts. Finding them feels like stumbling across something straight out of an old Western legend. These supernatural additions give the game plenty of surprises, and you’ll likely have just as much fun wandering around and discovering all these things as you will playing through the main story.

What really sells all of this is how John takes every situation. He’s the same gunslinger we know from Red Dead Redemption, trying to protect his family and make sense of a world turned upside down. He stays true to his character, taking everything seriously and never letting anyone down along the way, even when everyone around him has lost their minds. There’s something funny about watching John approach the end of the world like it’s just another job that needs doing. It’s all pretty strange, but that’s precisely what makes Undead Nightmare so memorable, and exactly why I have to replay it every October.

A Frontier Fighting for Its Life

Gameplay-wise, Undead Nightmare plays much like Red Dead Redemption, with John riding across the frontier, taking on missions, and generally helping survivors get through the outbreak. The big difference is that the outlaws have been replaced with hordes of the undead. The main story takes you through West Elizabeth, New Austin, and Mexico as John searches for some kind of cure, with missions ranging from investigating the plague to clearing out infested areas.

Combat gets a few welcome changes, too. You see, zombies are much harder to put down than ordinary humans, making headshots and Dead Eye absolutely essential when things get overwhelming. You also get to try out a few new weapons designed specifically for killing the undead, including a blunderbuss and a torch that can set zombies on fire and take them out in a single hit. It’s a fun change of pace from the usual gunplay, especially when you’re surrounded and need to get creative.

There’s plenty to do outside the main story, too. You can rescue survivors, defend the many towns across the frontier, clear out graveyards where much of the undead seem to be coming from, and take on challenges scattered across the map. But towns can come under attack again even after you’ve cleared out an infestation, so returning to check on survivors becomes an ongoing part of the experience. Survivors will help defend their homes, too, making these attacks feel like something you’re facing together rather than another routine mission. If you’re gone too long, they could die, and they don’t come back. If you’re not careful, an entire town can be wiped clean of survivors.

Then there’s all the supernatural extras. You can hunt down creatures John once believed to be myths, like the Sasquatch and the elusive Chupacabra, track down the Four Horses of the Apocalypse, and take on plenty of Stranger missions. There’s so much to discover while exploring the West. It’s pretty cool how Rockstar takes its familiar open-world formula and gives it a new purpose, turning the frontier into a place where survival is just as important as the next mission.

Final Thoughts

Even after all these years, Undead Nightmare is still one of my favorite pieces of DLC. There’s just something about riding across the frontier, stumbling into some ridiculous supernatural encounter, and never quite knowing what you’ll find next. It’s an expansion that doesn’t take itself too seriously, and I think that’s a big part of why I’ve held onto it for so long. Every October, I find myself coming back to it, saddling up, and enjoying one more ride through the undead West. Some games are just too good to leave buried.

There’s something deeply unsettling about descending into Rapture, a place that was supposed to be a paradise but has become something much closer to a nightmare. Let me try to explain how that sense of horror made BioShock stick with me for years after I first played it.

Horror in Plain Sight

BioShock is usually remembered as a groundbreaking first-person shooter, an immersive sim, and one of gaming’s greatest stories. But what really stayed with me over the years is the horror the game hides in plain sight. The underwater city of Rapture is one of the most terrifying video game settings I’ve ever had the pleasure of experiencing, not because it’s filled with scary monsters, but because it feels like a real place that’s been completely turned upside down and left to decay by its own inhabitants. The apartments, restaurants, theatres, offices, and even the advertisements scattered throughout its flooded corridors all tell you that people once lived here. Now you’re walking through their homes, their workplaces, and the city they built after everything went horribly wrong. What was supposed to be a paradise for the people who built it has become a graveyard, with its former residents left to wander the halls of a world that’s fallen apart.

You might not immediately think of horror when it comes to BioShock, but those elements shine through during the opening hours. First, you’re thrown into the ocean after a sudden plane crash. You find your way to an underwater city that seems almost impossible, and you’re immediately given a wrench and told to kindly move forward by a voice you hear before you see anyone. As you explore, something always seems to be moving just outside your field of view. Eventually, you run into the Splicers, and they’re worse than any monster you’d expect to find in a place like this. You see, they’re still people, just people who’ve destroyed themselves through isolation, vanity, and a drug called ADAM.

And then there are the Big Daddies. At first, they’re the most terrifying things in Rapture. They’re massive, heavily armed, and capable of putting you down very quickly if you’re not careful. But BioShock eventually makes you question whether they’re really the monsters you think they are. The deeper you venture into Rapture, the more you realize that almost every horrible thing in this city was created by humans, and those same humans have turned themselves into the monsters.

More Than Just a Shooter

BioShock is a 2007 first-person shooter from Irrational Games, a studio that grew out of the team behind the famous System Shock series. The original pitch was described as a spiritual successor, with Irrational taking many of the ideas they’d already been working on and making them bigger. This time, they wanted to create a blockbuster game without sacrificing the freedom, exploration, and player-driven storytelling they were known for.

This is no doubt part of what makes BioShock such a beloved game even after all these years. The developers weren’t simply trying to make another shooter. They wanted the world itself to matter, with players learning about it gradually through exploration, listening, and paying attention to what was happening around them. That philosophy carried over into the gameplay as well, giving players a world full of things to interact with and letting the city of Rapture and its inhabitants tell the story.

You can find audio diaries scattered throughout Rapture, giving you little glimpses into the lives of the people who lived there before everything fell apart. Combined with the abandoned rooms and the stories told through the environment, these little details make Rapture feel like a real place with actual history.

And while BioShock isn’t usually described as a straight-up horror game, a lot of its design choices are exactly what make it work as one. The game encourages you to be cautious as you move through the city, manage your limited resources, and take in the feeling of being trapped in a decaying metropolis deep beneath the ocean. Rapture’s horror works so well because the game gives you just enough freedom to wander through it and discover its mysteries for yourself. You’re not being dragged through some scripted haunted house. You’re walking through a dead city, and the game trusts you to notice just how messed up it truly is.

Victims and Monsters

The story begins with a man named Jack surviving a violent plane crash in the middle of the Atlantic, only to find an abandoned lighthouse in the middle of the ocean. The game doesn’t really tell you why or how it’s there, and there’s no real indication of what lies beneath it. You end up entering a submersible and descending into Rapture, a city built under the ocean as a paradise for people who wanted to live outside the rules of society. Instead, you find something that looks like the aftermath of a disaster. The streets are empty, the walls are leaking, bodies are strewn everywhere, and the people who remain aren’t exactly welcoming to newcomers. Even before you understand what happened, Rapture feels like a place you’re not supposed to be.

The further you go, the more the city starts to explain itself. Rapture wasn’t destroyed by some outside force. It was destroyed by its own inhabitants. The drug they created, called ADAM, gave people the ability to alter their bodies and gain all sorts of powers. People soon became dependent on it, and the city was torn apart. The Splicers aren’t monsters that crawled out of the ocean. That would be too easy. They’re people who’ve mutilated their bodies and minds chasing the effects of a drug. It’s sad. You hear them talking to themselves, screaming at each other, and wandering through the ruins. That alone makes them more disturbing and human than anything born evil.

The audio diaries make it even worse because you get to hear these people before and during Rapture’s collapse. You start to understand their fears, their obsessions, and the choices that helped bring the city down.

Then you start encountering the Little Sisters, young girls who’ve been altered to collect ADAM from the dead, and the enormous Big Daddies protecting them with their lives. At first, the Big Daddies seem like the big bads of Rapture, lumbering around in diving suits and violently attacking anyone who gets too close. But BioShock complicates that idea, too. They’re not creatures roaming around looking for their next victim. They’re protecting the Little Sisters while the rest of Rapture completely falls apart. It seems the more you learn about the city, the more the roles of victim and monster start to blur. That human element makes Rapture far more frightening than anything the depths of the ocean can conjure up.

The Horror of Staying Alive

I think BioShock’s gameplay also reinforces all those horror elements because it constantly makes you feel like you’re trespassing somewhere you don’t belong. Sure, you’re armed, sometimes heavily, but even then, you barely get any sense of real comfort. Rapture is dark and claustrophobic, and the game has a nasty habit of making you hear something before you see it. You might walk into an empty room and find nothing, only to hear voices coming from nearby. You check a corner, hear footsteps behind you, turn around, and suddenly you’re fighting for your life. The game doesn’t need to rely on jump scares alone; it builds tension through the constant anticipation that something is waiting around the corner or creeping up behind you.

Combat itself also fits the horror because you’re often fighting things that are deeply wrong rather than simply dangerous. Splicers might be attacking you one moment, then screaming at someone who isn’t there or muttering to themselves the next. They’re still human, and fighting them means listening to them scream, argue with themselves, and sometimes even beg for help. They’re unpredictable in a way that makes these encounters uncomfortable. Then you have Plasmids, which let you use genetic modifications to gain powers like shooting electricity from your hands or setting enemies on fire. They’re incredibly useful in combat, but there’s something unsettling about the fact that the same substance that gives you these abilities has helped turn Rapture’s inhabitants into the creatures you’re fighting. Sure, your weapons and Plasmids give you plenty of ways to deal with them, but there’s still something uniquely disturbing about walking into a room and realizing that the person standing there isn’t exactly a person anymore.

Even the security systems can make you nervous. Cameras and automated turrets can turn a quiet hallway into a death trap if you aren’t paying attention.

The game’s progression feeds into that feeling as well. You’re constantly scrounging for ammo, health, money to buy supplies from the vending machines scattered around Rapture, and anything else that might keep you alive just a little longer. You can hack machines, set traps, and use the environment in all kinds of ways, but you’re still in a city that feels hostile to your very existence. The more powerful you become, the deeper you’re willing to venture into Rapture, and the worse the things waiting for you can become. BioShock gives you plenty of ways to fight back, but it never lets you forget that you’re trapped at the bottom of the ocean with an entire city gone mad, and you’re not the one pulling the strings.

Final Thoughts

Looking back, I think what makes BioShock so special is that its horror goes far beyond the Splicers jumping out at you. It’s in the stories of the people who lived in Rapture, the choices that destroyed it, and the feeling that you’re walking through the remains of something that was never meant to end this way. Even when you’re armed to the teeth, there’s still something unsettling about being down there. Rapture was supposed to be a paradise, and seeing what it became is terrifying in its own way. Maybe that’s why the game has stuck with me for so long.

Since I’m doing nothing but horror this month, it felt fitting to take a step back from talking about individual games and talk about some of my favorites over the years. I’ve covered a few horror games in the past, but there are some that are constantly sitting in the back of my mind that I keep wanting to nerd out about. The games that made me uncomfortable, made me nervous, or had me shutting the game down until I had someone to accompany me through the terror.

The best horror games, at least to me, aren’t necessarily the ones with the most jump scares or the biggest, ugliest monsters. They’re the ones that get under your skin long after you’ve seen the credits roll. Sometimes it’s a genuinely terrifying experience, sometimes it’s the story, and sometimes it’s a game that isn’t even particularly scary but somehow lingers in your mind. So rather than trying to make some definitive list of the greatest horror games ever made, I’ll talk about some of my favorites instead. Some are obvious choices if you know me, some are strange indie experiences, and some are, in fact, the best horror games ever made. But every one of them scarred me in one way or another.

Bloodwash

The first game I wanted to talk about is Bloodwash, a short indie horror game developed by Black Eyed Priest and Henry Hoare that came out in 2021. It’s available on PC and consoles, and it immediately caught my attention with its PS1-style graphics and, most importantly, because it gets something a lot of horror games tend to forget: you don’t need a massive budget to create something uncomfortable. In Bloodwash’s case, all you need is a rundown old laundromat, some creepy people out past the time anything good happens, and the sinking feeling that you probably should hurry up and get home. A situation we’ve all probably been in.

You play as Sara, a pregnant college student whose night takes a turn for the worse when she needs to do some laundry, leading to a late-night trip to the laundromat. It just so happens that this particular laundromat has a pretty stained reputation, and there’s a serial killer on the loose in the area. What starts as a simple chore devolves into something much more sinister as Sara realizes she isn’t as alone as she thought at that lonely little strip mall.

What makes Bloodwash stand out so much to me is how much atmosphere it’s able to squeeze out of such a simple setup. The PS1-inspired graphics give everything this grimy, dilapidated, low-resolution look that makes the world feel oddly real. The laundromat, the surrounding businesses, even the bus ride you take to get there all create this sense that you’ve really wandered out later than you should have. It has that late-night horror movie vibe where nothing has happened yet, but you already know something bad is coming. It also has that old slasher movie feel to it, like something you’d stumble across in a bargain bin at a video store and regret watching alone at night. The VHS filter only adds to that feeling, making the whole thing look like some lost horror tape you probably shouldn’t have popped into the player.

And Bloodwash knows when to let that tension breathe. A lot of the game is simply walking around, talking to people, exploring your surroundings, and slowly trying to figure out the mystery of the laundromat while, of course, you wait for your laundry to be done. That makes the moments when the horror finally does come hit much harder and creates a real sense of panic.

For a game that can be finished in a few hours, Bloodwash left a huge impression on me. It’s exactly the kind of horror game I love playing. Small in scope, confident in its atmosphere, and willing to take an ordinary situation and turn it into a horror story. It’s a must-play if you love old-school horror.

Resident Evil 3

Next up is Resident Evil 3, specifically Capcom’s 2020 remake. Yes, I know this game gets a lot of flack for cutting some of the awesome content from the original, and that’s absolutely fair, but I still have a soft spot for it. It’s a fast, nasty little horror game that throws fan-favorite Jill Valentine into Raccoon City, which is already falling apart at a rapid pace. Jill is just trying to escape the city as the T-virus outbreak consumes it, but Umbrella has one last trick up its sleeve to make sure Jill doesn’t make it out. Nemesis.

The result is Jill fighting through zombies, monsters, Umbrella forces, and one big, angry bio-weapon while nearly everything else burns around her. Along the way, she crosses paths with Carlos Oliveira, who quickly became one of my favorite parts of the remake. He’s got the charm, the personality, the chemistry with Jill, the hair, and a willingness to throw himself into danger to protect her. All of that makes him the perfect counterbalance to her more serious attitude.

I think the remake really nails the atmosphere of a city in the middle of a zombie apocalypse. Raccoon City is dirty, burning, abandoned, and full of things that all want Jill dead. Then Nemesis shows up and chases Jill through half the city. Hearing that roar behind you never gets old, even when you know he’s coming.

Nemesis is a big part of why I enjoy this remake so much. He’s not just another big monster to shoot at; he’s this constant reminder that Jill is never really safe. Even when you think you’ve got a moment to breathe, there’s always that chance he’ll come crashing through a wall or show up when you least want him to. It makes the whole escape feel that much more desperate.

It’s short, and I wish there was more of it, but what’s here is a great time. The gunplay feels great, Jill’s dodge gives the combat some extra depth, and the game constantly keeps you moving. Resident Evil 3 may not be the most complete remake in the series, but for me, it’s one of the most fun horror games Capcom has ever put out.

Project Zomboid

“When there’s no more room in hell, the dead will walk the earth.” — Dawn of the Dead (1978)

Next up is Project Zomboid, and I’m specifically talking about the vanilla game, because once you start throwing mods into the picture, the possibilities become basically endless. That’s a whole different conversation that we’ll hopefully have someday. One of the things that makes the vanilla game so special to me is how well it captures the feeling of a classic George A. Romero movie. Romero happens to be my favorite director, and Zomboid really embraces his zombie philosophy perfectly. They’re slow, stupid, and individually not much of a threat. The problem is that they outnumber you by the thousands, and a simple mistake is all it takes to become one of them.

Project Zomboid is a sandbox where you can decide what your zombie apocalypse will look like. You can barricade yourself inside a house, raid towns for supplies, build a farm, learn to fish, work on cars, travel across Kentucky, or simply wander around until you inevitably die. There is no traditional story pushing you toward some grand narrative. The story is about what happens to your character and how they eventually end up a corpse. And they will, no matter how long you survive.

That’s where the constant fear and anxiety come in. You can spend hours building the perfect character, putting together an impenetrable fortress, stockpiling food for the winter, and convincing yourself that you’re actually going to make it. Then you open a door, turn a corner, or trip and fall, and there’s a zombie waiting there for lunch. One small mistake can kill you. There’s no checkpoint waiting to save you. Nope, you’re dead. Time to start over and learn from your mistakes.

And then there’s the way the game handles that death. When your character finally does bite it, you don’t just reload and pretend it never happened. That character is gone forever. You start over, create something new, and head into the same world (or a new one). Eventually, you might stumble upon your old character as a zombie, still wandering around where you died. It’s a brutal little reminder of how an apocalypse works, and there’s something strangely satisfying about it. You died, but you learn, and you use that knowledge to survive a little longer next time. Maybe you’ll die in an even dumber way. That’s Zomboid.

But at the end of the day, Project Zomboid remains one of my all-time favorite games. I’ve put hundreds of hours into it, and this game is truly something else. It isn’t about becoming some unstoppable badass. It’s about getting through another day. It captures that classic Romero feeling of ordinary people trying to hold on to whatever little semblance of their old lives they can find. And eventually, no matter how prepared you think you are, the dead will win.

Dead Space

Then we get to the original Dead Space, because I haven’t played the remake yet. It’s one of those games that I think gets almost everything right when it comes to survival horror. Released in 2008 by Visceral Games, it throws Isaac Clarke onto the USG Ishimura, a massive mining ship that has recently gone completely dark. Isaac arrives with a small crew looking for answers, but it doesn’t take long to realize something very bad is going on. The ship is practically a character itself, with its cramped corridors, blood-soaked rooms, flickering lights, and the constant hum of machinery you don’t really want to investigate.

What makes Isaac so important to the horror is that he isn’t some trained soldier. He’s an engineer, and he moves like one, too. He’s slow, heavy, and deliberately clunky. You can’t fly around the room like you’re playing some action game, and that limitation makes every encounter that much more frightening. When you hear something crawling through the vents, even turning around takes time. When a Necromorph comes charging at you, you have to commit to your movements and make sure your aim is on point.

And then you have the Necromorphs themselves. The Ishimura is already terrifying on its own before you even know what’s lurking inside it, but creeping through those dark corridors while hearing something nearby is where Dead Space really shines. You’re constantly listening for those skittering footsteps, watching vents, checking corners, and wondering if the corpse you just walked past is going to wake up and surprise you. The game wants you to be paranoid, and it never lets up.

One of the cleverest things about Dead Space is that you can’t just shoot everything in the head and call it a day. Necromorphs need to be dismembered, so you’re aiming for their limbs rather than going for a quick kill. It sounds like a small thing, but it completely changes how you approach a fight. You’re not just trying to survive; you’re desperately trying to take these things apart before they get close enough to do the same to you.

The best part is how the whole experience feels like one long descent into hell. Your job is to repair the ship and search for answers while trying to figure out what happened to the crew. Slowly, you start to realize that everything is far beyond your control. There’s no comfort on the Ishimura. Even when you’re in a room you think is safe, you’re never quite sure.

That’s what makes the original Dead Space such a great horror game for me. The ship, the Necromorphs, Isaac’s limited movement, the sound design, and that constant feeling that everything is about to get you all come together beautifully. It’s a slow, creepy crawl through a spaceship that has become a tomb, and honestly, it’s one hell of a ride.

Silent Hill 2

And we finally arrive at Silent Hill 2. The original. Not the remake. This is a game I’ve already written about in my Team Silent article ([link]), but I couldn’t make a list of my favorite horror games without putting it here. Silent Hill 2 is more than a horror game to me. It’s one of those rare games that takes me back to a dark room with my big brother, staring at a flickering CRT. I play it at least once a year, almost like a ritual, and somehow it still manages to freak me the hell out.

On the surface, it’s the story of James Sunderland, a man who travels to the fog-covered town of Silent Hill after receiving a letter from his wife, Mary, who has been dead for three years. That setup alone is bizarre enough, but the further the game goes down that rabbit hole, the more it begins to blur the line between what’s happening around James and what’s happening inside his own head. The monsters, the environments, the fog, the darkness, even the town itself all feel like pieces of something much deeper.

The real horror, though, is what the game makes you think about. Guilt, grief, loneliness, repression, regret, and the things people are capable of doing when they’ve been pushed a little too far by trauma. The game trusts you enough to sit with those ideas rather than spelling everything out. You aren’t just afraid of the monsters lingering in the fog. You’re slowly starting to realize that the most horrifying thing in Silent Hill might be what brought James there in the first place.

And the atmosphere has never truly been replicated since. The fog swallowing the streets, the oppressive darkness of the interiors, the sound of your radio crackling when monsters are nearby, and Akira Yamaoka’s soundtrack hanging over everything. Even the combat feels intentionally slow and awkward. James is bad at fighting, and the creatures always feel dangerous as you stumble through the constant nightmare, trying to survive it. But the game never lets that violence become a solution to the horror.

I think that’s why I’ll never forget Silent Hill 2. There are games I love because they’re fun, games I love because they’re scary, and then there are games that somehow become a part of who I am. Silent Hill 2 is one of those. I’ve played it enough times to know what’s coming, yet every time I play it, it still carries that same strange weight. It doesn’t just ask you to be afraid; it asks you to look inward, and sometimes that can make it even more horrifying.

Silent Hill 2 isn’t just one of my favorite horror games. It’s one of my favorite games, period. After all these years, I still don’t think I’ve completely escaped Silent Hills' fog.

The Horror That Stays With Us

Looking back at all these games, I think that’s what I love most about horror. It’s not always about how scared you are in the moment, or how many times a game manages to make you jump out of your chair. Sometimes it’s the atmosphere, sometimes it’s the memories you make along the way, and sometimes it’s a little indie game that makes you question why you ever thought going into a sewer was a good idea. Every one of these games has stuck with me for a different reason, and that’s what makes them special.

Horror has given me some of my favorite gaming memories, from playing Silent Hill 2 with my big brother to discovering strange little indie games that reminded me why I fell in love with the genre in the first place. Some of these games still scare the hell out of me, even after all these years, and I wouldn’t have it any other way. There’s always another dark hallway to wander down, another terrible decision to make, and another reason to ask myself why I’m doing this to begin with. And honestly, I wouldn’t trade any of it for the world.

A Dedication

This article is dedicated to my big brother, who hated Silent Hill: Homecoming just as much as I did. We shared a love for these games, and even now, I wish I could sit down with him and talk about them one more time. I miss you, big bro.

Silent Hill in Name Only

I’ve always thought Silent Hill was a series about making the player as uncomfortable as possible, mostly without relying on cheap scares or throwing increasingly disgusting monsters in your face. Its horror came from the feeling that something was fundamentally wrong, even if you couldn’t quite put your finger on what it was. The original games could make a simple, empty hallway feel more frightening than any monster you’d encounter. They made you question what you were actually seeing, why you were seeing it, and what any of it meant. There was a restraint to Silent Hill that made its horror stick.

Silent Hill: Homecoming throws most of that restraint in the trash and sets the whole philosophy on fire.

Released in 2008, Homecoming was the first mainline entry developed outside Japan, arriving after the original Team Silent era and in the shadow of the 2006 movie. Throughout the game, you can see these influences fighting for control. Homecoming takes the foundation Team Silent laid out and piles on more blood, combat, and spectacle. It wants to make Silent Hill bigger and more action-packed, almost like a horror movie, but in doing so, it loses much of what made the series so special in the first place.

The problem becomes obvious almost immediately. Homecoming has all the things you’d expect from Silent Hill: an ungodly amount of fog, a rusted Otherworld, plenty of creepy monsters, a weird cult, and, for reasons I still don’t understand, Pyramid Head. The game knows the visual language of Silent Hill and sometimes evokes it pretty well, but it still struggles to speak it.

The earlier games could take something ordinary and make it deeply uncomfortable through sound, lighting, uncertainty, and implication. Homecoming, on the other hand, is much more interested in showing you the horror outright rather than giving it time to linger. Everything is louder and more in your face. It’s noticeably more aggressive, but that doesn’t necessarily make it scarier. If anything, the constant spectacle can undermine the horror, occasionally making moments feel unintentionally silly rather than disturbing.

These problems extend into the gameplay, too. I’ve never thought Silent Hill was a series where combat was supposed to make you feel powerful. Fighting monsters was often an awkward, heart-pounding experience that left you feeling vulnerable, or made you wish you’d found another way around them. Homecoming makes combat a much bigger part of the experience, often forcing fights on you when you’d rather just get away. Sure, it gives you dodges, combos, executions, and a greater sense of control, but the execution is inconsistent. The gunplay feels satisfying because you can take down monsters much more quickly, yet limited ammunition pushes you back toward melee combat, where small hitboxes, enemies that can stun-lock you, and generally frustrating encounters make fighting feel like more of a chore than it should.

Ultimately, that’s what makes Homecoming so disappointing to me. It’s not simply a different creative approach to Silent Hill. It’s a game that reaches for all the things that made the series great while missing why those things worked in the first place.

Homecoming looks like Silent Hill, sounds like Silent Hill, and occasionally manages to feel like Silent Hill. But for all its attempts to recreate the series’ familiar imagery, it often forgets what made those games so frightening in the first place.

A New Team, A New Direction

Silent Hill: Homecoming was released in 2008 and was intended to be the series’ big leap into the HD generation. At first glance, it was still very much a Silent Hill game, but behind the scenes, the series was going through a pretty dramatic transition.

The biggest change was that Team Silent was no longer behind development. The group responsible for the first four games had moved on to other projects, leaving Konami to hand the series over to a Western developer. Double Helix Games took on the task, with series veteran Akira Yamaoka remaining to handle the music. That’s a pretty big responsibility, considering they weren’t just making another horror game. They were taking over one of the most influential horror franchises around, following four games that had already established what people expected from Silent Hill.

The idea wasn’t to throw everything out and start over. Homecoming was meant to modernize the series while keeping what made the franchise so beloved. Combat would be more involved, the controls more responsive, and the game would take advantage of the new hardware to create a more fluid experience. On paper, there was a reasonable idea here: take what people loved about Silent Hill and adapt it for a new generation.

Unfortunately, somewhere between that idea and the finished game, things went a little sideways. Homecoming changed far more than a few rough edges. Combat became one of the more frustrating parts of the experience, the horror leaned harder on shock and gore, and the game borrowed heavily from imagery associated with earlier entries and the 2006 movie. Instead of feeling like a natural evolution, it often feels like a game trying too hard to recreate what it thinks Silent Hill is supposed to be.

The reception was also more mixed than that of several earlier entries, reflecting just how difficult it was to follow up those original games. For a series built around such a distinct identity, that was a pretty telling sign that something had gone wrong.

A Mystery Without Much Mystery

The story of Silent Hill: Homecoming starts with Alex Shepherd returning to his hometown of Shepherd’s Glen after serving in the military. He’s been having nightmares about his younger brother, Joshua, and things aren’t exactly normal back home. His father is missing, his mother sits in her rocking chair in an almost catatonic state, and Joshua is nowhere to be found. Alex sets out to find him while trying to figure out what happened to his family and why the town has become so deserted. It’s an okay enough setup for a Silent Hill story. I mean, a guy coming home from war, a missing family member, and an empty town? This had Silent Hill written all over it.

From there, things get strange. Shepherd’s Glen has its own connection to the Order, the cult that’s been part of the series since the beginning, and Alex gradually discovers that his family isn’t as normal as he thought. The game also digs into Alex’s childhood, his relationship with Joshua, his parents, and the history of Shepherd’s Glen itself. There are plenty of interesting ideas here, and the family drama could have made for something genuinely disturbing. Unfortunately, the game struggles to bring all these pieces together in a way that feels natural. Characters give you bits of information, documents fill in other gaps, and major revelations are held back for much of the game, but the mystery rarely feels like it’s building toward anything substantial.

A lot of that comes down to the writing. Homecoming seems to believe that keeping the player confused is the same thing as creating a good mystery. The older Silent Hill games gave you enough information to keep you wondering and form your own ideas about what was happening. Here, the story often feels like it’s deliberately hiding basic information just so it can drop it on you later. Instead of feeling intrigued, I sometimes found myself wondering what exactly I was supposed to be piecing together. That makes Alex’s story unnecessarily difficult to follow.

Eventually, after enough patience, the game does explain what’s actually going on, and there’s a decent idea buried in there. The family story in particular could have made for a genuinely disturbing narrative, especially with the way Alex’s memories are handled. Unfortunately, the execution lets it down, and the story never quite reaches the level of its own concept. It spends so much time being vague that the eventual explanations don’t always feel as satisfying as they should.

Instead of making you look back at everything and realize the clues were right in front of you the whole time, Homecoming leaves you trying to untangle an increasingly complicated explanation for everything that’s happened. There’s a big difference between a story that leaves you thinking and one that leaves you wondering what the writers were smoking. Unfortunately, Homecoming spends a lot more time in the second category.

Gameplay

The gameplay is where everything in Homecoming starts to take a massive nosedive. The older Silent Hill games were never known for having great combat, but that was kind of the point. Fighting a monster was usually awkward and dangerous. With Homecoming, though, the developers decided to make combat a much bigger part of the overall experience. Alex gets a dodge, directional attacks, combos, heavier weapons, and even some finishing moves. In theory, this should give the game a more modern feel. In practice, it makes nearly every encounter more frustrating than it needs to be.

The problem is that making combat more involved also changes how you approach the monsters. In the older games, you were often better off avoiding a fight altogether, which helped maintain that feeling of vulnerability. In Homecoming, you’re encouraged to stand your ground and learn its combat mechanics, but the game never makes that experience satisfying enough to justify the change. Instead of worrying about what’s waiting around the next corner, you end up worrying about whether the controls will cooperate when you get there.

The combat just feels stiff and clunky. Enemies can be surprisingly aggressive, attacks can be difficult to land or avoid, and Alex’s animations often make it feel like you’re fighting the controls more than the monsters. There’s a disconnect between how much control the game gives you and how unreliable that control actually feels. You can dodge or attack at what seems like the perfect moment and still take a ridiculous amount of damage, or try to land a hit only to watch Alex swing at absolutely nothing. Once you start getting used to the clunk, encounters become less about surviving something terrifying and more about waiting for the game to give you a chance to do something without punishing you for it.

The bosses are especially frustrating because you can see the potential in their designs. The Schism, with its unsettling split head and bladed limbs, is a good example of the kind of creature that should make for some solid nightmare fuel. Instead, boss fights often turn into awkward pattern recognition, dodging, attacking, and praying you get lucky. They rarely feel like a satisfying culmination of the horror surrounding them. You can see what the developers were trying to do, and that almost makes it more disappointing. The concepts are there, but the combat mechanics let them down.

And that’s the biggest problem with playing Homecoming. Even when the atmosphere is working and you finally start getting absorbed in the world and its story, the gameplay keeps finding ways to frustrate you. Exploration gets interrupted by combat that simply isn’t fun, enemies become more annoying than scary, and bosses turn what should be memorable moments into chores. By the time I reached the end, my dominant feeling wasn’t fear. It was relief that I didn’t have to fight any more monsters.

Not the Nightmare I Remembered

Looking back at Silent Hill: Homecoming, I can understand why my brother thought it would scare the hell out of me. After all, this was my first PS3 game, and I was stepping into a series that had already given me plenty of nightmares. But instead of being terrified, I was left wondering why it didn’t quite feel like the Silent Hill I remembered. Even after all these years, I still wish Homecoming had done more with the things that made the original games so special. I may have outgrown some of those childhood fears, but I don’t think I’ll ever stop looking for that feeling those old games gave me.

Of course, I’m talking about the one and only Lost in Vivo.

Where Comfort Goes to Die

There’s something uniquely unsettling about being somewhere you know you shouldn’t be. A subway station after everyone has gone home, a hospital hallway with nobody around, not even a member of staff, or a sewer that seems to stretch much farther than it possibly should. These are places that are typically nothing more than background noise in our everyday lives, but Lost in Vivo takes them and turns them into something deeply uncomfortable.

The game doesn’t need some elaborate haunted house or supernatural spectacle to get under your skin. It takes familiar places and strips away everything that makes them feel safe. The deeper you go, the more these environments start feeling like places you need to escape from, and quickly. Narrow hallways, darkness, strange noises, and the complete lack of another human being turn a simple walk forward into something much more terrifying.

That isolation is a huge part of what makes Lost in Vivo’s particular brand of horror work so well. You’re often left wandering around with little idea of where you’re supposed to go or what exactly you’re looking for. There’s nobody around to explain what’s happening or point you in the right direction. Even when the game isn’t actively messing with you, you’re still waiting for something to happen. That constant feeling of anticipation can be just as scary as the monsters themselves.

Then there’s the way Lost in Vivo constantly screws with your perception of its world. Rooms can feel wrong, seemingly normal objects become unsettling, and the game has a habit of showing you things that make you question what you’re actually looking at. It doesn’t always give you enough information to understand what’s happening, and that uncertainty is where a lot of the horror comes from. Lost in Vivo understands that sometimes the best way to scare someone is to leave them alone in the dark and let their own brain do the work.

Beneath the Surface

Lost in Vivo is a psychological horror game created by Kira, a solo developer who began working on it around 2016. This wasn’t some big studio project with hundreds of people working on it or a massive budget behind it. It was a much smaller, more personal project, and you can feel that throughout the game. After several years of development, it was released in 2018.

The setup is simple enough. You’re caught in a thunderstorm while walking your dog, and he gets swept away into a sewer. Naturally, you decide the best course of action is to climb down there and go after him. It’s a pretty ridiculous decision when you think about it, but that’s part of what makes the premise work. You’re not descending into this nightmare because you’re some fearless soldier or paranormal investigator. You’re just trying to find your dog. That small, personal goal gives you a reason to keep going, even as the world around you becomes increasingly horrifying.

From there, the game takes what should be a simple rescue mission and turns it into a personal nightmare. You find yourself moving through sewers, subway tunnels, hospitals, and other places that feel as though they’ve been twisted into some endless hell. These aren’t just creepy locations thrown together to give you something to explore, either. The cramped corridors, oppressive darkness, and confusing layouts all make you feel trapped, as if the world itself is trying to keep you from finding your way back out.

Kira wasn’t just trying to make another indie horror game that throws a jump scare at you every two minutes. Lost in Vivo takes heavy inspiration from older horror games, particularly Silent Hill, but it has its own identity. Claustrophobia is a huge part of the experience. There’s something frightening about being trapped somewhere you can’t easily escape from, especially when you have no idea what’s waiting around the next corner. The game constantly reinforces that feeling, making even the act of moving forward feel uncomfortable.

And that’s what makes Lost in Vivo stand out in the sea of indie horror games. It doesn’t need huge set pieces or incredible visuals to make the heart rate increase. Its deliberately rough, PS1-inspired graphics, cramped environments, strange enemies, and bizarre situations all serve the same purpose. Kira built a world where you never quite feel safe, even when nothing is actively trying to kill you. Sometimes, you’re just walking down a hallway, wondering why everything feels so twisted. Somehow, that’s more than enough.

All for a Good Boy

The story of Lost in Vivo is, as I said, pretty simple, and honestly, that works out for the best. You’re caught in a storm that causes a flash flood, and your best doggo friend gets swept down into the sewer. You don’t really have time to think about it. Your little fuzzy friend needs help, so you do what anyone would do and go after him.

That’s basically the entire reason you have to keep pushing forward. You need to find your friend, and you’re not some badass action hero. You’re just a guy trying to find his dog. There’s something I really like about that. Horror games often give you some huge mystery to solve or some terrible evil to put an end to, but here, your priorities are much simpler. You don’t care what’s lurking in the darkness or why the place is so messed up. You just want your dog back. Everything else is secondary, and that makes the whole journey feel strangely personal.

The further you go, the more obvious it becomes that finding him isn’t going to be so simple. Your way back is blocked, and turning around isn’t really an option anymore. While the game eventually gets much stranger with its characters, imagery, and story, that initial motivation remains important. The game even goes as far as making you think you’ve found your dog a few times, only to snatch him away again. Those moments hit differently because you’re constantly hoping that the next area will finally bring you back to him. Every time you think you might be getting closer, the game finds another way to keep you moving deeper into the nightmare. It turns something as simple as finding your dog into a reason to keep pushing forward, even when every part of you is telling you to get the hell out of there.

It gives the story a surprisingly human center. Lost in Vivo can throw all kinds of creepy things at you, and it doesn’t need to explain every strange thing you encounter because your reason for being there never changes. No matter how bizarre or frightening the world becomes, you’re still looking for the same little friend you went down there to save. Underneath all the horror, there’s a pretty simple idea: how far would you go for your best fuzzy friend? In this case, apparently straight into hell for a good boy.

A Few Hours of Pure Misery

Lost in Vivo is a pretty compact game, but it manages to pack a lot of content into its short runtime. Most of your time is spent exploring, figuring out where you’re supposed to go, solving some cool puzzles, and trying not to get eaten by the bizarre creatures you’ll encounter. The environments do a lot of the heavy lifting. The sewers, tunnels, hospitals, and other locations all share the same miserable atmosphere, and the game constantly gets you questioning what’s going on as you wander through the dark. It’s easy to lose your bearings, and sometimes you can spend a while trying to figure out where the hell you’re supposed to go next.

Combat is simple, too, but it works for the kind of horror Lost in Vivo is going for. You’ll have a variety of weapons, but this isn’t the type of game where you’re meant to feel powerful. Enemies can be dangerous, ammo and resources are scarce, and getting into a fight leaves you wondering whether running away would have been the smarter option. The weapons also have that satisfying, scrappy feeling to them, which fits the game’s grimy presentation perfectly.

And then there are the monsters, which are some of the strangest parts of the whole game. They’re not just generic zombies or demons thrown at you time and time again. No, you’ve got creatures that barely look recognizable as living things. Things that crawl, scurry, twitch, and move in ways that make you immediately recoil and want to run away. Some are genuinely disgusting, while others are just bizarre enough that you have no idea what you’re even looking at. The game’s visual style really helps here, because the limited detail leaves you just enough for your brain to fill in the blanks.

The game also knows when to stop. Lost in Vivo isn’t a twenty-hour horror marathon that starts running out of ideas halfway through, either. It’s short, roughly four hours, which is enough to get you through its story without overstaying its welcome. There are multiple endings, too, so how you approach certain parts of the game can determine where you end up. Thankfully, I managed to get the good ending on my first playthrough because, after everything you go through to bring back your pupper, I wasn’t really interested in finding out how much worse things could get.

That short length also makes the whole thing feel more focused. There’s very little filler between exploration, combat, puzzles, and strange encounters. You go in, descend into an absolute nightmare trying to find your dog, and eventually find out where it all leads. For a game that can be finished in a few hours, Lost in Vivo gives you plenty to chew on once the credits roll.

Final Thoughts

Looking back at Lost in Vivo, I think what sticks with me most is just how much this little game manages to do with so little. It’s grimy, weird, and downright disgusting at times, but that’s exactly what makes it so memorable. It doesn’t need a massive budget or some big, elaborate story to get under your skin. Sometimes all it takes is a dark hallway, something horrible crawling toward you, and the desperate hope that your dog is still out there somewhere. It’s also the game that got me interested in indie horror in the first place, and looking back, I’m glad it did.

There’s a lot of great indie horror out there nowadays, but Lost in Vivo will always have a special place in my heart. It reminded me why I love horror games and got me interested in seeing what else the indie scene had to offer. And honestly, any game that can make me crawl through hell just to save a little doggo has done something right. Bring your courage, keep an eye out for the things lurking in the dark, and whatever you do, go save that pupper.

When Shooters Got Weird

There was a time when shooters were allowed to be different, even a little bit weird. F.E.A.R. came out at a time when military shooters ruled the market, and most of them were becoming increasingly obsessed with realism. Then Monolith comes along and decides to make one where you could tear through heavily armed soldiers in slow motion while being stalked by a creepy little girl.

And somehow, that was only a small part of what made the whole thing work so well.

F.E.A.R. is the kind of game that constantly puts you between two very different kinds of power. In a firefight, you are an absolute beast. The slow-motion ability turns you into a walking weapon, while the Replica soldiers you fight are smart enough to actually make you work for every kill. They flank, retreat, throw grenades, and constantly try to flush you out. They’ll almost never just stand in one place and wait for you to shoot them. The combat is definitely the foundation of the whole experience, and it remains one of my favorite parts of the game.

Then the shooting stops, and everything gets eerily quiet.

Suddenly, you’re walking through an empty office or warehouse. The lights start to flicker, something moves at the edge of your vision, and all that confidence you just had melts completely away. F.E.A.R. doesn’t need to turn every hallway into a haunted house. It lets you feel powerful, then rips that feeling away at exactly the right moment. That’s what makes it such a strange relic of its time: a military shooter with some of the best AI of its era, wrapped around a supernatural horror game that refuses to ever let you feel comfortable.

What Is F.E.A.R.?

F.E.A.R.: First Encounter Assault Recon was released in 2005 and developed by Monolith Productions. The studio already had a pretty impressive history with shooters like Blood and No One Lives Forever, so they weren’t exactly new to making games that did things a little differently. With F.E.A.R., Monolith decided to take the military shooter and throw psychological horror into the mix, which was a pretty strange combination at the time.

A huge focus was placed on the combat. Monolith wanted the enemies to feel like they were actually trying to kill you rather than standing around waiting for you to walk into the room. The Replica soldiers are aggressive, they work together, and they can make even a familiar hallway feel dangerous once the shooting starts. The slow-motion mechanic gives you a way to keep up with them, turning you into an absolute monster in a firefight. That combination of smart enemies and slow motion is what makes the combat in F.E.A.R. feel so good. You’re incredibly powerful, but the game still gives the enemies enough intelligence to make you work for it.

Then there’s the other half of F.E.A.R., where things get a little sideways. Monolith fills the game with unsettling visions, abandoned offices, dark rooms, and a little girl who keeps appearing out of nowhere just to mess with you. The horror isn’t separated from the shooting, either. It’s woven into the game itself, so you never really know when something is going to interrupt a firefight and remind you that you’re not actually as comfortable as you thought you were.

The setup is fairly simple. A mysterious paramilitary force has taken over a facility, and the F.E.A.R. team is sent in to deal with the situation. That’s really all the excuse the game needs to put you in the middle of a military firefight and slowly introduce the much stranger things happening around you. The story gives you a reason to keep moving forward, but it’s the combination of the combat, atmosphere, and whatever is waiting around the next corner that makes you want to keep going.

Something Is Wrong

Like I said, the story of F.E.A.R. starts with a pretty simple situation. A man named Paxton Fettel has taken control of a group of Replica soldiers and is leading them through an unknown operation. That’s where the F.E.A.R. team comes in. You play as Point Man, a new member of the team sent in to help deal with the situation. F.E.A.R. is a special unit created to handle situations involving paranormal activity, although at first, this still feels like a pretty straightforward military operation. On its own, that would be a pretty fantastic military shooter setup, but F.E.A.R. takes it a step further into the weird when you start experiencing visions of a little girl named Alma.

From there, the game slowly starts connecting the dots. You end up going through offices, warehouses, and other abandoned locations while investigating what this Fettel guy is up to, while also trying to figure out who the little girl is and why you’re having these visions. A lot of the story is told through radio conversations, computer terminals, and voicemails scattered throughout the game, so you’re constantly being fed little pieces of information and left to put them together yourself.

That approach works in F.E.A.R.’s favor because it never gives you all the answers at once. You know something is wrong, but you don’t really know how all these people and events connect. The game lets the mystery build while you’re busy dealing with an army of Replica soldiers, and the farther along you get, the more a simple military operation gives way to something much bigger and much more supernatural than the game initially lets on.

I’ll leave the actual answers alone because discovering them is a big part of F.E.A.R.’s story. What I will say is that the game does a good job of making its horror elements feel earned and actually connected to the story instead of just throwing jump scares at you. There’s an actual mystery going on, and even when the game is being cryptic, there’s a clear reason for it. The more you learn, the more the pieces start to come together, and that makes the strange things happening around you feel like part of something much bigger rather than just random horror thrown into a military shooter.

Guns and Ghosts

F.E.A.R. is at its best when you walk into a room, hit slow motion, and turn the place into an absolute mess. Soldiers frantically dive behind cover, grenades start flying through the air, bullets rip through anything in their path, and you’re just trying to rack the shotgun one more time before somebody puts a bullet in you. The way the environments get destroyed helps sell it too. Papers fly off desks, glass flies everywhere, furniture gets knocked around, and debris fills the air during firefights. It makes the rooms feel like actual spaces being torn apart rather than static arenas built around enemies.

What makes those firefights even more impressive is how much the level design works with the enemy AI. Offices and warehouses are filled with desks, doorways, windows, and other pieces of cover that the Replica soldiers can actually use. They aren’t just standing behind the same crate waiting for you to pop your head out. They’ll move around the room, try to flank you, retreat when things get too dangerous, and use the environment to their advantage. For a game from 2005, it’s still pretty impressive to watch a group of soldiers actually react to what you’re doing instead of simply following a set path.

And the weapons give you plenty of room to work with. The shotgun, my personal favorite, is exactly what you need it to be. The assault rifle and SMG are reliable enough to mow down plenty of Replica soldiers, while the stranger stuff gives you some toys to really have fun with. The Type-7 Particle Weapon is pretty much a ray gun that turns people into skeletons, and honestly, it never gets old.

The slow-motion ability ties it all together perfectly. F.E.A.R. can almost feel like a John Woo movie at times, with bullets flying everywhere while you move through the chaos in slow motion, blowing the whole room apart. You can kick through a door, slide around a corner, unload a shotgun into someone’s face, and come out the other side feeling like nothing can stop you. The combination of the weapons, enemy AI, and environmental destruction makes the encounters feel far more alive than most shooters of the time.

The funny thing is that the slow motion almost makes you forget you’re playing a horror game. Once you get into a firefight, you’re so focused on surviving that the last thing you’re thinking about is ghosts or creepy little girls. The game knows this too, which is why it works so well when it suddenly takes that feeling of control away.

Then Alma shows up.

And that’s one of F.E.A.R.’s best tricks. The same game that just let you blast through squads of soldiers suddenly puts you into a dark hallway with a little girl who makes you hesitate to move forward. There’s no firefight to win and no enemy to shoot. You can try, but nothing is going to happen. You’re simply left wondering what’s about to happen and how you’re going to survive it. That contrast between feeling completely unstoppable in combat and absolutely helpless when the horror takes over is a huge part of why F.E.A.R. works so well.

The Hurdle of Age

F.E.A.R. isn’t a perfect game, but I honestly don’t think it has that many flaws. Most of the things that feel dated are simply the result of it being a game from 2005. Some of the animations are a little stiff, the level design can feel repetitive at times, and there are definitely moments where you can tell you’re playing a game that’s over twenty years old. None of that really bothers me, though. They’re small cracks in an otherwise really solid experience.

The bigger problem is actually getting the game to run properly on a modern PC. Depending on the version you have, you may need community patches or other fixes to get everything working the way it should. Physical copies for consoles can also be surprisingly expensive nowadays, which is a pretty unfortunate hurdle for a game I think deserves to be played.

And that’s probably the biggest shame about F.E.A.R. today. The game itself has aged surprisingly well, but actually getting your hands on it and getting it running can be more difficult than it should be. For a game that still has some of the best firefights and horror atmosphere of its era, it would be nice if experiencing it again wasn’t quite so much work.

Final Thoughts

Looking back at F.E.A.R. now, what surprises me most is how little of it actually feels stuck in 2005. Sure, there are some dated animations and the occasional repetitive hallway, but the things that matter most still hold up. The firefights are chaotic and satisfying, the Replica soldiers can still catch you off guard, and the atmosphere knows how to make an otherwise ordinary office building feel completely wrong.

What really makes F.E.A.R. memorable to me is how confident Monolith was with the whole idea. They took a military shooter, gave it some of the smartest enemies around at the time, threw in slow motion, environmental destruction, and then decided that a creepy little girl that refused to stop messing with you. It’s weird, it’s violent, it’s creepy, and it has a ridiculous amount of personality for a game that could have easily been just another military shooter.

It might take a little effort to get running today, but I think F.E.A.R. is worth that effort. There’s a reason people still talk about its AI and its horror decades later. For me, it’s one of those games that reminds me why I love both horror and shooters in the first place. Give me a shotgun, turn off the lights, and I’m probably going back in.

There are games you finish, games you remember, and then there are games that never really leave your life, becoming a place of comfort rather than a game. Skyrim is one of those games for me. I’ve played it for thousands of hours since it released, across different versions and platforms, different characters, and many different mod lists. I’ve killed dragons, been a simple fisher, explored towns beyond the map, and pretty much lived in Skyrim longer than some towns I’ve lived in real life.

But yet, I keep coming back and making new characters with new motives and goals.

The obvious answer is that Skyrim is simply a great game. That certainly helps. It was when it released in 2011, and to be honest, it still is in 2026. Bethesda built a huge sandbox with a ridiculous amount of freedom and a foundation that was so strong players spent the past two decades building on it, but I don’t think that alone explains why people still can’t stop talking about Skyrim. Plenty of great games from 2011 faded quietly into the background. Skyrim, on the other hand, became something players could keep returning to long after they had finished the main story.

A huge part of that comes down to the modding community. Bethesda had given players a sprawling fantasy RPG and, intentionally or otherwise, gave them the tools to start tearing it apart and rebuilding it in their own image. The Creation Kit opened the door for players to create their own quests, characters, locations, systems, and just about anything else they could think of. Over the years, modders have fixed bugs, improved graphics, overhauled combat, redesigned interfaces, added quests, created entirely new worlds, introduced more systems, and changed just about everything you can think of. Skyrim isn’t simply a game you can mod; it’s a game you can slowly tweak and make your own.

That’s what makes returning to Skyrim so comforting. My Skyrim isn’t necessarily the Skyrim I played years ago, or even a few months ago. Depending on the mod load order, I can make the game prettier, harder, more immersive, more convenient, more roleplaying focused, or completely unrecognizable compared to anything Bethesda would have ever dreamed up. Mods don’t just give me more things to do; they let me take systems that were already there and push them way further, smooth over some of Bethesda’s many rough edges, and turn the game into something that fits how I actually want to play it.

And honestly, that’s probably the biggest reason Skyrim has lasted this long. Fifteen years later, there are still new mods being made, new ideas being experimented with, and new ways to experience a game most of us thought we had already seen everything from. I can come back to an old save and find that it feels completely different simply because I decided to play a different kind of character or build a different mod list.

Skyrim’s story is more than just Bethesda rereleasing the same game over and over again. It’s about what happens when you give players a world they don’t want to leave and the tools to keep changing it. After all these years, I think that’s why Skyrim still feels less like a game I finished and more like a place I can keep coming home to.

So, What Is Skyrim?

We all should know what Skyrim is, but if you don’t, here goes nothing. The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim was developed by Bethesda Game Studios and released in November 2011, serving as the fifth game in The Elder Scrolls series. It came after Oblivion and moved the series to the harsh province of Skyrim, a land filled with warring factions, dragons, and enough things to do to make your head spin.

One of the main things that changed with Skyrim was that it was more approachable than its predecessors without losing what made The Elder Scrolls great. Character classes were loosened, exploration was more emphasized, and practically every corner of the game had something for you to discover. Instead of picking a class and being locked into a specific playstyle, you could simply use the skills you wanted and let your character develop naturally. Want to be a warrior? Go for it. Want to sneak around and shoot everyone with a bow? You can do that too. Or you can spend hours making potions, smithing weapons, stealing things, or getting distracted by some cave you noticed on the way to somewhere else.

At its core, Skyrim was built around giving the player a huge fantasy sandbox to play in. It gave you the freedom to decide what kind of adventure you wanted to have, whether that meant becoming a legendary Dragonborn, joining one of the many factions, settling down in a little house somewhere, or completely ignoring the main story and doing whatever the hell you felt like doing. It wasn’t perfect. It was buggy and had its fair share of jank, but Bethesda had created something incredibly flexible. More importantly, they created a game that could be tweaked, expanded, and transformed by the very people playing it.

The Game Bethesda Built

There are plenty of jokes about Skyrim being rereleased on every piece of hardware known to man. It’s become the new “can it run it?” game whenever someone finds a way to play it on a fridge or some other smart device. Then there’s the “you’re finally awake” meme that somehow refuses to die. We’ve been making these jokes for years, but there’s a reason people keep coming back to Skyrim.

A lot of that comes down to how Bethesda built the game. Skyrim isn’t particularly complicated, and honestly, I think that’s part of the reason it works so well. Bethesda gave you a huge world, a bunch of systems to play around with, and then mostly got out of your way. You could follow the main quest, join a faction, become a thief, build a house, or wander off into the woods and completely forget what you were supposed to be doing in the first place.

And Bethesda had already been doing this kind of thing before Skyrim. Morrowind and Oblivion both had huge modding communities, and Bethesda had released official tools that let players start messing around with their games. Skyrim continued that tradition with the Creation Kit, giving players the tools to start changing the game and adding their own ideas to it.

And there was plenty to work with. Skyrim is packed to the brim with caves, ruins, forts, settlements, quests, characters, random encounters, and all the weird little things that can happen while you’re wandering around. You might witness a murder, run into a band of merry drunks, or find yourself halfway across the map because you followed something interesting you saw in the distance. You can start the game wanting to become the greatest warrior in Skyrim and somehow end up spending three hours collecting cheese. That’s just how Skyrim works.

The character system is another big part of it. Instead of picking a class and being stuck with it, you naturally develop the skills you actually use. Want to hurl magic? Go for it. Wanna sneak around with a bow? Sure. Wanna make some weird combination of skills that probably shouldn’t work together? Skyrim doesn’t really care. It isn’t the deepest RPG system ever made, but it’s flexible enough that you can take your character in just about any direction you want.

That flexibility is ultimately what made Skyrim such a perfect game for modding. Bethesda didn’t build a flawless RPG, but they built a damn good foundation. There was a huge world full of history to build off of, a character system that could be reshaped, and countless little systems that could be pushed way further. Modders didn’t have to save Skyrim from being a bad game. They were handed a damn good one and spent the last fifteen years making it even better.

How Modding Changed Everything For ME

This is where Skyrim’s story gets really unique. After fifteen years, there are mods for practically anything you could want to change, from tiny quality-of-life fixes to projects that completely transform the game.

Some of the most important mods aren’t even all that glamorous. Community patches have fixed bugs that Bethesda never got around to fixing. There are new interfaces, improved animations, smarter NPCs, better graphics, and countless little changes that have sanded down a lot of the game’s rough edges. Things that would have been major selling points if Bethesda ever released an official remaster have been available through the modding community for years.

Then things start getting much bigger. Mods add new quests, companions, weapons, armor, spells, factions, homes, survival mechanics, combat systems, and entire new areas to explore. Some projects have become so ambitious that calling them mods almost feels like underselling what people actually built. There are total conversions that feel more like their own games than something you simply downloaded and dropped into Skyrim.

The biggest change, though, is what modding has done to Skyrim for me personally. At this point, my Skyrim barely resembles the game I first played in 2011, and that’s exactly why I keep coming back. I’ve built a world with over 200 mods that I can disappear into whenever I want. My characters aren’t important. They start out with nothing and see how long they can make it. Sometimes I’ll make a living by fishing, sometimes I’ll fight in the arena, and sometimes I’ll just wander into the wilderness with no real plan at all. That’s usually when I have the most fun. I’m not trying to beat Skyrim anymore. I’m just living in it and seeing what happens.

Bethesda created a world that its community loved enough to spend years fixing, expanding, and just plain showing it some love. That’s why Skyrim doesn’t feel like a game that simply survived from 2011. It feels like a game that has been continuously developed by its players. Every new mod is another reason to reinstall it. I’ve never even uninstalled it, but I’ll still find myself starting a new character and convincing myself that this time I’ll play something other than a stealth archer. We all know how that goes.

A Game That Never Ends

In 2026, Skyrim is in a strange position. It’s fifteen years old, has been re-released on just about everything Todd could convince it to run on, and it’s definitely starting to show its age. The combat is basic, the animations are rough, and the game is still packed full of bugs. Plenty of things that felt impressive in 2011 are pretty mundane now. If you boot up vanilla Skyrim expecting a modern gaming experience, you’re going to notice the years immediately.

But honestly, I don’t think that’s the point anymore. Skyrim has become less of a game and more of a platform for players to build their own version of it. After all this time, new mods are still being made, old ones are still being updated, and people are still finding new ways to change a game we’ve supposedly already seen everything from.

Most games eventually become a snapshot of the time they were released. You remember them, maybe replay them once in a while, and that’s usually where the story ends. Skyrim somehow escaped that. Its community turned it into something that could keep evolving long after Bethesda had finished telling its story. There are people playing a version of Skyrim today that would be almost completely unrecognizable to someone who played it back in 2011, and I think that’s pretty damn cool.

I think that’s what makes Skyrim so special to me. It isn’t just a game I played in 2011 that somehow managed to stick around. It’s a game that keeps changing because the people playing it never really seem to be finished with it. And judging by how many times I’ve rebuilt Skyrim from the ground up, I’m not sure I am either.

The Odd One Out

Running with Scissors has never really fit into the video game industry, and it seems to be exactly how they like it. Founded in 1996 by Vince Desi, the studio began by working on small projects and ports before finding its own path with Postal, a game that ruffled plenty of feathers when it came out. It was crude, violent, and unapologetically offensive, and it immediately gave Running with Scissors the reputation they would carry for decades. What followed was a career built around making the kinds of games that large publishers wouldn’t come anywhere near.

As the industry changed around them, Running with Scissors stayed remarkably comfortable being the odd one out. The studio continued making games that leaned into absurdity, dark humor, violence, and the kind of ideas that could easily land them in the local news. When Postal 2 came out, it pushed that identity even further, giving players an open world where just about anything could become an opportunity for mayhem. The game became notorious for its violence and offensive satire, but rather than running from the attention, Running with Scissors embraced it. The controversy became part of what made the studio recognizable.

To me, that’s what makes Running with Scissors worth looking at beyond Postal itself. Their history isn’t simply a story about making controversial games. It’s about a small studio that found its audience by doing things its own way and somehow managed to keep doing it for three decades. Even today, they still seem more interested in giving players what they want than following whatever the rest of the industry is doing. Paid DLC? Nah. Free updates? Hell yes! That’s just one of the reasons I think Running with Scissors is a studio worth celebrating.

Before Things Got Weird.

Running with Scissors got its start in 1996, founded by the one and only Vince Desi, a man who had spent years working in the software industry before deciding he wanted to make games he would actually enjoy playing. At first, the studio wasn’t exactly known for making games that would have senators arguing about video games on television. Its early work was mostly small software projects, a few ports here and there, and whatever they could get their hands on while trying to figure out what they really wanted to make. It wasn’t glamorous, but it got their foot in the door and gave them a chance to start building something of their own.

Then came Postal.

This was the game that would change everything for Running with Scissors. What started as a much bigger swing for a small studio would become the game that gave them their identity almost overnight. They weren’t just another little developer making whatever project came along anymore. They had found something they could call their own, and it was about to get them into a whole lot of trouble.

Enter the Postal Dude

Released in 1997, Postal was a top-down shooter built around a simple but bloody premise: You play as a man known only as the Postal Dude, armed with a small arsenal and pushed over the edge into a violent rampage. The game isn’t interested in giving you the usual heroic excuse for shooting everything that moves. There isn’t a grand military campaign or an army of monsters waiting for you. No, Postal puts you in ordinary neighborhoods and lets you turn them into a shooting gallery. You’re attacking everyday people, watching them panic and scatter as the world around you falls apart.

And that’s really where Postal started to stand out. The violence wasn’t just something thrown into the game because violent shooters were becoming popular. It was the entire premise. You could attack civilians, police officers, and military personnel as they scrambled to stop you, and there was no heroic soundtrack or grand speech to make you feel like the good guy. You’re just some guy with a gun causing absolute chaos. It’s a pretty simple idea, but it was more than enough to get people talking.

Postal wasn’t a massive blockbuster that suddenly turned Running with Scissors into a major studio, but it did something arguably more important: it gave them an identity. The game made plenty of people angry, and Running with Scissors didn’t exactly rush to apologize for it. Instead, they seemed to realize they had stumbled onto something that fit them perfectly. They had found their formula: violence, dark humor, controversy, and a willingness to go places other developers wouldn’t. They would spend the next three decades refining that formula, with the Postal Dude becoming the face of everything Running with Scissors stood for.

Postal 2

Postal 2 was where Running with Scissors really started to figure out what Postal was going to be. Released in 2003, it ditched the top-down shooting of the original for a first-person shooter set across an open world, where you played as the Postal Dude while going through an ordinary week of errands. Getting milk, returning a library book, and cashing a paycheck all sound pretty harmless until you realize you can walk into a store with a shotgun, urinate on people, and turn the whole place into a disaster. The game also gave you a surprising amount of freedom in how you handled those errands. You could try to get through the week without killing anyone, or you could, you know, shoot everything. In fact, none of the main errands actually require you to kill anyone. Of course, the fact that you could do all the horrible stuff was kind of the selling point.

And Postal 2 went much further with the violence than the first game. You had guns, explosives, gasoline you could trail, and, of course, urine. NPCs weren’t just cardboard targets either. They would scream, run away, call the cops, and even pull a gun on you as they reacted to the chaos around them. Then there are the cats. You could literally pick one up and use it as a silencer for your weapon. Yes, really. It was completely juvenile, but that was Running with Scissors’ entire approach. The game wasn’t trying to make its violence look cool or realistic. It was taking the whole idea and pushing it as far into ridiculous territory as it could.

Then there’s the controversy. Senator Joe Lieberman had already singled out the original Postal during the growing debate over violent video games, even mentioning it during a Senate speech. Running with Scissors wasn’t exactly interested in taking the high road with him either. Instead, they turned the whole thing into another joke. You can find protestors outside the Running with Scissors office in Postal 2, and the game even gives you an achievement called “Lieberman is our Leader” for killing them all. At this point, getting people angry had practically become another feature of Postal. The more people complained, the more Running with Scissors seemed willing to poke the bear.

Then came Apocalypse Weekend in 2005, adding Saturday and Sunday to the Postal Dude’s already terrible week. It brought new missions, weapons, enemies, and even more ways to turn the town into a complete wasteland. At this point, Running with Scissors had clearly decided that Postal 2 wasn’t ridiculous enough yet, so they just kept adding more stuff until they ran out of weekend.

But the weirdest thing about Postal 2 is how long it stuck around. A game that was once held up as an example of everything wrong with violent video games eventually became a cult classic, finding a second life on Steam after making it through Greenlight in 2012. Running with Scissors kept supporting it with updates, bug fixes, mod support, and eventually the Paradise Lost expansion in 2015. It even got another major update for its 20th anniversary in 2023.

And somehow, in 2026, we’re still talking about Postal 2. The outrage that once seemed like it might define the game’s entire legacy eventually became just another part of its history. The game stuck around, found its audience, and somehow outlived most of the people who were angry about it in the first place. For a game about buying milk, kicking people in the nuts, and using cats as silencers, that’s one hell of a legacy.

The One We Don’t Talk About

Then there’s Postal 3, and honestly, this is where I’d like to keep things brief. Released in 2011 after being developed largely by the Russian studio Akella, Postal 3 tried to take the series in a more modern direction, turning it into an over-the-shoulder shooter with a cover system. Unfortunately, pretty much everything that could go wrong did. The humor rarely landed, the gameplay was clunky, the technical problems were everywhere, and most importantly, it just didn’t feel like Postal. Even Running with Scissors has spent years distancing itself from the game, and at this point, that’s probably the best way to handle it.

Postal 3 happened. It wasn’t good. Maybe someday I’ll give it the full autopsy it deserves, but for now, we should probably give it the same treatment Vince, Mike J, and Running with Scissors have over the years and pretend it doesn’t exist.

Back to Basics

After Postal 3 went completely off the rails, RWS eventually decided to make things right by going back to the game people actually liked. Paradise Lost released in 2015 as an expansion to Postal 2, but calling it just an expansion almost feels underselling it. Instead of trying to reinvent the series again, RWS went back to the formula that had worked and built something new on top of it. In fact, the studio has openly described the project as both a thank-you to the fans who helped bring Postal 2 back through Steam Greenlight and an apology for how Postal 3 turned out.

What makes Paradise Lost so good is that it doesn’t just feel like a few extra missions tacked onto an old game. You get a completely new version of Paradise to explore, new weapons, new characters, new enemies, and its own story. The Postal Dude returns to his old hometown years after the events of Apocalypse Weekend, only to find that the place has been completely transformed by the nuclear disaster. Instead of the relatively normal town from Postal 2, Paradise is now a post-apocalyptic wasteland filled with different factions, bizarre characters, and all kinds of places that make you second guess everything you’ve done so far.

And because this is Postal, of course the game gets weird almost immediately. One of the more ridiculous encounters involves Zack Ward, the actor who played the Postal Dude in the Postal movie. In Paradise Lost, Ward plays himself as the leader of a group of Gingers who have turned an old police station into a bizarre Christmas-themed attraction called Winter Wonderland. You can even end up fighting him if you decide to take the more violent route. Because apparently nothing says Christmas like Zack Ward and a bunch of angry Gingers trying to kill you.

That’s really what makes Paradise Lost work. It still has all the ridiculous violence, crude humor, and complete lack of restraint that Postal is known for, but underneath all of that, it feels like RWS remembering exactly what made Postal 2 so much fun. After the mess that was Postal 3, this felt like the studio finding its footing again.

RWS didn’t need to make Postal bigger or more modern. They just needed to make another Postal game that understood why people loved Postal 2 in the first place. Paradise Lost gave longtime fans more of the sandbox they loved, more stupid scenarios to figure out, and another reason to wreak havoc on a town that really doesn’t deserve any of this nonsense. After years of Postal being stuck in limbo, it felt like the comeback fans had been waiting for.

No Regerts

Then Running with Scissors went for something much bigger with Postal 4: No Regerts. After Paradise Lost proved there was still an audience for the old-school Postal formula, RWS set out to make a proper sequel rather than another expansion. For a developer the size of RWS, it was definitely ambitious. Postal 4 gives you a much larger world to explore, a ridiculous amount of things to interact with, and the same sandbox gameplay that made Postal 2 so memorable, just on a much bigger scale. It definitely feels like a Postal game. The Postal Dude is still wandering around causing problems, the world is still packed with ridiculous ways to deal with them, and the whole thing oozes that unmistakable RWS personality.

One of my favorite things about Postal 4 is that they brought back voices from across the series. Corey Cruise, Jon St. John, Rick Hunter, and even Zack Ward from the movie all return as voice options for the Postal Dude. I love that you can actually choose which one you want to hear. That might sound like a small thing, but it gives Postal 4 a sense of history that most sequels don’t get. RWS wasn’t just making another Postal game. They were bringing pieces of the series back together after a few missteps and letting longtime fans decide which version of the Dude they wanted to hear.

Of course, the game’s ambition sometimes gets ahead of the game itself. Postal 4 has plenty of bugs, technical problems, and rough edges, and its development took a very long time. The game originally entered Early Access in 2019, and RWS used that time to keep rebuilding and expanding it. At one point, the studio said its development team had grown from just eight full-time developers to 35, with much of that growth going straight back into improving the game.

That long development cycle also means some of the humor hasn’t aged quite as well as others. A lot of the satire is tied very closely to the late-2010s and early-2020s, and you can feel that in places. Some jokes that probably felt much more relevant when they were written don’t hit quite the same way now. That’s one of the unavoidable problems with making a game this slowly. By the time you finally finish it, the world around you has already moved on.

But honestly, there’s something admirable about the way RWS handled it. They didn’t just throw Postal 4 out the door and move on to the next thing. They kept patching it, adding content, improving performance, reworking systems, and listening to the people actually playing it. Even after the 1.0 release, they continued pushing updates and improvements.

And that’s probably the biggest thing I took away from Postal 4. It isn’t perfect, and RWS would probably be the first to admit that. But after three decades, they still care enough about these ridiculous games to keep working on them. Postal 4 might be messy, but so is Running with Scissors. Maybe that’s exactly why it feels so fitting.

Legacy/Future

If Running with Scissors has proved anything over the years, it’s that the studio knows how to deal with controversy. Whether it’s politicians complaining about their games or the much more ordinary controversies that come with the modern game industry, Running with Scissors has always seemed pretty comfortable doing things its own way. They’ve also taken a very different approach from the big publishers when it comes to supporting their games, showing a willingness to stick with them long after release instead of simply moving on to the next project. Those values have become a huge part of what Running with Scissors is known for, and Postal 2 is probably the clearest example. The game has continued to receive updates and support long after most developers would have moved on from a game released in 2003.

That relationship with players has become part of the way Running with Scissors makes games. They listen to their community, take feedback, and continue to support the people who have stuck with them for all these years. That doesn’t mean every decision they’ve made has been perfect, because it certainly hasn’t. But while much of the industry has moved toward selling a game and then dividing its content into paid expansions, Running with Scissors has built much of its reputation around keeping its games alive and giving players a reason to come back.

And the studio doesn’t appear to be finished yet. I’ve already covered Postal: Brain-Damaged [link], which showed that the Postal formula could still work when handed to another developer and pushed in a completely different direction. Now there’s Postal 2 Redux on the horizon, bringing the game that helped define Running with Scissors back into the spotlight once again.

After three decades, countless controversies, one horrible sequel, and an almost ridiculous amount of stubborn persistence, that’s probably the legacy that fits Running with Scissors best. They’re still making Postal games. They’re still listening to the people who play them. And they’re still refusing to act like what the industry thinks a “normal” game studio is supposed to be.

Honestly, I don’t think they’d have it any other way.