There are still a few days left in October. There’s still time to enjoy all things spooky. Depending on how old you are, we know that you can’t wait to either dress up to get candy, dress up to get drunk, or dress up your cute kids. But in the meantime why don’t you settle in, turn off the lights, grab your handheld, and enjoy these cozy yet spooky Nintendo Switch games. These aren’t full-blown horror games. You can play Amnesia on Switch and that’s really all you need to scare yourself senseless with Nintendo’s system. Rather, these are some recent games that just put us in the Halloween spirit.
Return of the Obra Dinn
Return of the Obra Dinn quickly became one of the most acclaimed games of 2018 when it first launched last October. This follow-up to Papers, Please features the eerie and absolutely brain-breaking gimmick of using your magic watch to view the moment of a person’s death. Piecing together the monochrome mystery of whatever happened on the doomed ship tests your clever reasoning and educated guessing skills in ways you never could’ve imagined. Through careful observation alone you can figure out not only how victims died but why and by whose hand. It’s like assembling the timeline of your own Christopher Nolan movie.
Obra Dinn’s tendency to dole out new info in chunks does an admirable job of keeping such a sprawling web of potential clues and solutions somewhat manageable, without allowing you to just guess your way to victory. Correct answers are only confirmed three at a time. But I while I do find the sheer creativity of this “murder Sudoku” extremely impressive, I also found it just mentally exhausting trying to crack the nut. I say that as someone who doesn’t like adventure games, though. If these puzzles even sound somewhat appealing to you you’re going to have a great time.
Sea Salt
I’ve seen folks compare Sea Salt to everything from Pikmin meets Hotline Miami to a Zergling rush in StarCraft. But it most reminds me of the multi-character mob chaos Kirby Mass Attack, only this time the cosmic horror is there right from the start. As an aquatic Lovecraftian Elder God, you visit wrath upon the heretics of a fishing village by controlling a growing mass of monsters. That means lots of mindless carnage as you direct your horde toward cowering humans and tear them apart with great satisfaction, as seen through briny pixelated visuals.
However, Sea Salt is not all mindless. Humans can fight back. And as you gain new cards that periodically offer new units for your custom collective, you need to consider strategies like rushing in with fast but weak units while also holding back with projectile users that don’t cause any fear. This tension between mindless and strategic play never fully gels. But the depth is necessary for creating something with any kind of staying power.
Dark Devotion
A Dark Souls-esque roguelike already sounds like a nightmare to me. And even fans of that genre want them to look grim, medieval, and underlit like this. Add in a 2D perspective and haunting pixelated art and you’ve got Dark Devotion. This was never going to be my type of game but I do appreciate aspects of it. Bringing over Souls-style stamina and combat systems to 2D leads to interesting results. You have to pick up weapons from dead monsters so your first kill always comes from your fists. You can’t even jump. Meanwhile, although there is permadeath, the huge maps swarming with bosses are handcrafted. The generous warp points and random buffs make the endless deaths slightly more tolerable.
Monaco: What’s Yours Is Mine
Forget monsters and death. One of the scariest things I can think of is stealing something and getting caught. Monaco: What’s Yours Is Mine is all about living on this edge of escape. With its arcade stealth rules and top-down blueprint viewpoint, this port of a popular older game feels like Pac-Man for lawbreaking in a really fun way.
Whether in single-player or co-op, the different abilities of each character really change up how you approach the different mazes. More often than not I would rather open doors faster as the lockpick than knock out guards (or zombies) as the cleaner. And while the multiple campaigns reuse many of the same maps, I enjoyed the European crime caper tone of the writing. You’re just a bunch of gentlemen thieves out of Ocean’s Twelve.
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