Top 5 Free Horror Games as Terrifying as Slender

Top 5 Free Horror Games as Terrifying as Slender

Recently, a new indie-developed psychological horror game called Slender was released and it become immensely popular on the Internet. It received many positive reviews on gaming websites around the web, with phrases such as “pure horror” and “absolutely terrifying” being used to describe the game. Kotaku even has an amusing compilation of videos showing people getting scared when playing Slender. If you liked playing this game and want to re-live the experience, but with a different game, here I’ve compiled a list of games that all have the same terrifying and claustrophobic atmosphere similar to the one in Slender. They shouldn’t hurt your wallet either, because they’re all free.

Before we look at the other games, let us take a quick peek at Slender for the benefit of the readers who haven’t heard about this game.
Slender is based on the mythical creature called Slenderman that was originally conceived in a thread devoted to creating fake paranormal photos on the Something Awful Forums. It’s a slim, elongated figure with a featureless white face and root-like protrusions and he appeared in the background of black and white photos.

The game begins with the player in a forest at night. The goal of the game is to collect eight notes scattered throughout the woods with the Slenderman stalking behind. The player is equipped with a only a flashlight with a battery which must be conserved. There are no weapons and the only way to survive the game is to avoid Slenderman.
The game is currently in beta and is available for Windows and Mac.
Now the alternatives.

Hide

Hide is a very simple game with very simple low-resolution, retro graphics. The game drops you off in the middle of a snowy forest. Your goal is find five signs scattered across a map while avoiding being found by an unknown monster that is prowling the landscape. Just like Slender, there's no way to physically fight back against your pursuers, so your only form of defense is simply to run and hide. The soundscape consisting of footsteps on the snow, a distant church bell and heavy breathing does a good job in creating a terrifying atmosphere.

Hide is available for both Windows and Mac.

Penumbra

The Penumbra trilogy is another immersive survival horror game very similar to Slender. The game was originally developed as a tech demo to demonstrate the capabilities of the company's HPL Engine. The demo was so well received that the company decided to develop it into a full commercial game. Although Penumbra is not a free game, the original tech demo is still available and is entirely playable for free.

Penumbra follows the story of Philip, a thirty-year-old physicist whose mother recently died. After receiving a mysterious letter from his supposedly dead father, Philip follows a series of clues that lead to him to a mysterious location in uninhabited northern Greenland. The harsh cold forces him to take shelter in an abandoned mine. Unfortunately, the mine's entrance collapses as he enters it, and he is forced to move deeper inside.
The mine is entirely dark. Philip is equipped with a flashlight which he must operate sparingly to conserve battery and a few glow sticks that he picks up on the way. Even with the flashlight, the darkness engulf around you and together with your fears. The game's main focus is on exploration and classic adventure game object interaction: examining and collecting objects and using them to solve puzzles.
You should definitely checkout the other games of the series - Penumbra: Overture, Penumbra: Black Plague, and Penumbra: Requiem, and also Amnesia: The Dark Descent from the same developers.

SCP-Containment Breach

In SCP – Containment Breach you play a worker who is trapped inside a containment facility during an accident in the building and must find a way to escape while dealing with several scary entities. The creatures only move when not in direct line of sight, but to prevent you from keeping the creature always in view the game incorporates a blink-meter that forces players to blink.

RockPaperShotgun writes: “Repetitive, dark and ominous, it aimed to have players wishing for something to happen in order to break the monotony while also desperately hoping that nothing would happen because the only possibilities were awful.”
Incidentally, you cannot escape or beat the game at the moment. This is because the game is the alpha development stage, and currently has no ending. SCP-Containment Breach features a randomly generated map layout so you can replay the game as many times you want.

Candles

This is another indie-developed horror game that uses darkness and spooky sounds to keep you constantly on edge. Your house has been taken over by dangerous imps while you were away and now you need to move around carefully, lighting candles to scare them away. Like Slender and other games mentioned here, Candles has the same tense and creepy feeling. The game is relatively short game, and has a couple of glitches, but it’s still a nice take on the horror genre.

The Corridor

From IndieGames: “In The Corridor, the player wakes up from a sense of unexplained anxiety, leave their room, and find themselves in a dark, long hallway. The hotel slowly turns into an endless maze of walls that forebode something sinister. They then must go deeper into the darkness to escape.”
The developer's website is in Russian, but the game narrates in English and should be played with a headset. The game is unfinished but the current build is playable and should give players a good fright.

Kerbal Space Program: Build And Launch Your Own Rocket

Kerbal Space Program is a fun and engrossing space simulation game that puts you in charge of an alien space program. Your job is to build rockets and help the aliens, called Kerbals, get off the planet and into space. The game is still under development, and as yet there are goals and objectives. It’s pretty much an open sandbox where you are free to build anything you want and fly it to anywhere.

The core of the game lies on rocket design. If you want to build a worthy spacecraft capable of successfully launching the aliens into space and safely returning them back to their planet Kerbin, you must carefully plan each stage. The tutorial is a bit long winded but it explains the basics nicely. Instead of reading the tutorial, you can watch the tutorial videos which will walk you through the steps in less time.

You start at the Rocket Assembly Building where the designing takes place. Various pre-fabricated modules such as liquid fuel engines, fuel tanks, solid fuel rockets, landing gear, wings, steering fins, struts etc are available. Each part comes with a short description and specification. To build a rocket simply drag the parts and slap them into each other. There is no size limitation on how big the rocket can be and no budget to limit your design. You can build simple single stage rockets to more complex 2 or 3 stage rockets. You can start with simple goals like building a rocket that doesn’t tumble out of control and then move on to challenging tasks like getting into orbit, or landing the spacecraft on one of the two fictional moons (Mün and Minmus). Or just let your creativity go wild and build bizarre shaped rockets and watch the fun.

Once your rocket is ready it’s time to head out to the launch pad to try out your creation. If the rocket is well built it will take off without incident. Once in flight, you can maneuver the rocket by controlling the pitch, yaw and thrust with different keys. There is no auto-pilot as such but there are what they call “S.A.S. Module” or Stability Augmentation System that help stabilizing the rocket. Without S.A.S. Modules it’s pretty hard to control the rocket, so make sure you install them when you’re building the rocket.

Overhead displays lets you monitor each stage of the rocket, the rocket’s altitude, speed, bearing etc. If you placed a command module into the craft you’ll have space crews – three Kerbal astronauts. Their faces and reaction, visible during the entire trip, seems to periodically alternate between elation and fear.

The game supports extensive end-user modification, allowing craft parts to easily be built and implemented by players. As a result, the game enjoys a significant modding community, with hundreds of modifications released to date. These modifications to the game add to functionality, allowing craft such as land vehicles or airplanes to be created far more easily than with the base game.

Kerbal Space Program is currently in the alpha stage of development, and can be downloaded for free. However, there is a newer updated version that can be purchased for $18. The free version of the game will always remain free but will never be updated.

Rovio Releases New Game “Amazing Alex” for Android and iOS

Rovio’s phenomenal success, the Angry Birds, now has a new brother - Amazing Alex. Released today on the Android and iOS platform, Amazing Alex is a physics based puzzle game that includes 100 levels, but unlike its sibling this time you have to cough up $0.99 cents to own it. However, a trial game with 16 levels is available for Android.

Amazing Alex employs a gameplay different from Angry Birds: instead of punishing pigs, you have to create Rube Goldberg-style machines by adding different parts like shelves, boxes or scissors starting with simple contraptions in the early levels to more complicated additions later on. While Angry Birds was a trial-and-error game throughout all the different versions, Amazing Alex requires creativity and planning to solve each level.

Amazing Alex was not developed by Rovio from scratch. It used to be called Casey's Contraptions when Rovio bought it from the game developers Mystery Coconut last year. They touched up the graphics and introduced some Angry Birds-inspired structure.

An exciting aspect of Amazing Alex is that users will be able create their own "challenges" and share them with others.

Amazing Alex is available now for 99 cents for the iPhone and $2.99 for the iPad. On Android based devices it is available for 99 cents or $2.99 for the HD version. Rovio says that the game will be available to Windows Phone, Mac, and PC soon.

[via TheNextWeb and Softonic]

JogoBox: Download, Organize and Play Thousands of Free Games

If you love playing casual, arcade-style games, you must be familiar with sites like Kongregate and Newgrounds. And if you love these gaming portals, you will also love JogoBox. But unlike Kongregate and others, JogoBox is not a website – it’s a desktop program that gives you access to thousands of games that are typically found online and played in browsers. The difference being, with JogoBox, you can download these games to your computer, organize and play them offline whenever you want. Aside from casual games, JogoBox also offers several PC-based freeware games such as America’s Army, Sid Meier’s Civilization, Super Mario, Command and Conquer, UFO: Alien Invasion and more.

The initial download of JogoBox is 363KB, but this is only the pre-installer, which further downloads some 55MB of additional files when launched. After the installation you will be taken to the main program.

JogoBox’s main screen appears very much like a game portal. There is a “Featured games” section at the top, which I’m sure, will be updated every once in a while. There is another “New games” and “Popular games” section underneath. At the top left there is a navigation bar that takes you to a curated list of games organized by game genre such as Adventure, Brain, Fighting, Girls, Racing, PC Games, Skills and Sports. The nomenclature is a little offbeat and out-of-way from the traditional Action/Strategy/Puzzle type of categorization you are familiar with, but they are easy to identity and even intuitive in some cases. For example, if you want Cake Mania type games out of your list, you can totally avoid the Girls section.

You can also utilize the Search tool to quickly find games you want to play.

When you select a game JogoBox shows you a short description, a few screenshots and gameplay controls, along with system requirements. To play the game, click the Play Now button, This will start downloading the game. You can see the download size only after the game begins to download. I would have preferred to see it before downloading, but the download can be cancelled if it appears too big, for instance.

All games are downloaded and saved within JogoBox’s installation directory, but you can change the location of the download from the application setting. As soon the game finishes downloading you are ready to play. JogoBox keeps track of all downloaded games which you can access from the “My Games” section. You can even create shortcut to the game and place it in your desktop so that you can play them without opening JogoBox first.

JogoBox is fantastic game organizer that can easily replace Windows 7’s default game manager. Besides, it works on Windows XP and Vista, apart from Windows 7.

Other Game Dowloading Tools: Tiggit and Games Downloader

Tiggit: Download and Install Over 300 Free Indie Games

The Indie game scene has seen a surge in the last few years primarily due to availability of new online distribution methods and social media for publicity. There are probably thousands of indie games developed by now, some of which have gone on to become an Internet phenomenon such as Minecraft. It’s hard to keep track of how many such games are released in a year because of the very nature of Indie games. One way to keep yourself abreast, if you are a fan of these small games, is to follow blogs dedicated to Indie gaming. Another way is to install Tiggit.

Tiggit is a an open source game installer and launcher, like Steam. The biggest difference, aside from the fact that they're not operated by Valve, is that Tiggit was built to serve only indie games. According to the website, Tiggit's mission is to help users find all the awesome indie games that exist 'hidden' around the internet. As of now Tiggit only provides freeware games and demos. So there will no sales or anything.

Currently, Tiggit features over 300 freeware titles and 30 odd playable demos. The games are categorized according to the genre; single-player and multi-player games are also grouped separately. You can sort the games by rating (although it is not clear from where the ratings are sourced) and there is a search box for easy finding.

Each game is accompanied by a short description and a screenshot. A one click install button ensures that you don’t have to manually visit the game’s website to download it. Tiggit does not require users to register an account. You simply install the program the launcher and enjoy.

Also see Games Downloader, a similar freeware games downloader.

Drawception: Humorous Game Based on Broken Picture Telephone

Broken Telephone or simply ‘telephone’ is a kids game, in which one kid whispers a short sentence to another kid, and that kid turns and whispers it to the kid sitting next to him. This goes on until the message is passed through dozens of kids and by the time the message gets to the last kid, it’s a so different from the original message that it has everyone laughing hysterically. The game has no winner: the amusement comes from comparing the messages with one another. Broken telephone is played around the world and is known by various names in different parts.

Sometime back, I wrote about an online version of the telephone game called Broken Picture Telephone. The online variant is slightly different from the original game. Since you can’t whisper to an online participant and passing the message by typing would kill the very purpose of the game, in Broken Picture Telephone, the message is passed around using pictures and text, altering between the two. You either receive a message in drawing or in text (done by the previous player) which you have to draw using rudimentary drawing tools or describe what you see, depending on whether you receive a picture or text. The message gradually starts deviating from the original as players struggle to get it into a drawing or try to decipher what the previous player drew.

Unfortunately, Broken Picture Telephone is no longer available. If you visit the site you can see a message from the developers promising the return of the game. Drawception is a new game that has come up to take the place of Broken Picture Telephone. The game completes once 12 unique players have participated. Completed games can be browsed and viewed by anyone without logging into the site. And oh, you can login using your existing Google, Facebook, Twitter or Yahoo account, so that is one step less between you and your game.

Players can rate and vote games as well as the gamers. Coincidentally, the highest rated game currently on Drawception is titled Inception, and the results of this particular game is the most stupefying of all.

Browsing through the completed games is such a delight. White boys trying to be Asian women in Africa went awry right from the start. In Batman punching the Easter Bunny, one bad interpretation ruined the entire game. All glory to the hypnotoad made a remarkable recovery towards the end, and in Sexy old lady one mistyped character changed the entire game.

There are other telephone games such as Teledraw, DoodleOrDie and Picturetelephone, but only Drawception is as good and as active as Broken Picture Telephone.

Microsoft Flight Available for Free Download

Microsoft officially released the successor of Flight Simulator X, the new flight simulation game Microsoft Flight last month. Microsoft said the realism and accuracy of the new game will appeal to flying enthusiasts while new types of gameplay will appeal to newcomers. The game is integrated with the Games for Windows Live platform, which allows players with Live accounts to join and host multiplayer sessions. The introduction of Live means that the GameSpy client will no longer be in use.

The game introduces a new model of downloadable content, integrated with the Games For Windows Marketplace. Unlike previous releases, Microsoft Flight was released as free-to-play game and only expansion packs are charged. The core game, which includes the Icon A5 aircraft and the Big Island of Hawaii scenery area, is free to download from the game's website. It can then be expanded with additional content including aircraft, paint schemes, and expansion packs that can be purchased and installed in-game from a central marketplace.

Microsoft Flight features new aircraft, scenery and terrain, a revamped weather engine, and new gameplay elements that users of all skill levels will enjoy. The new weather engine renders more realistic clouds and weather effects, including fog that blends well with the surrounding terrain, which Microsoft's previous flight simulator release, Microsoft Flight Simulator X, was not capable of. The most noticeable graphical improvements are the newer shader models and the use of new DirectX versions. Part of the improvement is more realistic lighting and self shadowing on aircraft, as well as the ability for terrain and scenery objects to cast shadows onto other objects and terrain. The aircraft visual models are also much improved over those of the previous flight simulator releases.