A Quiet Place: The Road Ahead (Saber Interactive)
THIS week we have a brace of budget boo-sims perfect for giving your sparkler-singed thumbs a workout over the witching season: one based on a blockbuster movie franchise and the other from a blockbuster Hollywood studio.
Keep it down, please, as first up is A Quiet Place. Despite being riddled with plot-holes, the original movie offered enough Hitchcockian tension to spawn two sequels. Now, The Road Ahead promises to take gamers to the hush hour with a standalone tale set before the events of the film, but with the same key to survival - shut your trap.
Following asthmatic, pregnant student Alex Taylor through a post-apocalyptic world plagued by Death Angels, gameplay boils down to hoofing it from A to B as softly as possible. They may be blind as a bat but our alien foe can hear the grass grow in a low-budget creature-feature that apes the earshot-avoiding gameplay of Alien: Isolation.
Every drawer and door will creak lest you move with all the agency of a rheumatoid pensioner, while there’s a comical amount of debris to navigate - not to mention gallons of yellow paint daubed on key routes.
When it clicks, The Road Ahead is genuinely panic-inducing – especially when playing with your microphone enabled, which alerts the Death Angels to real-life sounds (and makes that absolute rascal of a fart potentially deadly).
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Still, this is a largely linear, stealth-heavy experience that can only be recommended to the film’s most die-hard fans.
Fear the Spotlight (Blumhouse)
FROM Insidious to the Purge franchise, horror-mongers Blumhouse have been cranking out low-budget genre fodder since 2009′s Paranormal Activity. Now the fright factory is chasing that sweet videogame coin with a newly-minted games division – and their maiden effort is a throwback to the 90s heyday of survival horror guaranteed to pollute your britches with fear.
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Dark doings are afoot at Sunnyside High, and when a dalliance with a Ouija board goes wrong, bookish Vivian Singh and her goth pal Amy Tanaka end up at the mercy of a monster as they uncover the disturbing truth behind a fire that engulfed the school’s production of Phantom of the Opera.
Like Silent Hill with stabilisers, Fear the Spotlight boils the bones of PS1-era horror down to a nostalgic stew that gamers of a certain age will sup with delight. With no combat, Vivian must avoid the thousand-watt stare of a symbolic monstrosity with a theatrical spotlight for a head while solving classroom-based riddles.
And while rather short, a post-credits bonus doubles your fun with a brand-new quest, set in Amy’s home and leaning into Japanese horror.
While Fear the Spotlight’s visuals are deliberately old-school, with a fuzzy telly grain and wavy 3D environments that look like you’re playing through a gas leak, its brilliant sound design and card-carrying voice cast are head and shoulders above anything the PlayStation era delivered. And with a £15 price tag, you haven’t had this much fun on a shoestring since playing conkers.
An indie gem backed by Hollywood clout, Fear the Spotlight delivers a timely – and pocket-friendly - dose of spooky vibes for Halloween.
