Video games:
Blood - superficially a gory shooter fest, this game actually had some pretty engaging backstory to it. Set in rural-Gothic early 1900s USA, it chronicles the revenge quest of a single revenant gunslinger against his murderer. Pretty standard fare, for a vengeance story, but with a twist: his murderer was a demigod, and the path is beset with fantastic and fearsome otherworldly monsters as well as ruthless human cultists who won't stop until he's dead again. This game is now available for legal purchase and download from
Good Old Games (search for "One Unit Whole Blood"). Spawned a lackluster sequel that was rushed to market, but which has a much more moddable source code.
System Shock 2 - the spiritual predecessor to the much-later, much more popular
Bioshock. SS2 was a sci-fi FPS game, but it had serious elements of RPG horror gaming too. Ammunition was scarce, resources were scarce, and enemies were everywhere. Your character started off a simple marine, but as you progress through the game you received cyber modules which you could use to boost your stats, your skills, your weapon familiarities, and even psionic powers. The later game
Bioshock was almost a carbon copy of the earlier game, with somewhat more limited replayability but much more slick presentation and atmosphere. Both are well worth playing for a great handbasket of "alone in the dark with lots of bad guys" horror game tropes, including a few well-done plot twists.
Call of Cthulhu: Dark Corners of the Earth - a vintage game that takes the watchword "make everything real, detailed, and mundane... before you throw in the supernatural weird stuff". A great example of some very interesting and effective ideas, and in my opinion one of the best arguments ever made that "first person games make the most immersive horror". Your character is a standard detective investigator, not an experienced gunman. You don't even get a gun until about a third of the way through the game! Stealth is crucial to survival, and there are some very interesting puzzle-solving bits too. Once you do get a gun, the tempo of the game changes slightly, but you never lose the feeling of vulnerability and being out of your depth.
Before you can shoot to defend yourself, you've got to draw your gun. Are any enemies nearby? Because if they are, they might hear the noise you make drawing your gun (same goes for reloading it). If you just blast away without aiming, you'll be making a lot of noise and will probably miss all your shots. Aim, and your peripheral vision contracts, leaving you potentially vulnerable from the sides and rear. Aim too long, and your arms will get tired and your attention will waver, eventually forcing you to cease aiming.
If you get injured, your vision goes red and blurry from pain, and your limbs and body will register the injury. You can't get better until you heal up - but you can't just hit a button to heal yourself. You need to find a quiet, undisturbed spot to open your medical field kit. Then you have to examine your body for scrapes (require gauze), deep cuts (require sutures), and breakages (require splints). Then and only then can you start using them on yourself, which takes a decent amount of time... and which will prove nerve racking if you're hiding from enemies!
Finally, no Call of Cthulhu game would be complete without some insanity element to it. First-person games are especially good at this, because you see all the visions and hallucinations first hand. Your vision swims as you struggle to comprehend the impossible. Expose yourself to too much sanity-blasting weirdness, and your character might even bring his hands up to choke himself to death, or put a pistol to his own temple! An excellent game, and well worth checking out. (Note to potential gamers: the PC version of the game was hurriedly ported and features several game-breaking bugs. A variety of websites feature tools and saved games to help you past those bugs.)
Thief: The Dark Project - Probably the best fantasy plot of any FPS game I've ever played. Thief was developed by a studio that was something like 33% or 50% female. The gameplay is extremely cerebral, focusing on studying patrol patterns and light sources and walking surfaces. Stealth is crucial as you navigate the levels as a thief, stealing as much loot as you can before making your escape. The second half of the game involves a dark cult, and a truly chilling series of cutscenes. The plot and pacing of the game is superb, with earlier verses and poems coming back to rude significance later on as events take a very disturbing turn. Has two sequels and a full-game-length fan mod (Thief II: The Iron Age).
Lula: The Sexy Empire - You're a pimp and your goal is to make your girlfriend/prostitute Lula into an international porn star. This is actually a really bad game and I couldn't recommend it to anybody, regardless of whether they're searching for a Gothic horror game. I have never played this game and in fact don't know anything about it and would certainly never have bought it a) while still too young to legally buy it b) at a
Virgin Megastore for added irony. I'm just including this in the list to make sure you're all still paying attention.
Clive Barker's Undying - A great example of dark fantasy horror gaming. The game could easily be ported into the Ravenloft setting with minimal changes (although apparently it doesn't run well on Windows 7 OS). It features a cursed family estate off the coast of Ireland, where five siblings grew up with an occult secret that warped and haunts them still. Four of the siblings are gone but not forgotten, and the fifth needs your help to lay them to rest. Much of the game takes place in a brooding mansion, but portions of it take place in the catacombs below, or a breathtaking astral world ("Oneiros"), and finally in a devolved prehistoric violent paradise called "Eternal Autumn". One of the very few FPS games to feature an occult magic system that works well with the atmosphere. The end boss of the game may be a bit too fantastic for the buildup, but other than that, the game is a great WWI-era period piece.
