Halloween Retro Games!

Halloween, the culmination of everything that is awesome about the autumn season, is finally here. Unfortunately, I kept putting off getting the things I needed for my costume that it looks like I won't be having one this year. Oh well, now that just means I have a heck of a lot of time until next Halloween to get ready! But one way I will be celebrating this year is by playing numerous scary video games! My favorite way to celebrate anything in life, hooray! So on this, the eve before Halloween, I present five of the best scary retro games to play during the witching hour!

5. Maniac Mansion - NES

One of the most memorable of the Lucasarts adventure titles, Maniac Mansion pays homage to classic b-movie horror plots by having three teenage kids break into a huge mansion in order to save Dave's cheerleader girlfriend from the clutches of a mad scientist under the hypno-induced influence of a murderous purple meteor from outer space. In classic Lucasarts fashion you must search each room looking for items that might come in handy in the numerous puzzles needing to be solved. The game boasts seven different endings and lots of memorable characters, not to mention one of the best soundtracks ever to grace the NES' 8-bit soundchip. Anyone that's a fan of clever puzzles and comedy-horror would do well to check this one out.

4. The 7th Guest - PC

One of the earliest CD-ROM titles to come out (along with Myst), this game had some truly brain-busting puzzles in it with a truly amazing presentation, especially at the time. You explore a spooky old mansion in a first person view, going from room to room solving the puzzles in order to piece together what happened to the 6 guests that were invited decades earlier and were never heard from again. The music, written by The Fat Man, is truly amazing and still holds up well today and as a bonus is included on the second disc, just put it in your CD player and skip to track 2! You might need to download DOSbox for it to work, but if you come across this game, I can't recommend it highly enough!

3. Alone in the Dark - PC

Long before Uwe Bolle was making the theaters a more dangerous place by unleashing his movie of the same name onto unsuspecting audiences, this game series helped define a pioneering new genre. Anyone who has played this game can clearly see where Resident Evil got its inspiration. The first title in the series is definitely the best, drawing much of the atmosphere from classic HP Lovecraft's tales of terror. You play Edward Carnby in the early 20th century investigating a strange suicide. You quickly step into a world of occultists and monsters as you try to make your way back out of the mansion, most of the time by solving clever puzzles (that make more sense than those of Resident Evil) instead of relying on weapons. The game even includes the Necronomicon on a bookshelf in the game as well as crediting Lovecraft on the cover of the game. This is truly a horror classic, and one that fans of the Resident Evil games would be pleased to check out. As with 7th Guest, you'll probably need DOSbox to get this to run on modern computers.

2. Haunted House - Atari 2600

Man, all these games involve getting stuck in a big spooky house, I swear that was completely unplanned. But I guess when that theme works so well in games, stories and the like, it's just gonna get used a lot, huh? So this game for the Atari 2600 involved you, as a pair of eyes, roaming around the multileveled mansion in a top-down perspective, trying to find an urn and get it out of the house. You can only carry one item at a time, and you'll need other items in the game to get farther, so you might have to leave the urn on the second floor to retrieve keys to unlock a different part of the house. Items in the game are nearly invisible due to the darkness of the house, so you have to press the button in order to light a candle for a short while enabling you to see any items that might be nearby. Various things like ghosts, spiders, and bats wander the house and when nearby a wind will blow snuffing out your candle. Even with its primitive graphics this game is really fun, and unique for being pretty large in scale. The game's spooky theme still holds up today and is a great retro Halloween game!

1. ET - Atari 2600

This game was literally decades ahead of its time, as numerous elements used in horror games from recent years can be traced back to this one game. A lot of people applaud the game Eternal Darkness: Sanity's Requiem on the Gamecube for its unique sanity meter that when low would create effects convincing both the in-game character and the player themselves that they were going insane.

Cyclopean Architecture?

However they obviously took that element from ET; you try to control a little pacifist alien through a forest, but really all you can do is fall down holes, pull yourself back up, and then fall down another hole until you eventually run out of health and die. The process was so frustrating that it led to madness darker, deeper and endless than humanity can stand. The landscape, when not being holes, involved cyclopean architecture that Lovecraft wrote in his most horrific tales. Truly this game was not meant to be operated by mere mortals whose delicate minds can be rent to the very brink of awareness in mere minutes of exposure to this gameplay.

So there you go, five retro games perfect for Halloween, four involving spooky houses, and one that, like the Necromonicon written by the Mad Arab Abdul Alhazred should be avoided at all costs lest you unleash a knowledge of a gameplay so broken. Happy Halloween, everybody!