The sixth annual SCREAM JAM has finished! The jam has come a long way from the first event in 2018, which had 22 entries. This year, the jam received 561 entries from horror developers new and experienced, leading to one of the largest events ever held on itch.io. Thank you to everyone who was able to be a part of this jam, whether you developed something, or enjoyed playing the games!
In addition to the player-voted categories, every jam has gHost’s Choice, a host category where we highlight a set of games that deserve recognition for their innovation or uniqueness. Playing hundreds of the games on display, it’s impossible to judge which are the best, but we’ve settled on ten games we enjoyed that made a lasting impression:
Night Owls
There’s a lot going on in this visual novel! The game’s split-screen visual approach creates a great marriage of imagery and text, and conveys the split attention of Serenity, a character pulling a rough all-nighter. Over the course of one night, Serenity is trying to juggle finishing a midterm anthropology paper, keep tabs on her partner, Connor, stay awake, and talk to an online stranger. The narrative is open-ended at many stages, in terms of Connor’s loyalties, the nature of Serenity’s own behavior, and the true intentions of the increasingly disturbing online stranger, Hoot83. The game has excellent pacing as it culminates the slow night into one that is turning wrong fast.
TriumAI
Few games have tackled terminal-based game mechanics, even fewer as convincingly as here. The game is a good showcase for its core mechanic – unlocking and navigating through a rogue AI core using a portable terminal, a great idea easily scalable to a broader puzzle game. Popping it up, responding to dialogue, and inputting the commands from dialog and menu cues feels great. The narrative explores a fun interplay between the player’s instructor Handler, the AI CASSUS and the unclear delineations between the two as the game’s final twist reveals itself. There’s a polished quality to the game’s narrative progression in the vein of linear puzzle games such as Portal.
Paranormal '98
The game is a short proof of concept that opens up a world of design potential as a detective game focused on the incidence and power of symbols. Detailed player interaction to locate the offending symbol of a malevolent entity provides a wonderful opportunity for environmental storytelling, with Bernadette’s fate told only through items and not dialogue. The hints illustrate how much thought has gone into the item placement and design to solve the puzzle by thinking of the scene as a whole, in terms of the source and timeframe of the objects. Although the game is short, it demonstrates a command of environment design and a great detective mechanic.
Radio Security
Why not have style and substance? This game is a sci-fi job simulator set on a distant forlorn planet where the player is indentured to get a handle of the miserable telecommunications infrastructure. There is no shortage of atmosphere here and the game illustrates a memorable setting of life on a hostile, fog infested world where inhabitants are barely able to survive. Core gameplay involves transmitting radio signals through an arcane computer system, with some in-depth technical procedures to wrestle with. Of course, whilst the player is attempting to figure out how to make heads and tails of it, there’s a monster ready to interrupt the broadcast.
Bunker 73
A game that bleeds atmosphere through the literal lens of its photography mechanic. Players explore a haunted bunker with a Polaroid camera in order to uncover the secrets of the family that lived within its concrete walls. The Polaroid shots reveal narrative elements through writing on the walls, and, paired with a ghost-hunting sensor, slowly reveal the grotesque faces of the ghosts. Although the tables turn on the player in the ending twist, there are no obvious scares but the inventive use of text to shape the environment into a history of sad stories of a lost generation.
Night Drive
Ren’Py games seem to beg developers to make full use of its potential as an engine. This game is an excellent mood piece that commits to its concept about being captured and trapped in the backseat of a car. Soon, the game reveals its interesting ambiguity, asking the player to question the identity of the real monster. Simple elements go far to create a striking visual scene: a subtle parallax, an animated undulating road, and the furtive glances of the player’s captor. Timed dialogue reactions, multiple endings and a coda to the game revealed on a second playthrough give the game incredible depth. One to watch and an impressive project for a first game.
Concrete Cries
Games set in a single room always have a difficult task of providing the player with enough freedom and gameplay to sustain interest. This insidiously bleak game does the opposite: the player, trapped in their basement by a blast, is constantly taunted about their own confinement. The narrative context paces the player through the absurd and futile nature of their survival situation. The game ends abruptly, but not without a well-earned scare that calls back to a darker and more interesting horror of being trapped and surrounded by death. It’s an interesting, thought-provoking game that creates a setting atypical to the mythological tone of indie horror.
NO WASTE
A surreal foray into warehouse logistics in which the player is tasked to find boxes throughout the warehouse and deliver them. Repetition is leveraged wonderfully here to disarm the player into a false sense of complacency, and the simple tasks begin to defy expectations at every turn. There’s plenty of scripted sequences that lead the player into scares, often due to the claustrophobic shelves of cardboard boxes. By the end, crawling through the literal bowels of the warehouse, I asked myself: Why am I delivering all these boxes in hell? I can imagine the thought isn’t too dissimilar to the average Amazon warehouse worker. A really tight and well-paced game.
Asylum
It’s always nice to see old models of gameplay, and this is a simple but well-rounded classic graphical text adventure made in Godot with plenty of mechanics to test out. Players navigate an asylum, fighting and evading monsters to escape its confines. In the tradition of classic adventures, there’s dialogue, locations to explore, puzzles to solve to find the exit, and critically an RNG based combat system based on basic skills and weapons. The well-written prose leaves the atmosphere to the player’s imagination. A great example of game development that can do a lot with a little.
Rotting Railway
This game is an absolute blast. For a horror game that’s completely left-field in terms of tone and genre, it’s a shooter on rails set in an alternate-history Great War where chemical weapons become so potent they end up reviving the dead. It delivers a complete arcade experience, with players navigating a hazy, devastated Western Front shelling zombies from the safety of an armored train. There’s plenty of dialogue to guide the player along their journey. Enemy ragdolls, upgrades, cannons as an alternate weapon, and destructible environments create immensely satisfying gunplay that keeps the game enjoyable. Easily the most fun to be had for the jam.