Children's Horror Games

Still Scared: Talking Children's Horror

"Unloved dolls in the forst of bloodied light, at once familiar and alien"

In this episode we talked about Psy High by Rebecca Slitt, published by Choice of Games in 2014.

If you want to follow us on instagram we are stillscaredpodcast, and our email address is [e-mail]. Intro music is by Maki Yamazaki, and you can find her work at her website, and music on her bandcamp. Outro music is by Joe Kelly, and you can find their music under the name Wendy Miasma on bandcamp. Artwork is by Letty Wilson, find their work at toadlett.com

Transcript

Ren: Welcome to Still Scared: Talking Children’s Horror, a podcast about creepy spooky and disturbing children’s books, films, TV and games — today we’re talking about a selection of children’s horror games spanning the last thirty years or so, and going into a bit more depth about the text adventure game Psy High. Enjoy!

Ren: Good evening, Adam!

Adam: Ahoy ahoy there!

Ren: I teased at the end of the last episode that we might be branching into a new genre this episode, and we are!

Adam: Yes, you dangled the branch of possibility before them and it wasn’t just a plastic bit of old tat, it was a resplendent branch of truth.

Ren: Mmhmm, yeah. Somehow this is the first time we’re talking directly about games, which seems a bit unlikely, but it’s true. Maybe there aren’t that many children’s horror games.

Adam: Yeah, I don’t think there are. In preparation for this episode I did some very cursory research and I looked up ‘best horror games for kids’ and frankly I was disappointed and troubled, because some of these games are really only horror in as much as Monster Valley High toys are horror.

They’ve got the skin of a horror game — like Plants Vs Zombies, for instance. Yeah, there are zombies staggering about like zombies, but they might as well be postboxes or robots, or bits of old sausage, it doesn’t matter. They’re slow, that’s what makes them zombies, but they’re not there to be scary. And then there’s other games that I really don’t think are kids games, so Little Nightmares I saw crop up?

Ren: Oh God, that’s not for kids!

Adam: That’s what I thought! I’m sure some kids have played Little Nightmares, but I dunno. Not only because the visuals — so if anyone doesn’t know Little Nightmares, it’s a stealth platformer where you play a little elf-like child trying to navigate these creepy environments and avoid these horrible, hulking, galumphing, shabby-looking murderous chefs and other giant figures.

Ren: And it has a very troubling atmosphere, it’s very intense.

Adam: It’s a very intense game and the way they did the animation, I think it’s that each of the body parts of the animated models were animated individually, almost like you used to do in Flash. So they all look weirdly disarticulated. They don’t quite move in the way you want them to move. So they’re really scary and there’s some very dark thematic undercurrents. I wonder if people just think of them as kids’ games because they have the word ‘little’ in the title, and puppet-like graphics, and people think puppets are for kids.

However, I started my teacher training and I heard a reference to a legitimate kids’ horror game in an English lesson earlier today, as it happens. This isn’t the first time I’ve mentioned kids games, a couple of episodes back I mentioned that I was in a primary school, and that kids had tried to engage me in a conversation about who would win in a battle: Pennywise from Stephen King’s It, or Huggy Wuggy. Huggy Wuggy is a razor-toothed teddy bear from Poppy Playtime, which is very popular with kids and is what you might call a mascot game, and we’ll come back to those.

But today I didn’t hear a reference to Poppy Playtime, but a different reference. The kids in the class were discussing Ghostbusters, and one of them said: ‘They have these vacuum cleaners that they suck up ghosts with,’ and a kid in the row behind said ‘No, that’s not Ghostbusters, that’s Luigi’s Mansion!’

So Luigi’s Mansion is a series that I think started on the Gamecube but are still being made, in which Mario’s much-maligned taller brother goes around a spooky mansion hoovering up ghosts. So that’s what I think of as children’s horror — it’s committed to its horror theme, it’s set in a haunted mansion, and they really have a ghost train like feel. You’ve got this creepy, haunted environment where ghosts pop out and they look a bit gooby. There’s nothing really unsuitable for kids, but it’s clearly going for that spooky atmosphere.

Ren: Yeah. Where do you stand on Halloween Pinball?

Adam: Do you mean a specific pinball game or just in general?

Ren: Well, I’m thinking of a specific pinball game that I had on Windows ’95 or ’98. I enjoyed it very much.

Adam: I mean, is it as scary as the 3D maze screensaver?

Ren: Well, what is? Frankly.

Adam: I remember the UFO pinball, so it must have been similar. Was it graveyard themed?

Ren: Yes, I think it had gargoyles and spooky midi music.

Adam: I do like spooky midi music. So the thing is, you said that there aren’t many horror kids games, but the tricky thing is that back in the 80s and the early 90s when games were moved out of the arcade and into people’s homes, I get the impression that distributors thought of all games as potentially for kids, no matter how inappropriate. Because video games are a great way of marketing films that kids would have no chance of seeing in the cinema to impressionable young minds.

It took a while for the rating system to be bought in for games, and I think there’s still this idea to a certain extent, but particularly when we were kids there was the idea that games were for kids, so when something like Grand Theft Auto came out you did have parents buying it for their kids, because they didn’t have a sense of it being inappropriate.

So what’s tricky is that it’s not like with fiction where you have children’s books, and young adult’s fiction and adult fiction. I don’t think it’s been so easily demarcated with video games. But I mentioned Luigi’s Mansion and Nintendo as major players in the console market have tended to market their games to children. Obviously they expanded into a family market with the Wii, but if you think of the Nintendo flagship games like Mario or Zelda they tend to be marketed towards a young audience.

But there were some games on the N64 that while not horror games, were definitely horror-adjacent. I don’t know if you even played Banjo-Kazooie?

Ren: No…

Adam: So I re-played a lot of these games on the Rare Replay on the Xbox over lockdown. So Rare games were a games studio from up north, possibly Yorkshire, and they made some really big N64 games like the Goldeneye game, for instance, but they also had their own properties like Banjo-Kazooie, which came out after Mario 64, which had a bit of an uneasy, haunted atmosphere. A lot of those early 3D games did. Banjo-Kazooie was a straightforward fun game, with Banjo the honeybear and his bird pal Kazooie, and they go round to various lands collecting puzzles pieces, there’s a kind of haunted house zone with a cemetery but it’s not very creepy. Now Banjo-Tooie, on the other hand, came out at the same time as Rare were working on Conker’s Bad Fur Day. This was an odd, unsavoury game where they tried to make a game aimed towards adolescents with a cutse-y aesthetic but then lots of smutty jokes.

Ren: That’s interesting. I inherited an N64 and games from my sibling a while back, and me and Maki went to trade in a bunch of these games and Conker’s Bad Fur Day ended up fetching about £50.

Adam: I’m not that keen on it. It’s got some interesting voice-acting, if you look on the Rare Replay of it, the guy, Chris something who designed the game, he’s quite worse for wear at this point, to be honest. He’s clearly a man who’s been a hard drinker through a lot of his life, and he talked about how Conker’s Bad Fur Day was not autobiographical, but he put a lot of himself into it. So I think the slight degeneracy of it, and the way that you have a lot of characters who are drinking too much or partying too hard, it comes across. He does some great voice acting in it, but it’s a weird game.

Anyway, at the same time Rare were doing the sequel to Banjo-Kazooie, called Banjo-Tooie. And it’s odd because Banjo-Kazooie has this fun, light-hearted feel and I started on Banjo-Tooie and I was playing Rare Replay with my partner Antonia during lockdown, and she described Banjo-Tooie as a hauntological video game, and I totally get what she means.

Without getting too academic-y, the idea of hauntology is something that’s eerie, something that feels emptied out and absent, and is kind of haunted by a vision of the future from the past. Which is a strange idea, but I think often early 3D games, have this optimism about the future of video games, but in retrospect look really janky, and they’re often very empty because they only had so much memory to populate these environments. So they often look a bit weird and a bit haunted.

And Banjo-Tooie is really weirdly dismal. It’s still colourful, but the colours have all curdled and turned nasty. So if anyone has seen the Tim Burton Charlie and the Chocolate Factory remake, the colours are a bit like that, or his Alice and Wonderland. Kind of garish but grey and dismal at the same time, so it looks really unhealthy. And it also starts with one of the main characters being killed.

So the first game has a lovable mole called Bottles who has thick glasses, and Bottles gives you hints and upgrades your moves. Bottles gets exploded at the start of Banjo-Tooie and is then a blackened ghost-corpse for the rest of the game, and remains dead. So from the start it has this weirdly negative atmosphere, and there’s lots of meta jokes about how Banjo and Kazooie don’t really want to be doing a sequel, so the tone’s really cynical.

Ren: I’m looking at some screenshots of it, and it’s pretty damn ugly. I mean, N64 games in general are pretty ugly, but yeah, very blocky and brown.

Adam: It’s a very brown game. Another N64 game that was disturbing for its ugliness and bonkers premise was Space Station Silicon Valley. This is a real rare find now, this is a deep dive. The whole idea of this game is that you’re an astronaut with a robot companion and you crash-land on a disused theme park planet. So this planet was an entertainment complex populated by robot animals, but it was long abandoned so all these robot animals have gone completely rouge.

When you crash into it, the astronaut gets knocked out and the robot gets smashed to smithereens but its programming chip flies out and lands in one of these robot animals. So the main mechanic of this game is that you play this chip and you have to jump between these robot animals and inhabit their consciousness, so you’re this parasitic computer chip. Basically. So you have to kill robot animals as this computer chip, then once you’ve killed them jump into their bodies and puppeteer them, bringing them back to life.

Ren: Uh-huh. And it is frighteningly ugly.

Adam: It is astonishingly ugly. It is one of the ugliest games I’ve ever played, it’s horrid. Thanks for repeating that because it is, very, very ugly. Can you describe any of the character designs you’re looking at?

Ren: I can try. There seems to be the kind of head and torso of a bear, or possibly an orangutang, and instead of legs it has a black and red wheel, like a hot wheels car, and it has triangles for fingers, or possibly claws and there’s a lot of googly eyes, unsettlingly round manic eyes, is a theme I’m sensing.

Adam: It’s a very googly-eyed game. Which is true of Rare games as well, maybe that’s the common theme of N64 games that unsettled me as a kid, very googly eyes. There was one more Rare game that I wanted to mention, which was the unfortunately titled Grabbed by the Ghoulies.

Ren: …What? Okay.

Adam: Which might be the reason for its low sales figures.

Ren: That’s a choice!

Adam: It’s a bold move, Rare. That’s also available on Rare Replay and there’s an interactive comic book where you explore a creepy mansion and have to pummel your way through hosts of zombies and ghouls and other undead spectres and spirits. It’s a lot of fun, there’s not so much to say about it apart from the fact that it’s called Grabbed by the Ghoulies. I don’t think they even renamed it for the American market.

If you look at horror games for kids today, they seem to be mostly mascot games, and what I mean by that is games that have a marketable main character or antagonists. And I think the reason for this is the massive, massive success of Five Nights at Freddy’s. So Ren, have you played any of the Five Night at Freddy’s games?

Ren: Nope.

Adam: Do you know what they are?

Ren: Vaguely. I’ll tell you what I think I know. Are you maybe a security camera person or a night watchman or something? And you’re watching lots of screens, and then there’s jump scares because monsters jump up on the screens? But the monsters are like haunted or animate automata.

Adam: Yes, absolutely. You’re the night watchmen at Freddy Fazbear’s pizza place, which is like a Chuck-E-Cheese like themed restaurant with animatronic singing animals. And the idea is that at night they patrol the grounds and try to stuff any unfortunate souls into themselves, where they get crushed by their exoskeletons due to some bug in their system. And these games have loads of lore, so I’m sure that any fans of the Five Nights at Freddy’s games listening are like: ‘No, no, that’s not why they’re doing it — they’re doing it for these complex reasons!’. Because there’s tie-in games, there’s massive amounts of explainer videos, lots of internet lore and lots of these games as well.

And what’s most interesting about them perhaps is that the creator started off making Christian edutainment games, and a friend of his said, ‘Hey, your designs are quite creepy, wouldn’t it be fun if you made a horror game.’ And he did, and has very conflicted feelings I think. He’s an evangelical Christian and found massive success making horror games for kids. I’ve read interviews with him and this has clearly troubled his soul to some degree.

Ren: Oh wow. So, it is for kids?

Adam: It is, and there’s lots of plushies and so on. It’s very popular with kids. And Poppy Playtime is an obvious attempt to cash in on the success of Five Nights at Freddy’s, and there’s a few more games that have this mascot element, like Bendy and the Ink Machine is another one. A few years ago if you went into some toy shops you’d find plastic figurines of Bendy. And another one, which I saw figurines from and was kicking myself for not picking up, because I suspect it was a single run, is Baldi’s Basics. Have you heard of Baldi’s Basics?

Ren: Nope.

Adam: I fricking love it. Well, I say that, I haven’t played the whole thing, but I love the aesthetic because it’s very much a game made by a millennial who grew up playing creepy edutainment games. So the idea is that it’s a maths edutainment game where the teacher, Baldi, gets increasingly incensed and unhinged over you answering maths questions incorrectly or otherwise, and starts terrorising you.

Ren: That sounds fun, yeah.

Adam: And so that brings me, by quite a torturous route, that the games that seem to have creeped us out the most as kids were edutainment games. So, how would you describe what an edutainment game is for anyone who doesn’t know?

Ren: Well, I strongly associate them with borrowing them from the library. You’d have them in CD-Roms in one of those spinning racks. This was the era of CD-Roms. Edutainment and CD-Roms go together.

Adam: Definitely.

Ren: And it would be games that are trying to teach you some maths, or some spelling, or about nature — some are more directly educational than others.

Adam: And some of these you might get in school. My friend Peter says that he spent a lot of time playing The Crystal Rainforest, for instance, at school. I think my school had Granny’s Garden or some kind of equivalent, which had this infamously scary scene at the end if you lose, where you get captured by a witch. And sometimes you’d get games within educational software, right. So Microsoft Encarta, which everyone used for their homework before they had access to the internet, which was an encyclopaedia on CD-Rom, and had a game in it called Mind Maze.

Ren: Did it?

Adam: Yeah! You clearly didn’t spend as much time on Microsoft Encarta as I did.

Ren: I definitely used it for my primary school homework, but I don’t remember the game.

Adam: Well, if you really wanted to test your knowledge in Microsoft Encarta there was a quiz set in a medieval maze, where you had to click through. It did look a bit like that kind of 3D screensaver, but it was pre-generated 3D backgrounds like Myst. Not even that sophisticated, I think they were just still images. But that was a bit creepy.

But there was one edutainment game that you sent me a link to, or a link to a playthrough of.

Ren: So, this is a game called Forestia, a pretty obscure French game from 1998. It’s set in a forest and there’s a benevolent forest Dad called Daddy Oak who sends you on quests, and it’s mostly pretty tame but it has one level where everything gets strange. And this was pretty memorable to me, and I looked it up and found out that it wasn’t just me that it made an impression on because it has an entry on Reddit on r/creepygaming where they linked to this playthrough.

I’ll read the description from user romeowomeo:

“The game is split into different "episodes" or "chapters" as one could call them, that feature different scenarios. In one, it is the big tree's birthday, and he is given many gifts. In another, a siren comes to the forest, and all of its inhabitants are under some kind of spell, hypnotized, until you help her make her way to the ocean.

And then there's The Fire Mountain.

In this chapter, you are transported to an apocalyptic alternate timeline, in which all the scenes have this bright red tint as if they came straight out of a creepypasta, along with an eerie choir that never goes away. A dragon comes to the forest, as well as an evil wizard, and they announce the end of days, as a volcano threatens to erupt and kill everything. All over the forest, you can find dead animals, and if you stand there, their souls leave their bodies.

The best part is that this comes entirely out of nowhere. So far all of the game has had no mention of any apocalypse coming or anything bad happening to the woods. The chapter even starts out pretty normally, with Sam the rabbit calling you to look at constellations. Then, when the next day comes, you're in hell. Just like that.”

Adam: So did this really alarm you as a kid, then?

Ren: I think I enjoyed it. I liked the novelty of it. But I think I was a bit older than some of these commentators, more in the 10-11 than the 5-6 range. It was definitely pretty unsettling. I messaged my sibling, Willow, to see if they had any comments to share with the podcast and they said:

‘Oh my God, the rattle noise as the spirits left their bodies, discarded like unloved dolls in the forest of bloodied light, at once familiar and alien.’

Adam: That was lovely, thank you Willow.

Ren: Yeah, upstaging me on my own podcast!

Adam: (voice distorted and doubling) That’s the Texture of the Week right there.

Ren: Yeah, it made an impression on both of us, that stage.

Adam: I should have asked my brother about his memories, because the edutainment company that produced the most unsettling memories for me was a company called Mech, who ended up being amalgamated into Softkey. But when they were Mech they made too games that made an impression on me: Museum Madness and The Secret Island of Dr Quandry.

So, Museum Madness is probably the most traditionally educational in that it’s set in a museum, but it’s a museum that’s been taken over by a malevolent A.I. So you have to break into the museum at night under the cover of darkness and put the exhibits back together. So it has a bit of a Westworld thing going on, these animatronics or mannequins come to life and think they’re the real historical figures.

So the mannequin of Ben Franklin thinks he’s Ben Franklin, and you have to help him fly the kite to generate electricity or what have you. Some of them are historically themed, and some of them are natural sciences themed and so on. But it has this eerie midi music that marks out mech games, particularly they’re even creepier game — The Secret Island of Dr Quandry.

So, I got you to watch just the first three or so minutes of the game. Can you describe what you saw?

Ren: It was showing me a photo of a gloomy day at a local fairground. It looked really shabby.

Adam: It looks really shabby and rundown.

Ren: And it’s not a good photo, it looks like someone took an offhand photo with a disposable camera. It has a ferris wheel in the background and some of the carriages have been manipulated to shake, and there’s some text that says ‘Come on in! Come to the fairground! Ignore the shaking of the ferries wheel, I’m sure it’s fine!’

Adam: So you go into the fairground.

Ren: Yes, and then you have to chose —

Adam: Well, you’re met by a figure.

Ren: I think I didn’t actually see Dr Quandry himself.

Adam: Well, it has Dr Quandry posing as a fairground barker. And he’s the grubby-bearded magician trixture figure of the game, who curses you to his secret island. But he’s undercover as a humble fairground barker. And he gets you to play this shooting game called Troggle Shoot.

Ren: Yes, there’s three very ugly dolls and you have to hit one of them?

Adam: Yes, I think they’re the prizes. You have to shoot the troggles, which are these gawping-faced creatures and they shatter when you hit them — it’s hard to tell if they’re alive or not. But then you win one of these dolls, and then the doll face engulfs the screen, and the next thing you know you’re trapped in the doll, and you’re on the secret island and you’ve got to answer educational puzzles to escape.

You have to collect these ingredients for a recipe that you win from completing these puzzles, and you have to cook them up in a big pot at the edge of the island. You boil up the soup and then the idea is that the doll’s body breaks apart and you will be returned to your human form. But most upsettingly, the game is on an endless loop.

Ren: Oooh.

Adam: So when you do this — and I have completed it on beginner level, medium level and hard level so this is definitely the canonical ending, which infuriated me as a kid and I tried and tried thinking I could break the cycle — you are just returned to the start of the game, back in the fairground, once again faced with the choice of being imprisoned in a doll. So you’re imprisoned in a doll, you go through all these quite tedious educational puzzles in order to escape, and then you’re just back in the fairground. It’s like the job of learning is never done, you can never escape the educational cycle. This really frustrated me as a kid, I thought I must be doing something wrong, and there must be some ending I wasn’t getting, so I kept going back to this game in the hope that this time I could escape the secret island of Dr Quandry. But I never did, I’m still on the island in spirit.

Ren: I’m sorry to hear that.

Adam: I hope some of the genuine existential angst came across there, because it really bothered me as a kid! And I think I’m going to put some of the music behind me so that people can get the full effect.

Ren: I also have a request that if you can find the sound of the animals bodies leaving their souls in Forestia, to sprinkle that liberally throughout this episode.

Adam: Yeah, so, my step-kids have played a lot of games, and George is not ostensibly into horror but he does like adventure games, so I’ve got him to play games like Monkey Island, that I loved as a kid. He’s been playing a lot of Broken Age, which is made by DoubleFine, which includes some of the people who worked at Lucas Arts, like Tim Schaefer, who was project lead on it. And Broken Age has quite a dystopian atmosphere, or setting.

You play these two kids and one of them is on a 2001-style spaceship, isolated from his parents and forced to go through these asinine kiddy cycles where he has to rescue teddy bears, for example. So the idea is that this spaceship was set up to serve him when he was a little kid, and now he’s a teenager and he still has to do it. And the girl in Broken Age is being sacrificed as a maiden for the maiden’s feast, so these dragon-like monsters come along to eat up the maidens, and the society is completely complicit in that.

So it’s got young adult themes in it, I suppose. And some of those old Lucas Arts games had creepy elements. I don’t want to do proper spoilers, but the ending of Monkey Island 2: LeChuck’s Revenge, is infamously strange and unsettling. It’s such a good twist ending that I don’t want to give it away to people who haven’t played it.

The ending for Simon the Sorcerer 2, which I will spoil a little bit — Simon the Sorcerer is a teenage, sassy sorcerer and you have to battle this warlock, and you end up trapped in his body and he’s in your body, and Simon directly addresses you as the player at the end and says ‘You may be laughing, but Sorded is out there, and he’s going to come into the real world and get you!’ and that worried me a bit.

And I was going to mention Sierra games briefly. They were the rival studio to Lucas Arts, and not really kids games, but maybe the fantasy games were more aimed at kids. You might have heard of Kings Quest? One, Two, Three, Four, Five, Six, Seven and Eight? I think? Three is particularly punishing. The thing about Sierra games is that they would kill you off at the earliest possible moment for really pedantic reasons.

So the early games had a text parser, so you had to type to interact, so you’d come across a tree and type ‘climb up tree’ and get hit on the head with a coconut, fall out and break your neck and that’s the end of the game. You didn’t save, so you’re dead. Police Quest was the worst for this, which hilariously throws you out of the game unceremoniously if you forget to put on your seat belt. So if you don’t type in ‘put on seatbelt’ when you get into the police car. You get lectured by a police officer called Jim, who’s based on a real police officer, and Jim has a leg up on the police cruiser and says: ‘Now, a good cop always puts their seatbelt on when they’re out on patrol. Sorry kid, you’re out of the game!’ It just boots you out.

Ren: Uh… fun?

Adam: Yeah, I would say they’re quite anti-fun, those early Sierra games, they do feel like they just don’t believe in fun. If you want to have fun, no. Come on, that’s not what we’re here for. And Torin’s Passage which was specifically for kids, is quite creepy, because the idea is that you start on the outer crust of this planet, but each world is — within the planet there are layers of different worlds. You have to drill down and there are these different societies and it gets more dystopian and dark as you get towards the core of the planet. And the final one I’ll mention is a game that I never got to play but I think I had a trailer of it on another game, and I’ve never quite got up the courage to play it because I find it so unsettling. But that’s a game by a studio called Amazing Studio, which is another French studio I think, so I don’t know if they’re particularly good at making unsettling children’s games, called Heart of Darkness.

Have you heard of this one?

Ren: No.

Adam: I think this is really forgotten, but it’s horrible. It’s a cinematic platformer, so I think it was made with motion capture, the animation’s really smooth, but you play a small boy whose dog is captured by aliens, and you have to go and explore this alien landscape to rescue your cute dog. And it basically predates the game Limbo by about fifteen or twenty years, and that was notorious for being a game where you play a kid who dies in various horrible ways, but Heart of Darkness is way worse, frankly. Because it really looks like a kid’s game, it’s really quite cute, but as the child you die as really horrid ways. You’ll be munched, and torn apart, your head popped off. It’s not X-rated or anything, it’s just really brutal. I had a trailer of it on a different game, presumably an adventure game, and I think I only watched it once but I remembered it for decades. I only discovered the name of the game a few years ago, but it made such an impression on me.

So yeah, bits and bobs. I don’t know how many of these are technically horror games for kids. But you wanted to do a quick deep dive into a Young Adult text game, I’d say.

Ren: Yes, it’s probably more supernatural mystery than horror, although some routes are more or less creepy depending on the choices that you make.

It’s called Psy High by Rebecca Slitt, published by Choice of Games in 2014.

It is set in a high school where some of the students have recently started gaining psychic powers. You play the protagonist who has a side-hustle as an investigator, and you’re asked to start looking into some kids who are acting strangely — suddenly becoming serious and studious where they were goofy before. You eventually realise that they are being mind-controlled by a device called a vinculum, that the principal Mr Pierce and his sidekick Ms Clay are powering with magic from a vector in the ocean called The Nexus.

You have choices to try and undermine this plan, you can try and destroy the vinculum or reverse its powers — and in most endings you get a prom showdown on a boat, as it is going over The Nexus and Mr Pierce is trying to gain enough power to bring the whole school, or the who region, under their brainwashing regime, where the students who are brainwashed are called ‘model citizens’. And you also have to deal with more usual challenges of high school along the way, like keeping your grades up, trying to get scholarships and deciding who to date.

Adam: It’s a bit like — well, some of its themes made me think inevitably of The Demon Headmaster, but obviously in an American setting and using some of those John Hughes style American high school archetypes.

Ren: I’m curious what route, or routes, you took?

Adam: Well, in my first playthrough I played it very preppily indeed. I was just as hardworking in the game as I was during my own school years, so I won the scholarship and I did uncover the central mystery, and I didn’t cotton to all these teachers brainwashing the school, so I uncovered the mystery and sent them packing. And I dated my best friend, who seemed like quite a wholesome sort.

Ren: Yes, yes.

Adam: And then I started again and tried to play a bit more like a bad kid. How about you?

Ren: I’ve done a few, maybe seven or eight different playthroughs trying to get different endings. I think the creepiest one was the one where I ended up getting brainwashed, and turning into a pod person.

Adam: Ooh, I might have to try that!

Ren: Maki, who suggested this game, said that the first time she played it she was dating her best friend, who — the thing with this game is that the genders and sexualities are flexible on a lot of the characters so you can decide if you want to date girls or boys or both. But she was dating her best friend, who as a girl is called Alison, and Alison became a pod person. But she stayed with her because she loved her.

I’ve never got that ending though, but various things have happened — I’ve sold drugs, I played one today where I ended up getting arrested, not for selling drugs but because I was trying to uncover the vinculum and everyone thought that it was a bomb I had planted, so I went to jail before the end of the story.

I have this memory, because I played it quite soon after it came out, back in 2014 or 2015, and I swear that back then I got a proper horror ending where I exploded the vinculum and Cronenberged my classmates in some horrible way? And I can’t find this ending again, and I don’t know if I imagined it!

Adam: That makes it creepier — like it’s a cursed game with an illicit ending.

Ren: Because that’s what I was thinking, that I would try and get that ending, but I’ve tried a lot of different routes and I can’t get anywhere close to what I remember. So, I don’t know if that is there or not.

Adam: I have to admit that I want to delve more into it now and do a few more replays because I didn’t realise that it branched as much as it does.

Ren: Yeah, there is quite a lot of variety. And even in the showdown at the end, if you get to the showdown on the boat there’s a few different ways that that can go.

Adam: It’s fun. The writing is quite straightforward, it does what it has to do. And I’ve played quite a lot of text games, although more from the early 2000s. I try to keep up a little bit, but I don’t play nearly as many anymore. And there are some amazing writers within the medium, Porpentine, for example can really write. Porpentine can turn an amazing turn of phrase, and I’ve long loved Emily Short’s games and Adam Cadre’s. And I don’t think this is up there with that level of writing, but it’s really nicely designed. And it does convincingly create that high school environment.

Ren: And you can date three people at once.

Adam: Oh gosh, I kept things very simple when I played it. So yeah, I would recommend it, it is fun.

Ren: Yeah, so I think we will come back to games at some point. There is a Goosebumps game.

Adam: I mean we keep circling the Goosebumps and we probably are contractually obliged to do more Goosebumps. And I know there are podcasts dedicated to Goosebumps, but as a fairly long-running children’s horror podcast at this point we probably are contractually obliged to do more Goosebumps. Or Point Horror. But there have been several Goosebumps video games — there was one when we were kids. I think there was a Horrorland one.

Ooh, final recommendation, not really a proper game and only arguably for kids, but my step-daughter really likes it and played it a few years back. And this is yet another example of me thinking that I’ve found something cool, that Matt would like and her being like: ‘I saw that years ago’. Which is ever the way, sadly. But that’s Petscop, which is a series of YouTube videos supposedly recording a Let’s Play of a mysterious PS1 game called Petscop. So creepypasta style, and in reality the guy just made the game for these videos, but it’s this strange game where you’re trying to collect these pets in a pet store, and then you find a whole underground world with very strange happenings.

The plot’s very loose, with lots of troubling subtextual things but the atmosphere is absolutely incredible, it’s really unsettling. Without anything graphic, or any horrible visuals, a lot of it is just done through the sound design, lots of drones, and midi music. I read an interview with the creator and he said that the biggest influence on it was David Lynch’s Inland Empire. So if you imagine a children’s horror game, or edutainment game directed by David Lynch, that’s pretty much what Petscop is. So if you think that’s up your street, try that, and if you think that sounds really unsettling and will give you nightmares then don’t.

Ren: A good rule of thumb. I think that’s probably everything for this one.

Adam: Thanks for indulging me, I know I rambled quite a bit.

Ren: We covered a lot of bases.

Adam: But if, listener, there are ones that we didn’t cover, do email us and our email is… still scared…

Ren: [e-mail]. Do you have a sign off for us Adam?

Adam: Yes, have more fun than a Sierra game creepy kids!

Ren: Good advice. See you next time!

Adam: Bye!

[Outro music plays]