Horror

Creepy stories

Theatre

Your job as a real estate agent brings you into contact with many old buildings, but none are quite like the old theatre that has stood deserted for almost thirty years. After visiting it with some prospective buyers, you discover that you have left your pager behind. You quickly stop off there, on your way out for the evening, to pick it up. However, at night, you soon learn, the theatre's denizens are more than just rats and spiders. Now you find yourself trapped in a world of secrets and of shadows, while a century-old evil awakens to hatch her nefarious plans.

Shade

The author's tag-line for this game is "A one-room game set in your apartment," and it's difficult to say much more about it without spoilers. Suffice it to say that it's extremely well crafted and very, very creepy--this is "mess with your head" IF par excellence. Precisely what happens, particularly at the end, is open to multiple interpretations. There's also a lot going on, in a sense, so you may want to replay it a few times once you're done. Not to everyone's taste--it's not an upbeat game by any means--but masterfully done.

IF Whispers 5

Travel down into an abandoned Antarctic Base and unveil the mysteries within.

A game made in the paper-telephone style, with each person only having access to the section before, with a co-ordinated ending that ties everything beautifully together.

Uninvited

You crashed into a tree next to a creepy old mansion. Before you know it, your kid brother wandered off, probably into the mansion. Find your brother and call a tow truck or taxi before the evil spirits of the mansion claim both of you forever.

Vespers

Set in a 15th century monastery beset by the plague, Vespers follows an abbot driven increasingly insane as he watches his feverish monks perish one by one. It's a nauseating, deeply frightening game, like survival/horror without the survival part.

Geist

You were celebrating the arrival of the not-quite-second-half of the 21st century with your buddies in your gaming basement when the bad news arrived: Crazy Uncle Scott had finally given up the good fight and passed off into gaming nirvana. He was an unusual man, with a firm belief that the world went to hell in a hand-basket with the arrival of text messages, always claiming that their phones were smarter than them!

Curses

As "Curses" opens, you're hunting about in the attic of your family home, looking for a tatty old map of Paris (you're going on holiday tomorrow) and generally trying to avoid all the packing. Aunt Jemima is potting daisies and sulking; the attics are full of endless distractions and secrets; Greek myths, horoscopes, sixth-century politics, a less than altogether helpful demon, a mysterious bomb plot, photography, ritual, poetry and a dream or two all get in your way; and somehow you keep being reminded of your family through the ages, and all its Curses...

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