More Horror Games Need To Be About Scary Monsters

I love me some 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Horrified. I own all four of the main boxed editions, and having just exclusively revealed it, am also one of the few people in the world to 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:currently own the Krampus expansion. In the last week, as Spooky Season has gotten firmly underway, I've played three games of Horrified - World and Greek to test Krampus, and American just for fun. Universal will get its time before the mont🎶h is out, I'm su🔯re. But playing so many close together has gotten me thinking about the lack of these creature features in video games.

Obviously, horror has always been a classic staple of video games. TheGamer recently explored the history of horror in the medium, and found that it dates ꧑back to 1972 - the same year Pon𒊎g was released. For as long as there have been video games, there have been frights. But few offer the sort of fix I get from Horrified, and I can't help but wonder why.

Horrified's Monsters Offer A Huge Variety Of Creatures

The five monster figures for Horrified World of Monsters

There are 23 total Monsters in Horrified across the four boxes and Krampus, rising to 25 if you count Bride of Frankenstein and the second phase of Cthulhu as separate Monsters even though they're just part of a single Monster Mat. But very few of them have any video games. Obviously there are plenty of vampire games, covering Dracula, and between Hades and 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Dragon's Dogma the entire roster of Greek Monsters is dealt with. But there are plenty others that could do with some 💮love from the land of pixels and polygons.

While Cthulhu (another fairly consistent video game staple) is mechanically the most i𝕴nteresting in World of Monsters, from a lore perspective it would definitely be the Jiangshi. Half zombie, half vampire, this Chinese legend is a fascinating creature and with teleportation powers and great strength, would be perfect for a video game. Yet the only games with a Jiangshi that I could find were Tiger Road (released in 1987) and Phantom Fighter (released in 1988). The Shikinjou series features a Jiangshi as a mascot, but that's more of a mahjong puzzle game with added shenanigans than a horror affair.

Perhaps most interesting is American Monsters though. In a close race, 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:I put American M💫onsters at the bottom of 🅷the pack just because a couple of the Monsters feel reliant on luck, and it doesn't have the raw🍃 creativity of Universal, while also not being settꦉled into the rhythm of Greek and World. However, from a lore perspective, it's easily my favourite package. Built around urban legends and American cryptids, there is so much potential for video games to indulge in this X-Files tone, but the medium has rarely done so.

Where Are All The Creature Feature Video Games?

The six Monsters in American Monsters are Bigfoot, the Chupacabra, the Banshe🐲e, Mothman, the Jersey Devil, and the Ozark Howler. While I don't necessarily think of the Banshee as American, that's a great collection of beasts. But they don't have a rich video game legacy. There were two Bigfoot games (one in 1983, the other in 1988, compl🎀etely different despite both simply being called Bigfoot) as vague sasquatch/yeti creatures have been peppered throughout gaming history. The rest? Not much of anything.

There's an indie game called Chupacabra that costs $0.99 and has ni🤡ne reviews. I'm sure someone somewhere will remember a Chupacabra in some vide🌳o game or other, but I'm drawing a blank and so is Google. It's a similar story with many others. Mothmen 1966 is the most notable of the rest, and the vast majority of people won't have heard of that game until reading this very sentence. Banshee is a vertical shmup, but that's about fighter jets, not ghostly singing maidens.

Looking into all this also unlocked a memory. There was a Jersey Devil game for the PS1 that released in 1997, but also, there wasn't. While it was called Jersey Devil, you instead played this open zone platformer as ꩵan oversized purple bat who fought massive vegetables. It was decent fun, but never rose 💜above that level.

But this is not what a Jersey Devil is. A real Jersey Devil is a shapeshifting beast, one who (in different versions of the lore) bides its time by pretending to be an innocent local, or kills off a citizen and takes their pla𒁏ce, blending in with their surroundings. Their true form features cloven hooves on two thin, spindly legs, draconic wings, claws, and the head of a goat or ho🐻rse. Horrified uses a deer's head, and both extends its arms and stoops forward so it looks like a quadruped rearing up rather than a bipedal creature, but is still a great recreation of the myth.

This extends to the play, too. With the Jersey Devil in the mix, rescuing Villagers worಌks separately as you're deducing which player is the Jersey Devil while doing so. I'm never fully sure whether I think decimating the deck is a great mechanic that raises the intensity of the game by forcing you to play less conservatively, or a needlessly metagame-heavy twist on the formula, but the Jersey Devil itself is a fantastic inclusion that fully captures the idea of the American cryptid. And yet, no true Jersey Devil video game.

We have 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:hundreds of games based on zombies, but many of our horror games, especially in the modern era, are less about trope-driven beasties and more about how traumatic situations change our human nature. Plenty of games also explore original villains, or are based on movies that fe꧃ature original villains, rather than classic myths. So it does feel as though there is a major🦄 gap in video games for a good old fashioned creature feature. Until we get one, I guess it's time for another round of Horrified.