We’re knee deep in the spooky season of Halloween, so of course my mind turns to things that are horror related. Combining this with the fact the new Silent Hill 2 Remake has been astonishingly well received by both critics and gamers alike, those things got me thinking about older horror games. After all, there was a time when survival horror reigned supreme with franchises like the aforementioned Silent Hill and Resident Evil. There was a deluge of horror themed games in the past and, unfortunately, a lot of them are now forgotten and dead.

Well, let’s go raise these games from the dead… in our memories, at least. Let’s go check out just five forgotten horror games from the past!

#1 Clock Tower

Although there’s no doubt games like Resident Evil and Silent Hill caused the boom of the survival horror genre, that didn’t mean there weren’t any games that were specifically made to be scary. One of these games is Clock Tower. This was a point-and-click scary adventure game where you play as Jennifer Simpson, an orphan who was adopted by the Barrows family. As she arrived with other orphans to the secluded mansion, she soon realizes that she and her new sisters are being hunted down my a deformed serial killer.

There are a couple of reasons why the first Clock Tower as well as its sequels aren’t that well-known. For one, the first game was a point-and-click adventure on the Super Nintendo and it was only released in Japan. Future installments were made and, while they were pretty popular, they didn’t pull in the same kind of numbers the Resident Evil and Silent Hill games were pulling. Still, I will say the Clock Tower games, especially the first one, is pretty good at terrifying the player as the main character cannot really fight back and mainly has to get by enemies by finding a hiding spot or running away.

Thankfully, WayForward is developing a full-fledged HD remake of the original Clock Tower. It is slated to be released sometime at the end of the month. Hopefully, this will attract a younger audience who may have never heard of the game before.

#2 Fatal Frame II: Crimson Butterfly

I do wonder what happened to the Fatal Frame series. This used to be a franchise spoken in the same breath as Resident Evil and Silent Hill. This is especially true for the second entry of the franchise, Fatal Frame II: Crimson Butterfly.

Twin sisters Mio and Mayu are walking through the countryside when Mayu spots a red butterfly and follows it. Mio chases after her sister and they both wind up in an abandoned village. Mayu then gets lost, leaving Mio all alone. She then finds an old, dilapidated camera and it turns out she needs it as it’s the only weapon she can use against the spirits of the villagers who still haunt the area.

Maybe because it was still the early days of survival horror but Fatal Frame II: Crimson Butterfly was spine chilling when I played it all those years ago. Although I did play the first game, Crimson Butterfly seemed to amped up the production values in everything from the graphics to the actual scares. That actually could be the problem as future entries in the series never hit the same heights the Fatal Frame II reached.

#3 Rule of Rose

Among all of the games here, Rule of Rose may be the game you may have heard of but most probably never played. This is because of all the unfounded controversy that revolved around its gameplay.

Jennifer is a young amnesiac girl trapped in a kind of sorority of weird girls. As the newest member of the sorority, she is subjected to various kinds of abuse. Throughout the game, Jennifer will regain some of her memories and finally make some sense of her actual position in life.

Yeah, if that summary sounds really weird, that’s only because Rule of Rose is a really weird game. Focused more on psychological horror than anything else, it’s the story that really pushes it ahead of a lot of survival horror games that were released at the time. Unfortunately, due to some mincing of words, Rule of Rose became embroiled in a controversy as it was allegedly deemed too brutal and horrific to be published. Rule of Rose has since gained a kind of cult following as, because of all the controversy, it has become one of the rarests games out in the collector’s market.

Frankly speaking, as someone who did play Rule of Rose, the gameplay did feel clunkly. I do think it’s a great horror game mainly because of the story alone. It’s not exactly the most frightening game out there but, when you do get to the twist, it does hit just right to earn a spot on this list.

#4 Eternal Darkness: Sanity’s Requiem

While most horror games are scary because of the macabre story or the frightening monsters, Eternal Darkness: Sanity’s Requiem adds something else to the formula as the game has a tendency of breaking the fourth wall to add to the scares.

Alexandra Rojivas finds out her grandfather was murdered. As the police have no leads, she decides to return to her grandfather’s home and conduct an investigation into the matter. There, she discovers the Tome of the Eternal Darkness, a book bound with human skin. The book tells the past adventures of people through history but it also tells about her own destiny.

Eternal Darkness: Sanity’s Requiem is very different from a lot of the more traditional survival horror games as it’s much more Lovecraftian in tone than anything else. This does lead it to be one of the more unique horror games out there. However, the most unique thing about the game is the central gimmick of the “sanity meter.” As previously mentioned, Eternal Darkness breaks the fourth wall by making the player acutely aware they are playing a video game instead of trying to immerse you. As your character takes damage to their “sanity meter,” the game will start doing strange things. Some effects are benign, like tilting the camera slightly. Some are a little more devious, such as telling you are deleting all of your save game data!

Although you would think this would make you less immersed in the experience, this did the opposite as it made the player themselves think they were the ones going mad, not the character in the game. This made this one feel much more distinct and gave it a really different flavor than the other survival horror games out in the market back then and even today.

#5 Phantasmagoria

Phantasmagoria is definitely a product of its time. After all, while video games tried to be more movie-like, developers just didn’t have the time nor the budget to compete with Hollywood. But they tried and Phantasmagoria was one of the most decent attempts to create a playable horror movie.

Married couple Adrienne and Don move to the old mansion of a famed magician. Adrienne, a novelist, hopes the new change of scenery will help her overcome her writer’s block. While exploring her new home, she accidentally releases the spirit of the dead magician and, well, you know what happens next.

Phantasmagoria may not look all the scary by today’s standards. But when it was released in the 1995, this was state-of-the art horror! Using digitized actors instead of character sprites or 3D models, Phantasmagoria was a thing to behold in its time. While the acting did get pretty cheesy, it did lend itself to the B-horror genre. However, there were still some rather graphic scenes and the gory makeup was definitely a highlight.

BONUS: Lifeline

Oh, I know what you’re going to say. “Lifeline isn’t a good game.” I would tend to disagree with you. I like to think Lifeline was actually ahead of its time.

The biggest problem of Lifeline is the voice recognition software is garbage. I will concede that. Even when I played it all those years ago, I had to spend so much time just getting the main character to go where I wanted her to go because the game simply couldn’t understand me!

That was then. The poor PlayStation 2 simply didn’t have the processing power to understand vocal inflections and whatnot back then. Nowadays, voice recognition software is much more efficient so wouldn’t playing this game, which primarily relies on understanding vocal commands, play like a dream today?

What is your favorite forgotten horror game you wish gets more recognition today? Let me know in the comments section below!