This year we’re putting together a list of 31 Retro Horror games. Games that have come from dead console generations, back to haunt us. Sadly, not all of these games will be available for you to play due to the complicated nature of video game preservation. However, we’re going to note if it’s possible to play them on modern hardware. We’ll be covering games from the Seventh Generation (PlayStation 3, Xbox 360, Wii) and earlier. So basically anything before 2006.
Day 27
Uninvited
When I first mentioned this list to my colleagues, Aaron mentioned Uninvited. That’s a game I haven’t thought about in years. When I think of Uninvited I immediately think of the NES version, but it was actually released originally on the Mac way back in 1986.
Uninvited is a game unlike a lot of the others I covered in this series recently: it can be genuinely scary. Okay, maybe not scary on a level that horror games today can achieve, but back in the days of internal midi speakers and low res pixelated graphics, Uninvited was terrifying. And honestly, it still manages to hold up atmospherically.
But it’s not the terror aspect that makes Uninvited so effective: it’s the gameplay. You can explore the haunted mansion ( it’s always a mansion) at your own pace, discovering its horrors as you go. It's a bit of a slow burn, but it's great in building tension.
Uninvited doesn’t have the same legacy as other games in this list, but it did inspire classics like Shadowgate and Deja Vu–both of those titles eventually making their way to the NES, too.
If you want to play Uninvited these days, you can actually pick it up as part of the Macventures Series Collection on Steam, or by itself. These versions are a bit alien to me, however, as I grew up playing the NES version with their somewhat updated graphics. But to play that version you’d have to get ahold of old hardware.
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