October is full of new horror games you can play now or before Halloween comes to a close. Though it won’t be among those playable so soon, Corporeal looks creepy enough to stretch spooky season into a future month. The New Zealand-based indie team Cold Out has revealed the paranormal mystery game, which is played using a photo album of real-life people, not in-game renderings.
The outcome of that choice is a game that feels unnervingly real, at least in this reveal trailer. It reminds me a bit of a Sam Barlow and Half Mermaid game, such as Immortality, mixed with touches of 2012’s underrated horror movie, Sinister, in which a writer scrubs through left-behind home movies and photos to piece together his new house’s haunted backstory.
Players will flip through a photo album with analog-inspired interfaces and gameplay, solving non-linear puzzles that uncover the game’s mystery of the cursed family at the heart of it all. Though I’ve likened it to Sinister and Immortality, the team also drew comparisons to Annapurna’s Storyteller meets the cult-classic horror movie, Lake Mungo.
Corporeal is set in the 1990s, making it the latest in a growing line of projects, particularly spooky ones (I Saw The TV Glow, Long Legs, et al.), that have gone back in time to that era. The nineties nostalgia is in full bloom.
Corporeal is coming to Steam, though no release date was yet revealed.
