7 Spooky Games You Can Largely Find on Abandonware Sites and Absolutely Must Play this Halloween

The games on this list are extremely of their time. They are also extremely me on my bullshit.

From massively overwritten text adventures to full motion video contemporary gothic tales, this list is a time capsule of games that left their mark on me in ways that even much more masterful entries in the genre couldn’t.

These are the games I stuffed a couch cushion against the PC speaker to muffle its screaming pitches (what passed for sound effects during the days before SoundBlasters), because I was up well past my bedtime. That I sat on the lap of my stepfather while we beat our heads against impossible puzzles. The ones I think about all the time.

Are there more haunting masterpieces? Absolutely.

Games that play with the slick grace contemporary gamers have come to expect? Of course.

Some of these games are glacial enough to make Arthur Machen short stories read like flash fiction, others are on par with Lovecraft’s lacking prose style. But these old, creaky gems are eerie and spectacular in their own right. Some have a crumbling elegant beauty, and others a gritty decrepitude that only emphasizes the terrors within.

Here are my top seven games that you simply must play this Halloween.

7. The Hound of Shadow – Eldritch Games – 1989

I first played The Hound of Shadow long before I developed my interest in gothic and cosmic horror. My small brown index finger sliding under the words on the 640×480 screen of my stepfather’s early monochrome laptop, a comforter pulled over my head.

The studio name along should be a clue that this text adventure (with character creation and other RPG elements) borrows from Lovecraft and similar writers. Verbose and often wildly overwritten, it was an eerie fictional puzzle that I fell in love with.

There were other, better text adventures. Ones that had more impressive occasional graphics, a stronger command of prose. But with the unique character creation system and the voluptuous horror mystery kept this game in my thoughts long after others faded from memory.

6. Hell: A Cyberpunk Thriller – Take Two Interactive – 1995

A portal to hell opened in Washington D.C. and Grace Jones is the totalitarian leader of the United States.

Hell is an ugly game. Even for the time it’s graphics were a confusing mess. It’s writing is at various times amateurish, ponderous, and always clunky. The voice acting is all over the place, and so is the script.

But god does this game ever leave an impression. Explore a virtual reality recreation of Hell where enemies of the state are tortured by VR demons. There are death squads, and morality police. Supermodel Stephanie Seymour is a holographic AI construct of a now-dead bomb expert, Dennis Hopper is a slimy demonic version of himself, and Geoffery Holder wants to give you a massive lore dump about neo-gnosticism.

It’s a mess of an adventure game, and an even messier RPG. It tries in so many directions, and it fails in nearly all of them.

But, seriously, it has Grace Jones in it. What’s not to love?

5. Quest for Glory: Shadows of Darkness – Sierra Online – 1993

One of my favorite franchises takes a turn from fairytale to gothic horror and slavic folklore in the last installment I ever played.

A direct continuation of the previous games, Lori and Cory Cole magically transport adventures to the dark, forbidding, gothic romance of Eastern European myth and legend. There are vampires, Rusalki, burgomeisters, all manner of ghosts, and even some light Lovecraftian Old Gods. It’s dark, funny, and is one of the better crafted games in this list.

Teleported away at the end of Quest for Glory 3, you’ll find yourself in the foreboding lands of Mordavia. How did you get here, and for what dark purpose?

Well that’s for you to discover!

And as you solve mysterious puzzles, do class/skill-based side quests, and dispatch a revenant or two (or more!) in the new side-scrolling combat system, you might even get flirty with a spooky slavic vampire lady, and who doesn’t love that?

4. The Uninvited – ICOM Simulations – 1986

MacVenture games (of which there are 4) form a cornerstone of my life in gaming. And while my eternal, unyielding love will always be reserved for the NES remake of Shadowgate, The Uninvited is the only choice for horror fans. It’s eerie and unnerving and perilous. The graphics (which vary depending on platform) are so of their time — tragically dated, but all the more evocative for it.

You the unnamed hero must investigate an abandoned-looking house in search of your missing sibling after a car crash. The house, you soon find out, only looks abandoned. It’s filled with the undead and sorcery and all manner of secrets and puzzles.

Death looms everywhere in this game, as it does with it’s MacVenture siblings.

But just like them dying is as much a reward (if not more so) than succeeding in your quest.

If you’re like me, you’ll relish reading the fantastic descriptions of just how horribly you met your end.

3. Elvira II: The Jaws of Cerberus – Horror Soft – 1992

Have you ever wanted to be Elvira’s boyfriend?

Okay well preteen me absolutely wanted to be Elivra’s girlfriend, but if wishes were ponies…

The sequel to the (also) impossibly difficult CRPG, Elivra: Mistress of Evil, The Jaws of Cerberus is set in a horror movie studio. Elvira has been taken prisoner by Cerberus who wants to steal her magical powers.

You (Elvira’s boyfriend) have to save her. You might also be totally worthless.

You’ll have to fight and puzzle-solve your way through a horror studio that is so damn haunted all of the props have come to life!

Spooky!

It’s the perfect vehicle for an Elvira story. It’s campy exactly how it needs to be, and it’s also (to quote dear friend Colin Spacetwinks) “bastard hard.” I’ve never saved Elvira. It’s that damn hard. But I haven’t stopped thinking about it in over twenty years.

2. Gabriel Knight 2: The Beast Within – Sierra On-Line – 1995

I love the FMV era. Don’t listen to the haters. The experimental leap game devs took into cramming grainy, heavily mosaicked, over compressed low resolution video into every genre they could, populated with talented, big name talent and the absolute worst of community dinner theater actors, was breathtaking.

There were a lot of choices, because I knew I wanted to include a nod to this weird time in games. The fight came down to this and The 7th Guest, but in the end, it had to be Gabriel Knight.

Abandoning the weird, low-key (and not-so-low-key) racism of Sins of the Fathers, The Beast Within sees the titular hero in Germany trying to solve the violent murder of a young girl (and escape from writer’s block). He’s a big boy Schattenjager now, and he’s still atrocious at it and needs his plucky sidekick Grace Nakamura (who fucking rules) to save his ass constantly.

There’s a moment in the game where you have to dub an earlier conversation with a double cassette recorder to trick a zookeeper, and let me tell you, it’s just fucking magical.

It’s a murky, icky-looking game. It controls like shit. Especially now. The video clips never quite hang together, and the set design and script range from genuinely inspired to disastrous.

But at its heart, it’s a truly wonderful werewolf story that weaves in Wagner, Mad King Ludwig, and exhaustively researched lycanthropy lore. And when it comes together? It’s the kind of magic that makes you believe in the medium in ways that the most expensive AAA blockbuster can only dream about.

[Writer’s Editorial Note: So apparently David Hyde Pierce isn’t in this game, and yet somehow both one of my best friends and I have held this belief for years. But there’s no record of it on IMDB. Memory is strange, huh?]

Also, it’s extremely gay.

Like, so gay.

Werewolf gay.

1. Manhunter: New York & San Francisco – Sierra On-Line – 1988 & 1989

Manhunter: New York is the first game that genuinely blew my mind. Crashing into a gently post-apocalyptic, alien cult conspiracy body horror neo-noir at the tender age of 6 will do that to you.

If you’ve played other Sierra games from the era this will feel like a colossal departure. Operating on a rudimentary point and click system, with the occasional arcade sequence, and a shifting, but typically first person point of view it can often feel like it shares DNA with MacVenture and Japanese adventure games than something like King’s Quest.

The world of Manhunter is gritty, weird, oversaturated. It’s populated and overrun with floating eyeballs called the Orbs control humanity. You, a Manhunter, work for them as basically a narc (it’s a living). What starts as a murder investigation rapidly unfolds into a They Live-esque conspiracy thriller. It might be one of the most visually impactful games I’ve played, both in its time and since.

And like other Sierra games of the era, the death screens are an absolute delight.

Please, save and die often. It’s worth it.

Manhunter: New York is followed by Manhunter: San Francisco, a straight sequel that builds on the body horror aspects and dodgy arcade elements, but remains every bit the commanding adventure game.

If there’s one true sadness it’s that San Francisco ends on an outrageous cliffhanger, and now the property of Activision (who has no interest in reviving a bizarre cultish adventure game from the late 80s even if the original team did — fuck you, Bobby), so we’re never getting more.

But maybe that’s the way this bizarre, broken, and imminently devourable franchise should die…clinging to the side of a UFO flying high above the ruins of the San Francisco Bay Area.

And if you just pick one of these games to explore this Halloween: Play Manhunter. I implore you.