Halloween picks
LIKE most kids of 80s Northern Ireland, the whiff of candle-singed turnip and the boundless disappointment of indoor fireworks conjure up many a childhood Halloween. Who needs bangers when 10lbs of Semtex is detonating down the street?
Today's commercialised claptrap isn't a patch on the thrill of an old-school Irish Halloween. Bobbing for apples was essentially waterboarding, and if the plastic fumes from a "false face" or coin-laced tart didn't choke you, wearing a bin bag while brandishing sparklers promised a spectacular demise.
Yet while progress has consigned Halloween rhyming and swede lanterns to history, it at least brought in tow an age of videogames with more fear-power than Hollywood's finest. If you're planning to draw the curtains this Hallows' Eve, leaving your glazing to the mercy of Haribo-jacked oiks armed with eggs and bog roll, why not give your goosebumps a workout with my pick of this generation's finest chill-fests?
Zombies probably find Halloween offensive, but no list of gaming frights would be complete without the grim granddaddy of the undead-buster, and Resident Evil's gussied-up remaster still takes some beating as a morgue-load of the blighters await in the Spencer Mansion's architectural nightmare.
For something more 21st century, Resident Evil 4 marked a return to the director’s chair for series creator Shinji Mikami, where players were more likely to receive a pitchfork up the jacksie from its Texas Chainsaw Massacre-inspired hicks than fall foul of a zombie. Slickly packaged and reassuringly cheesy, it would be 12 years before the series found its feet again with the blistering Resident Evil 7.
If teen slashers are more your thing, Sony's Until Dawn subverted their tropes in a way that'd make Wes Craven blush (if his blood was still pumping) as a gaggle of hormonal teens become trapped in a remote cabin with a killer on the loose. Playing out like a choose-your-own-adventure, there's plenty for genre fans to geek out on here.
More low-key, but no less haunting, is Little Nightmares, a 2D puzzle platformer that gets inside your marrow. Mario meets Silent Hill as our young heroine attempts to escape a surreal world stuffed silly with all manner of grotesques in a Grimm cocktail of Dahl, Coraline and Tim Burton.
If your Wii U still chugs, fans of J-horror are well catered for with Fatal Frame: Maiden of Black Water. Proving our Asian cousins know a thing or two about videogame scares, players explore the cursed Mt Hikami with nothing but a camera for protection in a prime piece of poltergeist papping.
Closer to home, London is the setting for Zombi, where players survive an undead cockney apocalypse. Laced with the same cultish feel as An American Werewolf, it boasts all the gore a zombiephile could want as the capital is plagued by cadaverous Danny Dyer-types.
For my money, however, no game has the power to pollute your britches with fear more than Alien Isolation. Set 15 years after Ridley Scott's gut-busting original, players fill the space boots of Ripley’s daughter as she uncovers the truth about her mother on a remote space station run amok with androids and a certain Xenomorph.
The alien is a constant, unscripted threat in this nerve-shredding game of cat and mouse set amongst 70s analogue technology that's guaranteed to have you shaking like a defecating dog.
