- [Shannon] The Haunted PS1 demo disc
not actually a physical demo disc,
is a collection of 17 games, some more polished and finite,
some more unfinished and clearly in-progress,
all in the style of PS1 horror games,
and all available for download for free.
- Hey, kid!
- Who, me?
- Yeah, you, dummy!
You wanna play some cool video games?
- Yeah.
I wanna play games.
- [Shannon] The itch.io page for the disc reads
"Roused by the crackle of static,
"a lingering sense of dread crawls across the floor.
"You sit alone in your room.
"A dimly lit memory repeats in your head.
"17 demos too horrible to describe keep you from your bed.
"Each one is a personally crafted nightmare.
"You've tried to tell others, no one understands.
"A CRT you don't remember owning flashes to life.
"Frozen in place you look upon the flickering screen
"to spy a dismal, bloodied scene.
"A cracked and faded jewel case sits close beside.
"A pale grey plastic box sits in front,
"emitting a low whirring noise.
"Will you take to the controller
"or let yourself be taken over?"
I'm going to talk about each of the 17 games individually,
including my feelings about both the original release games
and some of the games that were significantly altered
with a later update, but before I do any of that
I have to say that this is a triumph.
This is amazing.
This is so cool and so much fun,
and is such an exciting sampler
of what is available right now as far as weird and engaging
and independently produced horror games.
I initially saw that Bro-gone Hackett and Modus Interactive,
two of my favorite developers
of weird and beautiful short horror games,
were involved, which piqued my interest,
along with just the concept of a PS1-style demo disc
and how much people I follow on Twitter
were talking about it.
And I'm not as familiar with anyone else involved,
but I was pretty immediately converted
to being a fan of a lot of these developers
even after playing, just, like, a 10-minute demo they made.
I'll get to it later in the review,
but I loved Dread Delusion so much
that, as soon as I was done playing it,
I backed the creator's Patreon
to get updated versions of that game
and to be able to play it longer,
just as an example of how cool
the games on the demo disc are.
I also want to say that, while I am going to be honest
about how I felt about all of these games
and am pretty critical in some of my assessments,
please take into consideration
that every one of these games is cool as hell,
this whole project is cool as hell,
and I have so much respect for everyone that worked on this.
And if you play every game all the way through,
you are getting hours of completely free entertainment,
all of which was made with sincerity and a clear love
of classic experimental and horror games.
My criticisms are more comparing the games with each other
than to any big budget triple-A titles,
and I tried to be fair in my assessments.
And the fact that some games in the collection
are much more polished or more fun to play
or more emotionally affecting than others
does not mean that you shouldn't play all of them.
They're right there, and they're free,
and they're all weird and creative,
and you might as well play them.
I'm going to talk about the games
in the order they're listed on the disc.
I know there's a secret game somewhere on the disc,
but I haven't found it and played it yet,
and I didn't want to cheat to find it
or spoil it if I did, so I won't be covering it.
So ...
A Place, Forbidden has a very pronounced
and well-established atmosphere:
you can practically smell the old books and mold,
and it feels dusty.
It gives the sense of a place
that is actively degrading in front of you.
I wasn't a fan of the puzzles in it,
but I certainly admired how well its setting was conveyed,
and some of the images in it were shocking and creepy.
Dread Delusion is, to me, the most technically impressive
game on the demo disc.
It's an open-feeling world full of grain,
garish neon colors that I loved
and that were used very effectively, ghosts, skeletons,
cruel gods, death, paranoia, oppression, and fear.
It has such a sense of scale
and so many stunning, gorgeous views.
It's not like a ripoff of any Zelda games
or of Zelda gameplay mechanics,
but it reminds me of a Zelda game
in the rush I get when playing it,
that feeling of adventure,
of exploring and uncovering weird small mysteries,
only in a darker and more cynical and more upsetting world.
It's brilliant, and I am so excited to eventually play
the full version of the game.
It's delightful, and I would highly recommend it.
I wanted to like Dead Heat, and I certainly liked
some of its basic conceits.
It's some kind of noir-style detective game
where one of the detectives is a zombie, maybe?
But it was really glitchy
and had some basic design and accessibility problems.
The way the text populates on the screen is distracting,
and the plain color text blends
into the background way too much.
I also found the text sound kind of grating.
I had trouble with the controls and with even understanding
how I was supposed to interact with the game.
The updated version had some kind of issue on launch
where I couldn't select anything
that I was only able to fix by launching
the older version of the game in a windowed mode,
which carried over and fixed the issue.
The updated version is definitely less glitchy
and seems to have more content to it,
but it still felt unpolished and confusing
and like a lot of ideas were just kind of thrown together.
There are filters you can switch between
to give the feel of different eras
to the visuals of the game, which is neat,
but, like a lot of this game,
it just seems to have been added in because it sounded cool,
not as part of any kind of cohesive or polished idea.
But, of course, this is a demo.
I bet the finished version of this game,
if they pull off everything they're going for,
will be really cool, and the developers seem aware of,
and apologetic about, the fact that it's unpolished,
and it's entirely possible
that I just didn't understand the controls
and missed out on what I was supposed to be doing.
It could still be on me, and you should still check it out,
but the bad AI and hard-to-read text
and other glitches and issues
definitely hampered my experience with this game,
and I would have preferred something simpler
and less ambitious that better accomplished its goals.
Effigy did remind me of old school FPS games,
and it has a well-established sense of wide scale
and a unique setting.
The only aspects of it I found frustrating
were imprecise controls getting in the way
of me completing time-based puzzles
and the fact that I spent a lot of time on this game
for the ending to just kind of trail off.
Again, yes of course, it's a demo.
I'm not expecting a grand, polished narrative.
But a lot of games on the disc
have a pretty clear arc to them,
and while I liked Effigy,
I wouldn't have spent as much time on it as I did
if I had known it would just trail off at the end.
Erasure is one of the more experimental games
on the demo disc.
It has a unique sense of humor
and it's a weird, abstract, eerie twist
on standard sci-fi themes around simulations
and maybe the morality of manipulating them.
I liked it a lot.
Fatum Betula--
I'm not even gonna look up how to pronounce that.
Is beautiful and frightful.
It's a game of grief and dreams and imagination.
And with many games on the disc,
but especially with this one,
there are none of the constraints of commercialism
or needing to market to or appease an audience.
It made me wonder what old games could have been
if they'd been approached in the same way.
Not that there weren't weird experimental
dreamscape nightmare games on the PS1,
just that there could have been more of them.
This game made me retroactively reassess my view
of the entire retro PS1 aesthetic.
In games as artful as this one,
the aesthetic and use of tropes from those old games
all become tools to reclaim a chance to make art
that could have existed if commercial interests
didn't influence console games so heavily.
It's that engaging and weird and haunting and beautiful.
My only complaint is some of the writing
seemed a little bit pretentious.
Small complaint though.
I think it is my favorite game on the disc.
I don't expect it to be everyone's favorite;
there are certainly more complex
and technically robust games
that are just as beautiful here, like Dread Delusion,
but weird, small-scale, creepy, charming, grief dreamscapes
definitely appeal to me in particular.
Filthbreed is one of the few games on the disc
that doesn't fit the PS1 aesthetic.
Not that the aesthetic is lacking.
The game is creepy, and the filthy lens effect is cool.
The game has a sense of humor to it,
and I liked occasional reminder
that there's a world outside of this gross, dingy setting,
given by beams of daylight coming in through windows.
And the cult narrative and cow skulls
and gross dingy feel gave the game a True Detective vibe.
I absolutely hated the jumpscare death animation, though.
It was not scary; it was annoying.
Also I thought it was funny
that the game's icon is just a gun.
Heartworm's description is a very overt Silent Hill homage,
and the main character looks like
a Resident Evil character or a Laura Croft type.
The game's credits are really creepy,
and some of the shots and scenes in it are creepy as well.
The game definitely has potential,
but the fixed camera angles
and the style of controls it used were frustrating,
and the mental illness angle in horror games like this,
to me, it gets old super fast,
and it's just kind of cliched and boring.
I really don't like that approach or that angle,
especially when it's used in kind of like
a very basic, standard way.
In Somnio is described as an attempt
to recreate the developer's dreams as games.
I loved some of the choices the developer made
in portraying these dream-games,
like the way that the ground movies in the second game.
The surreal succession of vignettes
reminded me of the old browser-based game 99 Rooms.
This whole game was scary and felt haunted,
like it was instilled with pure dread.
(dripping)
(screeching)
- [Garbled Voice] Somebody was murdered in this room.
It's fuckin' haunted, all right.
- [Shannon] And really did resemble what it feels like
to dream and to have a nightmare.
One of the strengths of a lot of the games on the demo disc
isn't that they're scary, though some of them are,
but rather that they're really unique,
surreal little explorations of dreams and feelings.
In Somnio was really cool.
That's definitely one of the ones I would recommend.
Here's my first set of notes
on the first release of Killer Bees, verbatim:
Hardcore filter.
VHS mode can't see shit.
Reminds me of PT.
Didn't get super far.
Kept getting killed by bees.
Can't tell if gun does much.
And I have to say out of all the games on here
that got updates, this was the biggest improvement.
I went from being frustrated and confused
to really loving the updated version of the game.
It's a unique concept executed very well
and with unique gameplay that is never spelled out for you
but is still intuitive.
I'd rather not describe any of it
because I found the act of discovery fun in and of itself,
but I will say you're exploring a weird building,
and there are, of course, killer bees.
The game operates with its own weird logic that is original
but easy to follow, and there are a lot of flashes of images
with really disturbing implications.
The sound design is also great and very realistic.
Some of the aspects of this game are very stylized,
but the soundscape you're walking through feels very real.
And even when the game is not actively threatening
your character, it's still menacing and creepy.
This went from being one of the most frustrating games
on the disc, to me, to one of my favorites
and is a great example of a simple but unique concept
executed flawlessly, and it's really fun and unsettling.
You can also choose between PS1 mode and VHS mode
for visuals, and while I liked both,
I did like VHS mode more,
especially after alterations with the update
that made the game easier to see and play.
Neko Yume, or cat dream, is, as I understand it,
an homage to the game LSD Dream Emulator, but with cats?
And maybe referencing Yume Nikki?
I haven ot played either of those games, so I don't know.
But I love the work Modus has done in the past,
Sanguine Sanctum especially,
so I was excited about playing this one.
I was a little frustrated when I started this game,
because I wasn't sure of what I should do
or of how I was expected to interact
with the world it presented,
but then I had a lot more fun when I realized
I should just goof off and see what I came across.
The game overall is very charming and funny,
and, I know I keep using this word
to describe games on the disc,
but, yes, it's also very weird.
I laughed a lot at this segment,
which gets the game's tone across pretty well.
(quirky music)
(meowing)
(rocket rumbling)
(meowing)
Ode to a Moon has a very cool title screen
and a striking color palette,
and I liked how it shifted its atmosphere with VHS effects.
It's a spooky game that uses sound well,
and I liked the way its 4:3 aspect ratio was used.
It has some lovely landscapes as well.
One problem I had was that
it was kind of easy to get lost in the game,
and I had trouble being able to tell
where I was going a couple of times,
like in different segments of the game.
I still really enjoyed it, though.
Orange County is a horror game where you're on a skateboard,
and I found the controls kind of confusing and unintuitive.
Dying in this game is scary, though.
As far as I could tell,
the objective is to ride around getting different drinks,
trying to not get hit by cars?
There's a lot of creativity in the concept and presentation,
and it's worth playing just for how unique it is,
but I found it kind of frustrating and never really got it.
It never really clicked with me
what I was supposed to be doing.
At least, my experience trying to play
all these games all the way through,
or close to all the way through, to review them,
the more difficult to understand what was happening
or what was expected of me, the less time
I wanted to spend on a game
trying to just figure out how to interact with it
before moving on.
When a game is in a big demo disc like this,
I think focusing on something that someone can get into,
play, and then move on,
not that you should make your game disposable,
but just like, it's one of 17 games.
If I'm trying to play the whole demo disc,
I don't have time to sit here and learn
some kind of really, really complicated control scheme
for a game that I'm gonna play for like 15 minutes.
I just preferred games like Fatum Betula
which were weird and mystifying in content
and in how to progress the story
but super easy to understand how to play,
or games like Killer Bees that are more challenging to play
but still pretty quickly clicked for me,
to games like Orange County or Dead Heat
that I had trouble even understanding in the first place.
Sauna 2000 is wild.
My biggest complaint is that it was super glitchy for me,
with subtitles lagging behind audio
and glitches actually preventing me from beating the game
or seeing what was going on
while some really wild stuff was happening,
so I had to keep replaying the game,
trying to avoid the glitches,
to actually be able to complete it,
which kind of broke some of the atmosphere for me.
But even though it was one of the most problematic games
on the disc for me gameplay-wise,
it was still one of my favorites.
From the music to the game's sense of humor
to the mounting sense of dread,
I loved the concept and I loved playing it.
And regardless of technical problems, it ruled.
The basic conceit is that you have to start up a sauna
by chopping wood and collecting water and so on,
and then something weird starts happening.
It's surprising and funny and creepy,
and I really enjoyed it.
Snowy Castle was the only game on the disc
where the proportions felt a little off.
I don't know if it was intentional,
but my character felt a little short
or like the scale of the environment was off.
The game was somewhat atmospheric,
and I did like the little weird mysterious story it had,
especially how it ended:
you walk around an old castle in the snow lighting candles.
But especially for the outside candles,
some of them felt like I was just mentally
criss-crossing the map, like going through the scenery
to light candles out of obligation
versus the sense of exploration you feel
while inside the castle.
But even then, it's definitely a fun game
that executes a simple concept well.
I liked Tasty Ramen's title screen
and I thought the color palette,
out of all of the games on the disc,
felt the most accurate to PS1-era kids games,
like the aesthetic was a very accurate homage
not necessarily to old horror games
but old wacky kids games, especially from Japan.
The game itself, though, is what I would refer to
as an anxiety simulator rather than a horror game.
You walk around collecting keys trying to avoid
a patrolling ramen mascot that kills you if it sees you.
This game got an updatte to balance its gameplay,
and I did consider the updated version
more forgiving and more fair,
but it still isn't something I'd play
on my own time for fun.
I really like dread-soaked atmospheric horror
rather than a game that just makes me anxious,
but that's a subjective assessment,
and I still did really appreciate
how well this game executes what it set out to do.
It's still neat.
My first impression of Until Biglight
is that it is gorgeous and weird.
You play a mouse traversing the underbrush
with all these canted camera angles
and little mouse establishments.
Pretty quickly, though, I found some problems with the game.
Until Biglight is overtly anticapitalist, which is cool,
but the way it's handled is kind of clunky and obvious.
The game has too much dialogue,
and I'd rather that same information
be conveyed more concisely
and in a way better suited to the medium.
And you're very much railroaded
as far as what you can do in the game,
which I'm normally fine with in games like that.
I like point A to B walking sims
and weird little barely interactive experimental games,
but it does give the thin illusion of choice
that falls apart pretty quickly.
The visuals and the representation
of a little capitalist hellscape mouse world
run by evil cats are both fantastic,
but I'd definitely want to see the dialogue
tightened up a little in future versions.
Okay, there's all 17 games.
I really enjoyed playing this.
I can't recommend it enough.
I think at this point a lot of people come to my channel
for recommendations for weird, independent art to check out,
and this is definitely one of those.
Although, this already got a fair amount of attention.
It's not like it's a super obscure collection of games,
but I figured a lot of people in my audience
wouldn't have heard of it.
And it took me a while to review it,
especially because I wanted to play the updated versions
of the games I had already played before they updated 'em,
and I wanted to go a little bit in depth on every game.
When final versions of these games come out,
for some of them I'll probably do a full review.
I could definitely see myself doing
a full review for Dread Delusion,
which already has so much going on with it,
even though you can tell it's barely complete,
as far as the scope of that game goes.
I was surprised at how many of these games
were more surreal than horror games.
It doesn't feel like they were mis-marketed;
it was just a pleasant surprise to me,
although most of them were both.
It was also weird how much a lot of the games
kind of fixated on Japanese culture
and had Japanese characters in them.
I don't think it was offensive or problematic,
and it makes sense, because PlayStation
was a Japanese console, and a lot of the games
that people would have played growing up
were originally in Japanese.
It was just something that kept coming up again and again,
and I thought it was funny, or that stood out to me, rather.
Anyway, thank you for watching.
If you enjoyed this video, please consider
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And, thanks.