I’m here to help you people out, and that’s what I’m going to do. Not every good horror game had the backing of a major producer, and you certainly won’t find them all on the PS3 and Xbox 360. May I instead present a list of the more obscure, more interesting horror games to crawl out into the gaming scene? Check out these titles as they lurk in the shadows, ready to suckle gently at your soul.

The Top 7 Scariest Games You’ve Never Played, courtesy of Games Radar.

Those who know me, know I love some Silent Hill. The first game is probably my favourite title, with the second game facing off in a pipe/whip cage match thunderdome duel with Castlevania. I’ve been unnaturally quiet on the subject of Silent Hill so far because the recent offerings from that dismal town have been lurching towers of suck and fail.

This may well change.

Silent Hill: Shattered Memories is a retelling of the original game, with its own brand new quirks and themes. Unlike certain other versions of the franchise that shall not be named but involve random truckers, this Silent Hill game seems to know what it’s doing and where it wants to go. Oh, did I mention it’s for Nintendo’s Wii?

Since the game isn’t out yet, we don’t know much of it, so I won’t talk about that. Instead, here’s a bit of an infodump to chew through and see if you can’t find some meat to gnaw off these old, rehashed bones.

The Wikipedia page is right over here, always a good read.

IGN has a page full of preview coverage, including screenshots. Check it out.

I know this name.

Forrest J. Ackerman was a fan of horror and sci-fi the way NASA is a fan of things that fly and the Pentagon is a fan of things that explode. Not only did he promote the early and struggling genre of bizarre fantasy in film, he also defined it with his magazine, Famous Monsters of Filmland. His personal collection of sci-fi, horror, and plain weird genre memorabilia is perhaps the largest in the world.

It was through his influence that the fantastic was able to seize hold of the minds of a generation, and many genre writers, myself included, blame him for our strange obsessions. Without Forry, fantasy as we know it would be a thin and struggling thing, reduced to gnawing upon the mossy bones of Poe and Lovecraft. Our world, and our collective imagination, would have been darker and dryer.

So what’s that have to do with gaming? Turns out rather alot. Ideas are built on each other, one generation handing down their legends and visions to the next. Science fiction gave us ring worlds, mad artificial intelligences, and expanding alien empires. Gaming gave us Halo. Horror brought to us dark dreams of demonic gods, necromantic cultists, and lonely underworlds where the radio hisses with static. Gaming gave us Silent Hill.

More games than you could ever play find their beginnings in the rich genre soil that Forrest helped to till, and it’s thanks to his work and his unflagging enthusiasm that our generation grew up on myths beyond the cowboy on the plains and the trench-mud soldiers of WW2. The beasts and horrors and robots that populate our games and our culture might have been spawned from hundreds of books, movies, and campfire stories, but the monsters, like myself, deep beneath their foam latex skins they know this name. Even our nightmares shall mourn his passing.

Forrest J. Ackerman was 92.

You can read more about Forry at this Los Angeles Times article.

Otherwise it was a generic FPS with horror elements. Things that we did like involved how the bad guys would jump for cover, or leap over objects to get at us. They’d throw grenades when we were hiding and scream in horror when we revealed ourselves. We’re told by everyone that they’re telepathically controlled clones, but they seemed pretty well socialized for clones.

There isn’t much in the way of tactics, or problem solving that we had to do. The enemies are loud—well, most of them are—talking to each other in their outside voices on the radio whenever we came near. We didn’t need to walk like a cat, these guys were made to be snuck up on.

We think that they could have done a lot more work with the NPCs (or at least more NPCs in general who weren’t specters walking in our vision) and had them be more interactive. Maybe some escort or protection scenarios. As a horror it did a pretty good job with the ethereal ghosts that fell into dirty ashes every time we got a good look at them, and the dead bodies falling out of ceiling tiles, but sadly eventually it just got tired. We stopped jumping at noises about half-way-through. We think it was because we realized nothing was coming to get us anymore, at least nothing that wasn’t going to bark, “AREA SEEMS CLEAR!” on its radio before it came up on us.

Learn true fear, buy it now!