Summary
With the growing success ofart-house horror in cinema, it’s only natural that enthusiasts would look to the gaming sphere for further examples and for developers to look to cinema for inspiration for their games. However, the definition of art-house is as nebulous as the emotions it evokes.
Unlike conventional horror games that rely on suspense-building and misdirection to frighten the player, art-house horror instead explores the uncanniness that lives in the liminal space between uncertainty and fear. It employs fear as a vehicle to drive the narrative rather than being a mere outcome. If traditional horror is the shock of a monster leaping from the shadows, then art-house is the unsettling sense of being watched, even when nothing is there.
8The Space Between
Deconstructing The Suffocating Walls Of An Architect
The opening scroll ofThe Space Betweenreveals that Martin “Matt” Melanson, the player character, has been found dead within the very walls of the theater of which he was the architect. The game is both a literal and figurative deconstruction of the walls Matt has built—emotional and physical barriers that shaped his life.
There’s a clear—if somewhat heavy-handed—thematic and narrative throughline in play, as the game explores Matt’s complex relationships with others and lack thereof,filtered through an abstract, retro-aesthetic.
7No One Lives Under The Lighthouse
Other Than That Which Does
IfThe Lighthouseby Robert Eggers were ever ported to the PSX as a movie tie-in, thenNo One Lives Under the Lighthousewould be the result. The game approaches its visual storytelling with a cinematic quality, where every scene is a crafted painting of surrealist realism that fully utilizes its low-poly aesthetics to create an unsettling atmosphere.
This is evident during the game’s chase sequences, which employ asubjective camerafrom the chaser’s perspective, while the player remains in control of the protagonist, adding a disorienting—and horrifying—twist to the gameplay.
Year Walk, loosely based around theSwedish folk tradition ofÅrsgång, feels more like a game that was filmed through a lens than one coded in an engine. Its meticulously crafted parallax visuals and nod to cinematography techniques humanize a stark, sterile environment, all the while guiding players through a first-person side-scrolling adventure that unfolds as if watching a dreamlike theater on a conveyor belt.
The game embraces its folklore roots, leaning heavily into the inherent horror that is found in most folktales while weaving in a narrative that’s steeped in companionship and love.
During the late 19th century, polio was ravaging the Americas and Europe. There wasn’t, and still isn’t, any cure for the virus. The best outcome was palliative care and a painless passing; the second best would be spending life in an ‘iron lung’—a large mechanical respirator that encases the body in a cocoon of metal.Iron Lung, mirrors this.
The player spends all of their time submerged in an alien ocean cocooned in a rusting metal submarine, slowly plotting coordinates to find some form of salvation. However, players are only met with isolation while their breath slowly slips away and the unknown from the inky abyss eventually comes for them.
Fans of the horror genre are more than familiar with thehaunted house trope, but whatAnatomyinstead explores is what happens when the home itself becomes the haunting entity. The game delves into themes of loss—specifically, the loss of a home—and how people can so easily discard or abuse something they once cherished.
Often, moving house is treated with the same indifference as booking a holiday. InAnatomy, the house is anthropomorphized; it yearns, feels, and holds grudges and will seek revenge—turning an abode of safety into a prison that serves only to relieve the grief and fury of the warden.
3Paratopic
It’s Not Simlish They’re Speaking In
Paratopic, for the most part, plays out like a surreal not-quite-fever dream, akin to drifting in and out of sleep as a child during a nighttime drive while their dad listens to aTwin Peakspodcast. The narrative itself is fragmented and presented through the viewpoints of three different characters, creating aRashomon-likeeffect whereevents unfold in a non-linear, often contradictory manner.
Paratopicalso masterfully createssuspense and unease through its soundscape, allowing the backing tracks to stalk in the background before rising into a crescendo ofBlade Runner-esque retro-noir synthesizers during critical moments.
SIGNALISis one of the few games in the art-house genre that offer an accessible and almost traditional gameplay experience, setting itself apart from the inherently avant-garde nature of other titles in its lineage. It blendssurvival horrorwith fragmented story beats to create stark and surreal environments, visually representing its core ethos: isolation.
Narratively,SIGNALIStakes players on a journey of disjointed memories, layering truth behind propaganda, confronting them with questions of identity, consciousness, and the nature of fear while obfuscating the reality and nature of the protagonist’s relationships behind each narrative twist.
Pathologic 2is hard. It’s not Soulslike hard, where with enough time and effort, players will eventually overcome the difficulty and will be better players as a result. Instead, thegame is just hard. It’s mechanically cumbersome and obtuse, it drains players emotionally, and there’s no ‘winning.’
The game plays as if reading a Shakespearean tragedy, but each page is made of sandpaper, and the nerves in the reader’s fingers are fully exposed. And yet, beyond all of that, there lies arguably one of the best narratively driven games within the genre. There’s a reason why many gamers who power through and experience this tragedy on stage always look back on it fondly but can never recommend it.
