There is nothing better than being scared in company, so we compiled a list of scary titles that are also multiplayer.
“For those who are afraid, all are noises”, Sophocles
Fear is “an emotion characterized by an intense unpleasant sensation that is caused by the perception of a danger, real or supposed, present, future or even past”. It is a primary, pulsating and visceral emotion that manifests itself in all animals in nature, including humans. And within fear, its maximum expression is terror.
Touch the Terror
There are those who hate it, those who avoid it and for whom the slightest sequence, image or passage that evokes a ghost, an anima, a zombie means looking the other way, changing the channel, closing the book. But there are also those who adore it, who enjoy that primal feeling that puts the body in tension and sharpens the feelings. And one of the best ways to experience it, even more than film or TV, is through video games.
And it is that the interactive component of a video game is the key. You are not a mere spectator, but a participant. You manage, control and decide or react to what happens. You kill, flee, die, save, convict … Today is October 31 -which also falls on Saturday this year-, and although in Spain there will be no parties or street costumes or deals or tricks or anything due to the current situation we live in, it does not prevent being able to spend ‘All Hallows Eve’ or the night of all the souls at home enjoying a good horror game.
But although there are those who like to shut themselves up to be afraid alone, the idea of doing it as a couple or a group is very attractive and attractive. Because if we share the fright, the terror is less, and we have someone next to us. And whether right next to it locally, or remotely through online, playable experiences are not lacking for us to fear in company, to share the Terror.
Therefore, and to complement articles like the one we brought you this week about psychological horror games, today we are going to review a few titles so that you can have fear in cooperative, terror in multiplayer, in a mixture of new and classic, of survivals of 15 years ago and titles that come out just tomorrow, consoles and PC.
Shall we start?
Phasmophobia
We started strong, with which many of you will have in mind. Every year and around this time a scary game emerges that becomes the favorite, the one that begins to earn all the visits on YouTube, viewers on Twitch because the youtubers and streamers with the highest profile are hooked on it and hooked on its public. And the 2020 one is Phasmophobia, one of the most original horror indies we’ve seen in years.
What is it about? One type of reality that is not usually lacking on VOD platforms is that of investigators of the supernatural, ghost hunters popularly speaking as the delusional Ghost Adventures. And that’s what you and 3 other friends are in Phasmophobia: a team of researchers who must establish contact with paranormal entities that inhabit different places, from the typical 3-story US house to remote haunted farms. The success of its creators is to implement a simple but effective gameplay and an original point.
There are objectives, for example taking a photo of the ghost, or getting to establish contact by calling him by his name and asking him questions by entering a room alone. It is the latter that gives life to the games, since the microphone of your team is used to talk to the entity, while the rest of the teammates wait. And that one of them is looking at the cameras in the van while watching his companions play the type from afar and pass them **** without being able to do more than talk to them on the Walkie and tell them when the red bar of the EMF meter goes off great.
Add all this to it: different types of ghosts, each with its ‘counter’ and its strong point; different ways of locating them – there is a kind of ‘Tobin Guide’ that we have to consult to survive-; gadgets to measure the temperature of a room, record psychophonies; EMF paranormal activity meters; two types of communication between users: directly from close-up, from afar through Walkie talkies -which the entity can hear-; crucifixes in the style of the Hammer movies, and a priceless online cooperative in which everyone can be scared, scared and laughed.
Okay, graphically it is a potato, but the experience is so fun and original, that it certainly surpasses the graphic deficiencies and is right now one of the viral games of the moment, especially in the month we are in. And you know, if a colleague is captured by the entity and falls dead, THE LAST ONE TO LEAVE THE HOUSE PAYS THE BILL.
Until Dawn
A game that was cancellation meat at the time, Until Dawn surprised us by resurfacing for a later generation converted from a curious survival horror driven by the Move sensor on PS3 to the ‘Slasher’ version of the David Cage formula on PS4. At the beginning a Single Player experience, in our Reviews we recommended playing it with friends at home and doing that classic that is “passing the controller”, turning the single player experience into a “Party horror game”.
It is simply to pass the command, because the game is still Single player, but if there are several of you at home and each one takes care of 1-2 characters and controls them at the moment their scenes begin, you will have an ideal multi for him. 31. Especially because its playability is very open, and even if you have not played a game in your life, you will be able to play with no more problems than knowing which are the buttons on the remote.
Obscure 1 and 2
16 years old has the next game on this list. In 2004, in 6th Generation plan, Survival Horror was in its golden stage, flying high and dropping one gem after another, one masterpiece after another. And in the summer of 2004, a rookie French studio called Hydravision decided to try their luck with a survival game that also endorsed something that we were tired of seeing in the movies, but never in the video game: Teen Slasher in high school.
Parodic as well as serious, effective and hilarious, the mix of US horror with European production resulted in a story much closer to HP Lovecraft and Buffy The Vampire Slayer than to Urban Legend, Cherry Falls and co. And it is that 14 years later, although graphically it has aged a lot, you have it on Steam along with its sequel and maintaining its best asset: a cooperative mode to play doubles that is amazing. As well as his intro to the beat of the punk song Still Waiting by Sum 41.
In itself it is a survival horror witness of the time, with a game of preset cameras and gameplay based on exploration, puzzles and gunplay – or melee attacks too. New in its day was a basic Crafting system that allowed lanterns to be added to weapons to destroy each creature’s shield of darkness. And as we always carry more than one character at the same time – each has their own skills – the two deliveries allowed us to connect a second command in an immediate ‘drop in drop out’ Coop. Local coop yes, no online, in case you are already opening Steam.
The Dark Pictures Anthology: Man of Medan and Little Hope
Following exactly the same formula as in Until Dawn, Supermassive Games found in Bandai Namco the support for its horror anthology that was born last year with Man of Medan, and continues just with the recently released Little Hope that we analyze here. An ‘interactive drama’ with a limited control scheme but a huge narrative load, which benefits from posing the user a series of quick decisions along with exploratory moments and QTE events. Underneath without a doubt Until Dawn, Man of Medan is still an ideal experience for these days, and in fact a must, since unlike the previous one, The Dark Pictures has a fabulous multi component.
And it is that both, Man of Medan with its ghost ships and sea terror, and Little Hope with its witches and ‘horror folk’, offer an online cooperative to replay the campaign with a friend. Called Joint History, the grace is that there are times when the game’s plot separates the characters and leads them to travel different paths, thus complementing the story, since each player will go through a different area than the one the other is going through. Each of the 2 players can stop their game whenever they want, but beware, if you don’t notify the other and do so in the middle of a ‘delicate’ moment, the game annoys them.
As if that were not enough, the two titles offer another mode called Movie Night: Designed for 5 players, Movie Night Mode is played with a controller and with each player embodying one of the 5 characters. When it’s your turn, you take command and tackle your character’s part of the game, and then pass it on to your friend. The scares may be diluted between 5, but laughter and having a good time are guaranteed. And yes, it is the same as Until Dawn, but implemented in the game.
Resident Evil 5, 6 and Revelations 2
More than a horror classic, Resident Evil is a pioneer, a founding title that gave birth to the genre. At present, it is great to see the two currents that exist right now: on the one hand, the remakes of the first installments, real brutalities at the graphic level, and on the other the new formula that RE VII brought with him from the first person. But let’s go a little further back.
Since Resident Evil 4 established a new canon, the following numbered installments followed, and there we have the controversial Resident Evil 5 – with an absurdly cycled Chris Redfield – and the ambitious Resident Evil 6, which brought Chris and Leon Kennedy together in screen. The best thing is that both games have, apart from their multiplayer, a Campaign mode that can be traveled alone or in cooperative, and also online or also locally using the split screen system on the same TV, offering the user 2 ways to spend it with a friend.
This same Coop was also implemented in the episodic Resident Evil Revelations 2, although only locally – it does not have it online. All three games are available for current consoles, and their coops are still hilarious, apart from going with a colleague killing zombies and other Umbrella monsters is what is distilled on Halloween.
Friday the 13th
The normal thing in a horror game is to embody the victim, not the murderer. But the best thing that the controversial (at the time) adaptation of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre of the Atari 2600 did was precisely let us play as Leatherface and pixelate innocent virgins. And it is that embodying the beast is more fun than being one of the beautiful or beautiful without a doubt. How to do justice to one of the absolute icons of the horror genre and icon of popular culture? How to give Jason Voohrees the virtual cache he deserves? Apart from how Mortal Kombat X did it, betting on a proposal in equal parts.
Released in 2017 with many bugs and performance problems, and already with several patches in these years that have stabilized its performance and brought balance, Friday the 13th is not a simple survival in which we are one of the victims of Crystal Lake, but a Asynchronous online multiplayer for 8 players in which you can be one of the 7 campers who must escape the camp, or be Jason and have a great time hunting scared survivors. Be that as it may, it’s a joy to enjoy those ultragore ‘fatalities’ executions.
If you are one of the victims, you must be smart to get the necessary objects and create your own escape route from Crystal Lake in collaboration with other players, and you can only ‘stun’ Jason to temporarily stop him. If you are the protagonist, you will be able to perceive your prey. And also do it by wearing the different Voohrees outfits throughout the saga and touring the most iconic locations. And there is nothing more Halloween than Friday the 13th, without a doubt.
Dying Light
In a sub-genre as oversaturated as the zombie in video games, coming up with a new formula, something that makes your proposal come out of the rest was and is complicated. And Techland, out of Dead Island, did it in 2015 with their Dying Light, a title that a priori seems like another zombie FP, but with enough new features to make it dynamic, agile, fun and original. Because for those who do not know, Dying Light mixes two disparate elements a priori: survival horror and the wildest Parkour.
The game’s formula offers you an open world to jump around like Ezio Auditore or Faith, only in the middle of a zombie apocalypse, while you search for and build weapons, flee from enemies by day and hide from super-predators at night . If you feel like jumping and also bursting the undead this Halloween, Dying Light, versioned for current consoles as well, has a multi-player cooperative for 4 players both to pass the campaign and to complete different challenges -if there are even beach buggies to run over zombies at will.
But the icing on the cake is the Be the Zombie mode, in which one plays the Night Hunter, a powerful and fast infected who must hunt down the other players, infiltrating their games and they must destroy nests and survive the attacks. Updated by its creators during these 5 years, in the most recent DLC we can even fight with medieval weapons, and they even do crossed events with Left 4 Dead.
F.E.A.R. 3
In every list of scary games, the first F.E.A.R., that FPS that killed us with a heart attack, who we thought was more action and Bullet Time than anything else, can never be missing. The first installment was the presentation of the terrifying girl Alma, who grew up in the apocalyptic sequel. The saga closed 9 years ago with the third installment, an F.E.A.R. 3 that came with none other than the hand of John Carpenter -Halloween Night, Vampire $, In the Mouth of Fear- in the cutscenes and co-written by Steve Niles (30 Days of Dark).
Although it certainly lowers the level of scares compared to previous installments, its creators pulled out of their sleeve a campaign that can be played entirely in cooperative, both local split screen and online. The bad thing is that if you do not know the previous installments, it will be difficult for you to follow the plot. The good thing is that the coop is very effective and fun, with two different characters in terms of skills and weapons.
Left 4 Dead 1 and 2
An obligatory reference, if we talk about scary and multiplayer games, we must talk about one of those who established the formula. It is true that it has rained a lot since that first Left 4 Dead that brought a proposal as irresistible as hunting zombies playing in Coop a 4 – who remembers the cries of the Witch? -, in which collaboration to survive is maximum. Even more so with friendly fire activated …
Although this October, Left 4 Dead 2 has already been 11 years old, last September it received a new update, The Last Stand, a great and the latest update created by the game’s update community and approved by Valve itself. In fact, it’s been the first new content since 2012, and it adds a ton of new features: new weapons, maps, enemy types, dialogues, and even a campaign. I said: 11 years and still alive.
Dead by Deadlight
Another asymmetrical multiplayer that benefits from its two distinct sides, Dead by Deadlight immerses you, or rather has you trapped in purgatory and hunted by a sadistic murderer. As a survivor, you must start the generators that control the exit of the map while dodging an enemy that is coming for you to sacrifice and offer yourself to the gods of the game.
Dead by Daylight allows players to choose which side to play. While Killer offers more varied and entertaining gameplay, with characters like Michael Myers from Halloween, Ghostface from Scream, Leatherface from The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Demogorgon from Stranger Things, and Freddy Krueger from Elm Street joining the original monstrosities, escaping the horrible scenario as a survivor can be surprisingly funny.
You have various weapons and abilities, but even if you have played several times, the ‘jumpscare’ moment of when the killer finds you and the rivers of blood in the game still make it ideal for these dates.
Call of Duty: Zombie Mode
What is Call of Duty, a militarized FPS saga, doing in this report? Well, earn a little hole thanks to one of its modes, ultimately the best known. And it is that what began as a joke in the ultraviolent Call of Duty: World at War by Treyarch – ultimately one of the studies that has been in charge of the saga -, became one of its most canonical elements. In fact, Treyarch crafted a story around their ‘Nazi Zombies’ throughout the CoD Black Ops tetralogy, and fans are wildly waiting for that new zombie mode in CoD Black Ops Cold Ward due out next month.
For the memory we have the zombie mode ‘Five’ from the first Black Ops, which played with American History to introduce us in the 60s to President John F. Kennedy, Richard Nixon, Secretary Robert McNamara and even Fidel Castro collaborating together to clean the pentagon of an undead putrid attack. Even in other games like Advanced Warfare we have seen the mythical Bruce Campbell face the ‘exo-zombies’ with famous actors like Rose McGowan, John Malkovich, Bill Paxton.
Even Elvira, a true icon of terror and American popular culture, has participated in these DLCs. And posts to recommend, the zombie multiplayer of Black Ops III with the Chronicles Zombies DLC pack. The remastered 8-map pack brings back memories of old iterations of Zombies mode, taken from World at War, Black Ops, and Black Ops 2, with each map redesigned for the occasion using the Black Ops 3 graphics engine.
As always, they are not all that they are, but we do not want to dismiss this without mentioning other horror titles with coop and multi:
- Hunt Showdown, Crytek (2019)
- Deceit, Baseline (2017)
- No more room in Hell, Steam Beta (2013)
- Last Year, Elastic Games (2019)
- White Noise 2, Milkstone Studios, Steam Beta (2017)
- Killing Floor 2, Tripwire Interactive (2016)
- Stay Close, Blind Bird (2016)
- Cry of Fear, Team Psykskallar (2012)
- The Forest, Endnight Games (2018)
- Desolate, Hype Train Digital (2019)
- Last Year, Elastic Games (2018)
