Our Picks From The Steam Scream Fest Sale: Resident Evil Village, SOMA & More

As with most stores, Steam is holding its own sale to celebrate Halloween, running until November 1st! To make scrolling through their very long list of discounted games easier, we’ve highlighted a few games we think are a must-have for fans of the spookiest of genres.

Links to each game will be provided at the end of the article. Prices will be displayed in USD but may vary depending on your region!

Resident Evil Village

Get up close and personal with the most horrifying (and completely made-up) village in Romania by trying out the critically-acclaimed Resident Evil Village, a game praised for its gameplay, setting and variety that racked up a juicy amount of award nominations and even won ‘Ultimate Game of the Year’ at the 2021 Golden Joystick Awards and ‘Game of the Year’ on Steam.

Village is the 8th major installment in the Resident Evil franchise and picks up a few years after Resident Evil 7 Biohazard, boasting an all-new story that even players new to the franchise can easily grasp without much pre-reading. Assume the role of Ethan Winters and battle your way through hordes of monsters and v-v-vampires(!) as you try to figure out a way to save your daughter.

If you’re looking to go deeper into the Resident Evil franchise, check out our recap of their recent showcase, which details upcoming Village-related content and more.

The Mortuary Assistant

For something truly uncanny, The Mortuary Assistant has you, a freshly-graduated mortician (a corpse noob) being called into work late one night to handle some embalmings. I’m not too sure how common this is in the… embalming industry(?), but let’s suspend our disbelief for another minute.

The Mortuary Assistant plays somewhat similarly to a single-player Phasmophobia. On the one hand, you’ve got all this embalming to do, which we can categorize as the ‘busywork’ the game puts you through to catch your off-guard with a big spook. However, your embalming needs to be done while keeping demonic forces at bay, but which demonic forces?

Practice occult rituals to identify what kind of demon you’re being terrorized by, piece together clues and eventually banish the demon to advance through the story. This whole paranormal detective angle is where my comparison to Phasmophobia comes from.

The game employs some clever procedural generation, making each playthrough a little different than the last and the game promises 10+ hours of content, so with all this juice in a single game, why wouldn’t you buy it while it’s on sale?

Inside the Backrooms

For a crash-course into the horrors of liminal space, Inside the Backrooms is sure to provide you with a horror experience rife with hallways, staircases and reality-bending spaces that just don’t make sense. Not knowing where you are (colloquially known as being lost) is a seldom used tactic to instill fear despite how potent it is.

To get you primed, ‘the backrooms’ started out as a creepypasta on 4chan, culminating into a whole series of YouTube videos that further explored the concept and solidified the visual aspect of their identity: yellow rooms that don’t make sense, patrolled by mysterious entities. Here’s the Wikipedia entry on them and we recommend this video to get a better grasp of the concept.

Now, the game takes this concept and makes a multiplayer game out of it! Bundle up with up to three other players and solve puzzles to escape the four levels of the backrooms. Dodge six ‘entities’ inspired by the original pasta, find items to mend your physical or mental wounds or allow you to communicate with your team long-distance and feel safe to make a mistake, because you may respawn up to three times!

Did I mention the solution to every puzzle changes each time you start a new game?

Inside the Backrooms is still receiving updates, so don’t be turned off by the fact there’s a ‘mere’ four levels to engage with. More levels, more entities, puzzles, and items are on the way, as well as procedurally-generated levels. The game is also playable in VR, although there’s still some work to be done to get it working as intended.

SOMA

From the creators of the Amnesia series of games comes SOMA, a claustrophobic horror experience that’s even more terrifying if you’re afraid of the ocean, the unknown depths, the physics mechanic of pressure or, you know, monsters.

It’s hard to talk about the game’s story without throwing major spoilers, so here’s all you’re going to get: You’re in an underwater facility, the ‘overworld’ experienced an extinction event, and you’ve got to go somewhere to do something. Starting this quest is when the terror begins!

You can expect from SOMA the same things you’d expect from Amnesia, yet (at least for the original Dark Descent) enhanced: Lots of monsters with their own quirks (don’t look that one in the eye, don’t make noise near the other one etc.), engaging puzzles, amazing atmospheric set pieces and an amazing story. I will say, I wasn’t a huge fan of the main character’s dialogue and, to an extent, timbre, but otherwise this game is a must-play on the ol’ Halloween night.

You can check out each game’s store page below:

This list has a bit of everything: A triple-A game, co-op horror, single-player spook, you name it. What’re you going to pick for this spookiest of occasions? Let us know in the comments below!