Weird Dreams (Atari ST, Amiga, C64, PC)

 Weird Dreams (Amiga, Atari ST, C64, PC) :

Properly freaky stuff! This game came with a rather large back story told in a 64 page novella which came with it ...to cut it short, you fancy this girl who turns out to be possessed by a demon who is a bit fed up and trapped in her body, only you don't know that and the aforementioned demonic chappy decides to faff about with your mind for some giggles. You start having crazy dreams after it gives you some pills to help "cure" you , and eventually end up in hospital where you start having another, and possibly your last, weird dream!

You have to try to work through various puzzles and defeat the various nasties which are living in your head thanks to that old demonic numpty inhabiting you lady friend...but this is a very tricky game, or at least I found it to be...

It is filled with freaky graphics and bizarre gameplay, and definitely deserves a go or two, but I just kept getting killed and watched a video of someone else playing it on Youtube instead...so here's the video, which obviously contains spoilers, so if you do fancy giving the game a bash without knowing anything, don't watch it!

Another way in which you might have come across this game back in the day,  was if you ever watched British Saturday Morning TV,  as a modified version of the game was used on ITV's MotorMouth program as part of their quiz game for kids...as can be seen in the video below!

But yeah, the final verdict is that it's just too damn tricky with not a lot to see, and you're better off watching someone else play it instead!

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Halloweenie (C64)

 

Halloweenie (C64) :

In this short, but very, very tricky 'runner' style game by The Reaper UK , you control a girl who has lost all her friends to various enemies, including a very familiar-looking hockey masked slasher, and so she has to try and run as the screen scrolls from right to left and escape to safety!

Various baddies and traps will attempt to stop our heroine's escape, and just one hit from any of them will spell the end of her pony-tailed pixels! So you must scurry around the screen, avoiding knives, cannonballs, bats, axes, spikes....anything the masked menace who is also chasing you can find to try and hault your progress!

Created with help from the Shoot-em-up Construction Kit by Sensible Sotware, and a few others credited on the game's itch.io page, the game has a simple set-up, but a fun one, and although you'll be tearing your hair out every time you die, you'll still find yourself going back for 'one more go' at escape.

 The graphics are cute and suitably spooky, and there's some nice music courtesy of  Andrew 'Merman' Fisher to bop along to as well!

Grab a  C64 emulator, and you can find this game by clicking here which will take you to it's itch.io page, and then you can find out if you have what it takes to successfully escape the killer's clutches before Halloween!

Scary Monsters (Commodore 64)

Scary Monsters (Commodore 64) :

In true horror movie style, American football hero Harry Johns and his girlfriend Conny have found themselves stuck on an island near some spooky old mansions. These mansions are owned by a mad scientist called Dr. Graves, who has been pottering around in the corspe filled places that he shares his name with, and conjuring up monsters with which he plans to take over the world! 

It's up to Harry to wander around the island, enter these mansions and find the special weapons required to take down the six main monsters who are also lying sleeping in some of these cursed buildings. He'll need a gun to defeat the werewolf, a hammer and stake for the vampire...you get the idea! Trying to put a stop to Harry's plan are all the lesser monsters under the control of Dr. Graves. Touching any of these fiends will see you bounced around the screen, your health diminishing as you do so. Luckily Harry has somehow managed to power himself up with some sort of magical energy and can fire bolts from his hands to kill the beasties! Bizarrely, they also seem to be a bit spooked themselves, as pressing down on the joystick while in a building sees you giving the baddies a scare by waving your hands around in a spooky fashion. It's all a bit odd...

I had high hopes for this one after reading the premise and seeing the screenshots, but unfortunately the game is a mess. Trying to navigate the map screen I immediately came up against an invisible wall that stopped me going in one of the directions. Entering the first mansion I couldn't find anything but enemies, but had no idea how to leave the building again. And so I spent my time endlessly getting bounced around the screen before dying 3 times and getting a game over screen. Oh, I should say that was actually my second attempt as well, as the first time I tried to play the game self-aborted to the title screen from the map.

A real shame then, but although this game looks lovely and has pretty good presentation, I can't recommend it at all, as it is utter, utter poop! 

Skull (ZX Spectrum / Commodore 64)

Skull (ZX Spectrum / C64) :-

The plot for this 1984 title from Games Machine is pretty much what you read on the front cover (see above)......Enter The Catacombs, Hunt The Treasure, Avoid the Traps....Watch Out For The Skull!

So with this straightforward set-up, you start with your character in a first-person view and wander through the 3D catacomb maze, in the hunt for said loot to boost your score! The traps that you have to avoid come in the form of gaping holes in the ground, trapdoors that open up randomly to reveal more gaping holes in the ground, portcullises that will sometimes trip when you walk past and trap you...and of course, the giant wandering Skulls Of Doom!

Portcullises can opened or closed by using keys, which you'll find lying around in the maze too, but if you get trapped behind one without a key you'll have to wait until a trapdoor opens up beneath you and kills you, resetting you elsewhere in the maze. You can trap the skulls with clever use of the portcullises and keys too though!

If you hang around above a trapdoor, they'll open up and plunge you to your demise, so it's best to hurry past those! Whenever you fall through a hole, you get treated to a psychedelic, multi-coloured screen flash before you kick the bucket!

The skulls can be attacked, but not got rid of, by picking up green crosses that are also scattered about, and these work like the power-pills in Pac-Man, giving you a short amount of time (about 15 seconds) to chase down the skulls and collect the gems that their eyes become when you collect the cross! You'll need to be really quick though, and careful that they don't suddenly change back just as you reach them!

To help you out, you also have a lucky charm bracelet that you can see below your view. On this you'll see any skulls that are nearby, and you can tell how far away the are by the colour of the skull...

CYAN - 4 or more steps away

GREEN - 3 steps away

MAGENTA - 2 steps away

RED  - 1 step away

There's also a map at the side of the screen, but that quickly becomes obscured by some sort of dark magic, so if you want to view the map you need to fork out some of your cash for a plan! This shows you where the treasure is, your position on the map, the position of all the skulls and traps and also any ladders that will allow you to descend to lower levels of the maze safely...

And that's pretty much the gist of the game! I played the Speccy version first and whilst finding it to be quite enjoyable, it was a bit tricky at first due to the key layout. But once I set up my joystick as Cursor it became a lot easier. I'd still probably pick the Commodore version over the Speccy one though, as it has more spooky sound effects and the trippy drop-sequence is even more psychedelic and noisy! 

The game won't blow you away with it's amazing-ness, as it doesn't really have any! But if you fancy a fairly-standard-if-sometimes-awkward-to-control  jaunt around a 3D maze avoiding giant skulls this Halloween, you could do a lot worse than this! 

Guns 'n' Ghosts (Commodore 64)

Guns 'n' Ghosts (Commodore 64) :-

I always like to include Homebrew games in my Gruesome Game recommendations whenever possible, as there will still be some people out there unaware that there are still games being made for their favourite old computers! And while quite a few of these new games are only available for digital download to play in emulators, there are also some homebrewers that release their games on actual cassettes, disks or carts so that you can load them up on the original hardware and experience them properly!

Psytronik & RGCD are a couple of groups that do just that, and this 2013 collaboration by both and by developers Georg Rottensteiner & Trevor Storey, can be bought either on disk or cassette, or from RGCD on C64 Cartridge! It is available to buy via digital download too though, which is the version I picked up a while back....

So what's it all about then? Well, Trev and Georg, as well as being a bit handy at programming groovy C64 games, also have a nice side-line going as Paranormal Investigators! After a series of reports of supernatural shenanigans come in from all over the country, our daring duo decide to get on the case and give these spooks a piece of their mind....

Especially Trev, who with his special psychic powers that give him a link to the spirit-plane, can send these demons back to the hell that spawned them just by thinking about it! Georg prefers to use his trusty boom-stick though, and blast the bogeymen to billions of bits!

There are a number of ways to enjoy the game, as it has several game modes....

1 Player Trev - As Georg with his shotgun, you start as a single player with two shots and best dispatch of the beasties at long range...

1 Player Trev - A single player uses Trev's freaky mind blasts to melt the monsters, and is best used at short range!

Brothers - A two player mode where you and a friend take control of a hero each, and use their powers independently to free the land of the paranormal pests!

Cooperative Play - A mode where player one is Georg, player two is Trev, and the baddies must be held in place by Trev's psychic power so that Georg can shoot them! This is the trickiest way to play, but probably the best fun!

Double Georg - Both players play as Georg and use shotguns!

Double Trev - Both players play as Trev and use psychic powers!

During the game there are also a number of power ups that help our pals defeat the hordes of zombies, spooks and failed lab experiments, such as special bullets for Georg and potions that increase Trev's psychic powers, and also the usual extra lives and invincibility power ups!

As you can see from the screenshots, the levels are lain out as a series of platforms, and the enemies appear on these various platforms and then try and make their way to you to stop you in your quest to be a paranormal party-pooper!

While it starts off quite easy and you'll have no problems defeating them, the game increasingly ramps up the difficulty, adding more enemies like the skeletons that rush at you when you're in their line of sight, or the bullet-spongy Frankenstein Monster type enemies that require several shots to destroy!

 It never gets so tricky that it stops being fun though, and if you've read my blog for a while you know that I struggle sometimes with the difficulty of some C64 games! Thankfully, I feel this is pitched just right, and I get a little further every time I play!

And so I can heartily recommend that you follow the links by clicking the Psytronik and RGCD names at the start of this post and purchase a copy for yourselves...and while you're there you should probably check out their other releases, look for other homebrew developers elsewhere online, and sample their wares and go shout about them from the rooftops too! 

Mad Doctor (Commodore 64)

Mad Doctor (C64) :

You can almost be certain that if you have a scientist with an odd name who lives in castle on top of a hill overlooking a quaint old village, come the first thundery shower and he'll be creeping about the graveyards acting rather suspiciously around town and carrying large bundles of something about the place...

So it is with Dr. Franz Johann Blockenspiel, who has devoted his time and energy to gaining worldwide fame as the creator of life! Of course, in order to achieve this goal, he has to first dabble a little with death.....

Taking control of Franz, you wander around the village of Strudelberg, looking for parts for which to create a body you can use in your twisted experiments. You can either go to the graveyard and search the coffins for a suitable corpse or go into town and cut down a recently hung criminal! Of course, doing such things won't go unnoticed by the villagers, who if you rile up enough will start rioting and hunt down and kill you!

So how do you get a body by other means if the village is too busy??? Well, along the paths outside the village, you sometimes encounter a lone traveller...and who's to say what happens to lone travellers who disappear on dark, stormy nights.....Mu-hu-hu-ha-haaaa!

I can't believe it's taken me so long to find this game! For someone who loves horror games as much as me, it's a real hoot to roam around a village breaking into hospitals to steal equipment, cut down corpses and loot graveyards, pop up in the tavern through a secret passage that leads from my castle.....all the while avoiding an angry mob and the police who are all out to stop my crazy experiments!

The game feels years ahead of it's time, giving you a huge list of options and things to do...you can read books on the creation of life left by your uncle, you have to eat & drink to stay alive, you can lock people in a cell for use later if the body you build doesn't work out....the game is filled with choice! If you succeed in building a monster from good parts, getting it alive by electrifying a kite and are able to subdue it with tranquilisers..you can even show it in the village hall and gain the fame and notoriety you seek!

The controls can be a little tricky at first, and there's not much in the way of sound....but everything else about this game is great, and I highly recommend it! The fact it allows you to murder innocent victims might seem a little controversial, but like modern day games like GTA, if slaughtering masses of random folk isn't your cup of tea then there are other options available! I mean, after all...I would never do such things, would I...*cough*...Your Honour?

Gogo the Ghost (Commodore 64)

Gogo the Ghost (C64) :

I don't know what it is about the Commodore 64, but I've always seemed to find its games a lot harder to play than the ZX Spectrum's.....any game I haven't played that I find on the Speccy, I can usually get quite a bit into it and manage to see a fair few screens at least before getting killed by anything....

Not so with the C64...most newly discovered games have me dying every two bloody seconds, getting really frustrated with them and giving up on them pretty quickly! This is another such game....(maybe I'm just really crap at C64 games through some psychological want to not be good at the Speccy's rival's games or something? I dunno....)....

You play as Gogo the ghost as he tries to make his way through 150 screens of obstacles and enemies in a haunted house, to reach his "dream princess!"....Well, she'll be waiting a long bloody time, as I only made it as far as the second screen after quite a few goes.....

The game is far too difficult to get anywhere at all in, and although I know I'm pretty rubbish at C64 games, looking around online suggests that others find this game way too tricky as well.....one to be avoided then....unless you're a masochist.....

Werewolves Of London (ZX Spectrum, Amstrad, C64)

Werewolves Of London (ZX Spectrum, C64, Amstrad) :

Cursed by a family of Gypsy yuppies, this game has you hunting down every last member of that family and killing them, in a bid to cure yourself of an evil, lycanthropic affliction that sees you become a werewolf by night! You have to munch your way through London to get to them..but be careful of the police as the more you kill, the more will be after you!

You can collect various items to help you in your quest and if you eat people as a werewolf, you can find some useful stuff like train tickets which will let you into the Underground, or keys to let you enter the park. Members of the family of fiends who cursed you can be found by keeping an eye out on the bottom of the screen. A cross will flash when they are near and they are easily distinguishable from the other randoms walking around as they are always clad in black.

Inevitably, you'll end up in jail before you find all eight of your enemies. The key to success is to store items in your cell that will help you escape, like a file to open the window or a torch to see in the dark sewers. A manhole cover lifter gets you into these smelly tunnels so best keep an eye out for that too!

There's loads of fun to be had prowling around London's parks, sewers, rooftops and Underground, preying on helpless civilians and armed police alike! Finding a family member always induces a slight panic as you strive to get them before they escape and legging it from the policeman with the keys who locks you up can also be a right laugh ....

The game can be a bit glitchy in places, and suffers quite a bit from slowdown when a lots happening on screen. Unfortunately, the original Spectrum release also came with a bug which meant the game couldn't be completed. But thanks to the wonders of modern science, a bug fixed version can now be obtained from World Of Spectrum meaning you can finally be free of the curse after all these years! Hurrah!

You can get the fixed version here...

But yeah, it's still well worth a go....you'd have to be howling at the moon to not try it at least! 

Maxwell Manor (Atari 800 / Commodore 64)

Maxwell Manor (Atari 800 / C64) :

Strange things are afoot at Maxwell Manor....The former mad scientist-type owner has been found headless and obviously dead in the library, and strange creatures resulting from bizarre experiments on doilys & combs (seriously!) roam the grounds and manor, as do undead spiders and the like!

The Psychical Society believes that the legendary Skull Of Doom is now in control of the manor and has tasked you... the wonderfully named Professor Arabesque...with the task of entering the manor, seeking out the skull and destroying it!

With no instructions, this game can be rather confusing as you start off in the middle of road with no idea where to go. A gun, shield and sword can be found here, but if you venture too far along the road you'll end up getting lost and find yourself zapped to the mansion gates! This is not the entry into the manor though, and you'll need to find another entrance somewhere along the wall....

Thinking the game was a bit basic, and not really wanting to continue with it, I did manage to find and check out the instructions online before giving up on it completely...and I'm glad I did! The game is a lot more complex than it first appears!

Apparently there are over a thousand variations to how the game will play out, although the instructions are deliberately vague about what exactly affects these variations. Also included in the game manual are some maps that show how the various areas are connected, so it's worth having the instructions for this fact alone!

The various creatures can be attacked with the sword or gun, and the shield will deflect some projectiles...but I'll leave it up to you to discover how to beat the Vampyre Spider and it's sticky webbing! Oh, and if you happen to die too many times, escape from Limbo can only be achieved by choosing the right direction!

There are a few more items to pick up with some unique abilities, but again you'll get more enjoyment if I leave these for you to discover yourselves. Hopefully you'll make it through the mazes and get to the manor...which I have yet to actually do myself...although I hear some jumping and platforming skills may be needed!

But yeah, having given the game a bit more time, my first impressions turned out to be wrong...and I now recommend Maxwell Manor to any Atari 800 or C64 owners or emulators who are willing to put in that little bit of effort required to fully enjoy it!

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Dante's Inferno (Commodore 64, Xbox 360)

Dante's Inferno (C64) :

Games are sometimes inspired by some odd sources, including 14th century poems about a journey through Hell it seems! Yes, the next two games I'm going to look at both use Dante Alighieri's epic Divine Comedy's Inferno section as their source material, and as such are filled with suitably Gruesomely-Hellish imagery.....

First up is Denton Design's take on the poem....it has us take the role of a pilgrim trying to escape Hell, by traipsing through all 9 of it's circles and reaching Satan, who hopefully will allow us back to live for a bit longer and hopefully end up in heaven next time.....

The game is basically a series of little mazes, with items lying around that you'll have no idea what to do with, but are important for progressing through the game. The first one for instance is a bag of gold that you give to Charon the ferryman by holding it up so he'll stop his boat allowing you to climb aboard and get ferried to the other side....something you'll want to be doing sharpish, as if you stand on the banks of the river too long, wasps will appear and try to sting you...and they can only be avoided by hopping on the boat!

When you reach the other side, you'll have to avoid getting caught up with the poor chaps and chapesses who were a bit too lusty in life, as they get blown around by strange winds which form two or three lines you'll need to run between to get past....and then you'll discover what hell has in store for you next!

It's surprising how true to Inferno the game manages to be, and if you're familiar with the work you'll see references to lots of aspects of the circles of hell. I only made it as far as the Garden Of Suicides though, as I found it incredibly difficult! This isn't helped by the fact you'll need to work out for yourself what each of the items lying around actually does, but I suppose that adds to the longevity of the game, as it doesn't seem particularly lengthy....

Overall, it's not too bad....just bloody difficult...but you should probably play it just too see what fate awaits a huge proportion of today's society, most likely including yourself, if the criteria for entering Heaven is as strict as it appears to be from the rules presented in the poem!

Dante's Inferno (360) :

Viscerals take on Inferno also has lots taken form the source, but also adds some of its own storyline to make it a better fit for the God Of War style game it so obviously wanted to mimic. It's Dante is a man who returns from the Crusades to find his lady Beatrice's soul taken captive by Satan and dragged to Hell....a fate for which Dante and the sins he commited whilst away are to blame......

Off he trots down to Hell, aided by the poet Virgil, who imparts his knowledge about the various circles to help guide Dante. All manner of twisted denizens will be met, and luckily you'll constantly be finding relics and power-ups to help absolve or punish them so you can rush on to the next level.

You get souls from the creatures you dispose of, which act as currency for purchasing upgrades. The souls are either Good or Evil, depending on whether you decide to punish the baddies and rip them to bits, or redeem their souls and send them to heaven. Occasionally you'll also come across various figures from history, who you must also judge! This starts up a little mini-game sequence where you'll have to hit the correct buttons as souls fly into a circle in the middle of the screen, gaining you extra souls upon completion.

All of these souls you collect can then be spent on two different sets of upgrades.....again both Evil & Good...and these will help improve your health or magic or give you new moves with which to batter your foes with.

The main meat of the game is the God Of War style hacking and slashing and block-moving, lever-pulling, monster-mashing puzzles though...and very enjoyable stuff it all is! The game feels suitably epic, and despite a few camera issues and the occasional annoying jumping sections, you should have lots of fun as you make your way through the wonderfully-hellish looking, nicely constructed levels. It's definitely not a title for younger players either, as it's filled with violence and nudity...so keep it away from youngsters or you'll definitely find yourselves going downward when you pop your clogs!

But yeah, definitely recommended for action game fans and horror lovers...although maybe not for some overly religious or stuffy literary types who have been quite vocal concerning the fact a game based on Inferno was ever considered for release in the first place, failing to notice that such a thing already existed as early as 1986! (see above)

And these two weren't the only ones either...whilst looking for videos and info on the games for the blog, I stumbled upon another game that was due for release based upon Alighieri's work...

Irrational Game's The Lost was due to be a modern take on the theme, but was unfortunately canned before release due to various issues....still, you can read more about the game by clicking here... and here's a couple of videos to show what it would have been like..

The game code and rights were eventually picked up by an Indian company FXLabs who changed some of the graphics and plot, gave it a Bollywood makeover and released it on PC as Agni : Queen Of Darkness so maybe I'll try and hunt that down and take a look at it some point!

Scarabaeus (Commodore 64)

 Thanks to C64 Wiki this re-post of Scarabaeus has been updated with some nice animated gifs like the one above! Enjoy the post, and remember to pop back everyday (usually around 12 noon GMT) for another Gruesome Game! 

No.24 - Scarabaeus (Commodore64) :

The Scarabaeus of the title is a mythical diamond, created long ago by the Pharaoh and buried with him in his tomb. You, apparently, are an astronaut who likes shiny things...and shiny things don't come much shinier than mythical Pharaoh diamonds! So, the game starts with a lovely little animated intro where you see yourself arrive in a rocket with your little space pooch (who promptly disappears from the rest of the game) tagging along behind you...

What you don't see in the intro, is that upon entering the tomb you've been bitten by a poisonous spider, and now not only must you search for hieroglyphs to unlock the key to the Pharaoh's treasure, but also hunt down the medicines that can cure you of the spider's venom.

The glyphs can be found rather easily by chasing ghosts who appear in the mazes and capturing them. Doing so fills a square in the key you have in your hand. You'll use this key later, to recognise other hieroglyphs that will let you know the difference between the antidotes and poison, which has also been left bottled up in the tomb, and also to collect Zombie Traps....but more about them later!  

Finding the ghosts in the maze is made a lot easier by using the map, accessed by pressing down on the joystick. This will show you the layout of the maze and the position of the ghost will appear as little skull. After you've found all nine ghosts in the first level, you can head over to the lift.

The lift can be an awkward thing to control. You have to rotate the joystick to get the crank moving, but one wrong input and the lift will crash down to the next floor, seriously damaging your health! However you get there, level 2 is where things start to get tricky!

The information points that you'll need are hidden in alcoves along some of the mazes walls. These alcoves also house a spider, who'll stay put until you wander past, whereupon they'll hop out and start legging it after you. You have to lure the spider away from the alcoves, then run back round to them and try to use the symbols from your key to work out which antidotes and traps are safe to use before the spider manages to get back to you...

Then when you get to Level 3, you'll find these antidotes in similar alcoves. If you recognise them as being safe to use from what you learned on Level 2, you can pick them up and use them. If you get it wrong, you'll end up being poisoned and losing health! Oh yeah, the traps! You put these down to trap the zombies that are released when you access the alcoves on this level,,,they'll chase you around using the shortest possible route to get to you! 

Then once you've got all 8 potions and 4 zombie traps, the Pharaoh's Tomb will be able to be opened with the key, whereby you'll need to do another puzzle in 40 moves or less, or die horribly or something!

If all this sounds incredibly complicated, that's because it is! And to be honest, I really had no idea what the hell I was doing for most of the time playing this game...The puzzles, it would seem, require your head to be in a much better place than mine was after the miserable 4 hours sleep I'd had before starting! You'll need your thinking cap firmly screwed on if you're to get the most out of this game... 

Having said that, I still had loads of fun travelling around the wonderful scrolling maze! It really is surprising how fast and smoothly it moves around when you consider the age of the game and the machine it's running on! Atmosphere oozes from Scarabaeus too, with awesome breathing and heartbeat sound effects making your exploration of the maze a whole lot scarier! And there's even a tune if for some reason you want to turn these sound effects off!

So there you go...a brilliantly presented, atmopsheric, brain-busting maze game, that sort of feels like a C64-pacifist version of Doom crossed with some unused section from the BBC's Only Connect! Well worth giving a go, if you want spooked whilst also building your brain power! I'll personally be having another attempt once I've had a bit more nap time!