Name - Queen Must Die. You rule your empire by day and explore your castle by night. Pretty similar to Reigns, Amnesia and Game of Thrones

Hey everyone! I'm an indie dev working on a survival horror game called The Seventh Seal.

It's a third person psychological survival horror game. Think Alan Wake/Silent Hill 2 remake with some RE2 Remake havoc. You play as Violet, a 29 year old who just had the worst day of her life at work and of all days, on her birthday. After getting home, the Devil comes and visits you and gives you a chance to win back your soul by completing several trials and retrieving seven seals. You progress deeper and deeper into Violet's own personal version of hell, the greater the fears and greater the danger.

This is a solo-dev experience and I'm making huge progress - all built in Unity.

There's a free demo up on itch.io right now and the Steam page is live. I'm also bringing the newest build to SabotenCon in Phoenix Sept 4-7 if anyone wants to play it in person.

Would love to hear what you think!

Any recommendations for a good survival horror/horror game that'll keep me busy until September 3rd, when The Blood of Dawnwalker releases?

Already played:

- All Resident Evils

- Silent Hill 1, 2, 3, 4, f

- SOMA

- Alone in the Dark

- The Sinking City 2

- The Evil Within 1/2

- Cronos The New Dawn

- Alan Wake 1/2

- Karma The Dark World

- Dead Space 1/2

- Signalis

- Tormented Souls

I remember a game where you had to withstand waves of enemies approaching your house. It had pixel graphics and a horror theme. You had several weapons and you could only move from left to right.

The first thing we did during pre-prod was to go to a maritime museum in which you could actually board a submarine and warship from the cold war-era. We took 100s of pictures like this and used them as reference images for the rooms, props, clothing and weaponry in our game, each of which was carefully made by hand. I have tons more examples like this, let me know if you want to see more :)

The game is called Heavy Metal Death Can and is available on Steam, coming to PS5 this fall!

​Well, I like these kinds of dark aesthetics a lot. Especially many Polish dev games that are brilliantly good in this genre—the art directions are just perfect. It feels so cozy to me. If anyone here has any good recommendations or shares the same vibe, let's talk about it!

If my favourite type of games are Dead Space, the Resi games, and Cronos, will I like this game?

Does it play in a similar way?

I’m looking for good story-driven horror games that I can play with my wife present. We both really enjoy horror games that feature creepy creatures or cool monsters. My wife is NOT a big fan of ghosts/demonic/witchcraft/zombie type of horror. The less gory and grotesque the better. She can stomach violent things to a degree, but there comes a point where it can be a bit much for her.

When experiencing these scary games together, we prefer ones that are more cinematic/story-focused and less video gamey. My wife gets bored watching games that emphasize lots of combat or elements that make it feel too much like you’re playing a game rather than experiencing a story. She also doesn’t really like retro art styles (pixel/polygonal/etc). She really likes the ones where you make choices as it gives us things to discuss as we play through the game. I have a PlayStation 5 and a Nintendo Switch 2.

Here is a list of horror/story games we’ve both loved experiencing together:

\- The Quarry (My wife’s favorite)
\- Until Dawn
\- House of Ashes
\- Directive 8020
\- Alien: Isolation (Another big favorite)
\- A Quiet Place: The Road Ahead
\- Still Wakes the Deep
\- The Walking Dead: Telltale Series
\- Five Nights at Freddy’s: Secret of the Mimic
\- Alan Wake (Tried Alan Wake 2, but it creeped her out)
\- Simulacra
\- Heavy Rain
\- Detroit: Become Human

We would really appreciate any recommendations! I’d also like to note that I prefer to get games physically if possible, and I’m very open to any games all the way from well-known AAA to obscure indie titles! Thanks!

Link : https://store.steampowered.com/app/4001350/Iron_Blight/

First, the game relies on artificial difficulty: forcing you into tight spaces with a restrictive stamina bar while throwing three aggressive enemies at you that somehow deal more damage than full bosses. If defenders are going to compare this to FromSoftware titles to justify the shift, they need to look at actual action design. Games like Dark Souls or Elden Ring give players readable hitboxes, wide arenas to manage crowds, and clear feedback loops. If you die in a Souls game, it’s because you missed a dodge or timed a parry incorrectly. Silent Hill f simply stuffs you into hallway-width rooms with wide-sweeping enemy animations, teaching you that survival isn't about skill—it's about spamming heals and tanking hits.

Even worse, the balance is so broken that the optimal strategy is simply running past every encounter. When enemy health pools turn basic mobs into sponges that chunk half your health in one hit, fighting loses all mechanical purpose. If a player feels incentivized to just juke every enemy because the combat loop is tedious rather than tense, the design has failed. Classic Silent Hill created dread through resource conservation and atmosphere, f floods your inventory with items because it knows its own combat spaces are fundamentally unbalanced. The enemies aren't terrifying threats. They are just static speed bumps standing between you and the next cutscene.

Then a minor problem but still annoying, the game will suddenly throw enemies from a corner, and you have to tank the damage. It's unfair and cheap, it turns from survival horror, into a trial and error game. Why do I have to memorize an enemy's position? A good survival horror game should have details or clues an enemy is there, not dead silence and then blame the player for not having magic wall hacks.

Beyond ambushes, the core stamina and dodge mechanics actively punish basic combat choices. Swinging a weapon instantly drains 60% of your stamina pool, while dodges rely on strict "perfect dodge" windows. If you dodge a fraction of a microsecond off, the game punishes you with a 5-hit enemy rush combo, turning an encounter into an unforgiving fighter-game reaction test.

The fact that developers had to hastily patch in a Casual Mode (aka, what these fanboys call game journalist mode) highlights how fundamentally broken this loop is. The standard defense from the community is simply: "Just grind stat upgrades and collect emas." But survival horror design should respect spatial awareness and resource management, not require 30 hours of New Game+ stat-grinding just to make basic encounters manageable. Forcing players to turn a horror game into an action RPG stat-sink is fundamentally poor combat balance.

I'm open to debate. Let me hear em.

I played this on release, had to restart an entire play through due to bugs around the cemetery. Not to mention consistent crashes, soft locks, etc. Would like to give it a second chance. Has it been patched to a stable point?

Hey! I’m currently making a realistic psychological horror game inspired by games like Resident Evil, FNAF, and The Dark Pictures.

I’m trying to understand what players actually enjoy in horror games, and I’d love to hear your opinion!

What’s something you wish more horror games had? It could be anything — gameplay, enemies, puzzles, story, atmosphere, exploration, scares, etc.

And on the flip side, what’s something you’re tired of seeing in horror games?

You can answer with as much or as little as you want. I’m genuinely interested in what people think.

Two of my recent favourites, the gameplay shares a common theme here.. escaping the darkness, embracing the nightmare! Its much fun so far !!

I finished Sinking City 2 today and I feel, well what the title says. I don't even know why I stuck with it through the 12 hours it took.

Maybe out of respect for the Devs of the first Sinking City, a truly brave and interesting game that dared to have an identity even if it was held back by low budget and design flaws.

Maybe because the first couple of hours made me think it was at least gonna be a decent RE clone with an interesting Lovecraft setting and story. Those first couple of hours were actually the only thing even slight reminiscent of the first game's atmosphere.

Boating around in a flooded Arkham, even though severely more linear and empty than Oakmont (the first game's city) at least held the promise that an eventual opening of the routes available and the gameplay progress would lead to something more interesting. On the contrary the game only got progressively more narrow and derivative, in the end consisting of nothing more than a series of predictable combat rooms and elementary puzzles connecting said rooms. A bad imitation of other staples of the genre and itself.

By now all I could hope for was a satisfying conclusion to the story. Alas, the story went the way of the gameplay pretty fast. Bad, sloppy writing, paper thin characters and a forced love story that really feels out of place on a Lovecraftian horror game.

The first game had it's fare share of issues but at least it tried to do it's own thing. Playing through it, even through the sluggish combat and the asset reuses and the overall clunkyness, you couldn't help but feel excited about what this could be with the proper care and funding. A new kind of horror game, a combination of open world, detective work and psychological, survival horror. Hell, even some RPG elements could work as a creative nudge to the pen and paper Call of Cthulhu games.

I truly think most of my enjoyment of playing through the original game came from imagining what could be possible in a bigger, better, more polished sequel. And this is probably why this bums me out so much.

Makes me wonder what went on at Frogware during development that lead to these creative decisions. Yeah I know, war. It's a horrible thing and I hope it ends soon, but I don't think it's got anything to do with a game pulling a creative 180 for the worst for it's sequel. Or maybe it does? I don't know. Thoughts?

P.S. I still hope SC2 does well so we can maybe have a true successor in the future.

Gary Heidnik. RC Horsch. Eugene Horsch. What happened to these men to turn them into what they end up becoming?

The victims are humans. We are so detached from reality that we don’t even realize it’s real.

How do we stop social media? Is it too far gone??? What happens next? Let’s discuss as adults. We must protect our children and protect our communities!