I’m not going to act like jump scares are a new idea. Audiences have been freaking out at sudden movement ever since a grainy, black and white train barreled at them in eighteen hundred who cares. The same goes for games: we’ve all seen the dog jump through the window in Resident Evil. We’ve all noticed an animatronic animal creeping on a security camera. Those double legs in Silent Hill 2 sure love it.
Jump scares are easy, effective, and kind of annoying. Which makes it so funny that I’m now completely obsessed with cheap anomaly games. They’re my favorite. I love them. I cherish them. I’ll buy them forever and a day.
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What Are Anomaly Games?
If you haven’t played them, here’s the gist: anomaly games tend to be short horror experiences in which you’re tasked with exploring a (usually) mundane space and looking for strange, surprising things that are probably going to kill you if you don’t run the other way.
In games like The Exit 8, this literally means walking down an eternal subway station corridor and then booking it when a creepy businessman seems to be speed walking. And in a lot of games like Shift 87, you’re sent right back to the start if you get it wrong.
I recognize this doesn’t sound terrifying, but it is creepy. That’s the feeling. Being trapped in a world that’s almost like one step to the side of hours. Like a Brian Evenson story. And when you spend ten minutes staring at nothing, waiting for anything to happen, the slightest change scares the crap out of you. I also think it’s worth reiterating that these games are short. Losing and starting over is like restarting an episode of a TV show, not doing a new run after permadeath in an RPG.
It’s Hard To Pick A Winner, But The Losers Are Fun
The very nature of the games makes them a little oblique up top. Most give simple instructions that amount to ‘walk one way until you see something strange, and then walk the other way until you see something strange and then walk the other way again’.
Some, like The Cabin Factory, have you exploring a creepy space and reporting on strange activity. Actually, let me stop right there because the story of The Cabin Factory is actually pretty funny: you’re supposed to be examining fake haunted houses for theme parks and weed out the ones that are actually haunted.
The games not wanting to go into detail and spoil themselves is noble, but it can make finding new titles a crapshoot. You’ve likely seen them filling up Steam and the Nintendo eShop looking like cheap cash grab, asset swap slop. And I’m gonna be real honest: some are. It doesn’t matter that they are, but – if that bothers you – some are. And half of the anomaly games are even cheaper rip offs of other anomaly games. I’ve got no idea if I’m playing the original ‘weird pools everywhere’ game or playing a copy of a copy of a copy. I don’t care.
In fact, that kind of works for the genre. Anomaly games are all about something being slightly off or not working. These games are easy to imitate because they take place in familiar, if uncanny spaces that aren’t too hard to construct in a game. One yellow backrooms is going to be just as spooky as any other yellow backrooms. And seeing the little interpretations of that horror experience is nice. Even similar settings have different ways of making you fill your drawers. It’s almost like I’m paying $5 to go from town to town to test out their spooky corner of Halloween adventure.
At These Prices, Who Can Argue?
I also love that anomaly games present a creepier, more subtle world. A lot of horror games really want you to pay attention to every single scary design. Monsters. Carnage. Ghosts with broken, yawning jaws. Anomaly games can have some of these, but they also have little tiny details that you aren’t sure are scary or not. Was that a doll moving in the corner or your imagination? Was that painting always there? Is it haunted if it’s not moving? Rather than bracing yourself for someone to jump at you, you’re sweeping your eyes across all areas and running the moment a mannequin’s head turns. Just a tiny, subtle move can run everything.
And here’s again perhaps that’s the biggest thing: these games are, by and large, very cheap. I love a cheap game. I say this too much, but if your game is under $5, I’ll probably give it a shot. We’re all conditioned to spend $70 and then a $30 season pass for a game. And you know what? For a 100-hour adventure, that seems fair to me. But for a little horror experience, $5-$10 is more than reasonable. You’d spend more than that to visit a Halloween haunted house for less time and zero replay-ability.
The price itself also encourages the same curiosity as the games. If I’m dropping a few bucks for a game, I can go in blind with no idea of what’s coming. Meanwhile, I’m excited to be playing Avowed, but it hasn’t been what I’d call ‘casual fun’. More like ‘I really gotta pay attention and remember all this and help these people oh god what is going on with my face?’ I know there are quest logs and explainers. And I love it!
But going into a cheap game completely blank is the perfect place for horror. You can nope out at any time, which makes pushing forward all the more compelling. There’s no financial obligation that you ‘should’ put as much time into the game as possible. If you get scared and soil your drawers, you can quit and basically just lose the cost of a cup of coffee.
If you’ve got $5, I recommend looking at some of the games I’ve mentioned. But go down the rabbit hole. At the prices (most) of these games cost, you’ll be able to discover something that feels like it should not exist. Is it always going to be good? No. Is it always going to be weird? Probably. But if anomaly games are the next big indie boom – or the current one for that matter – I’m going to keep experimenting and finding the strangest crap to chase me down a hall after I saw it escaped a painting.