It's Halloween digital game store sale day I guess, so here's one more, from GOG.com. Their Halloween Monster Hunt discounts loadsa vaguely spooky games over the course of five days, from now until Monday November 2. Today's offerings include The Witcher 3 for a bit less, plus moderately whopping savings on Stasis, Deadly Premonition, the Amnesias, both Alan Wakes and more.

35.09 seems like a lot for The Witcher 3, particularly when I just picked it up on PS4 for 10 less from Amazon, but if you've not played Amnesia, the bonkers Deadly Premonition, and the well-regarded The Last Door and The Cat Lady, you can now pick them up for the price of a bag of seasonal sweets.

Frictional Games' new horror tale SOMA will be out later this month, and to get everyone in a properly terrified mood, the studio has made its brilliant (and brilliantly awful) Amnesia: The Dark Descent free on Steam.

Amnesia: The Dark Descent is a Lovecraftian tale of supernatural awfulness in which you, as the "hero," see and do some pretty awful things on the way to redemption, or freedom, or quite possibly the moment where you, as the player, leap up from the keyboard, slam down your headphones, and declare, "Enough!" Because The Dark Descent, the game that established Frictional as the masters of the genre, is not just scary: It's disturbing. It's creepy. It's awful.

And it's free! Trust me, you should play it. With the lights down and the volume up. Good times for sure! Grab it quickly, though: It's only free until 10 am PT on September 16, which is tomorrow.

Well, FINALLY. A brave soul has at long last taken the completely logical step of modding turn-based Pok mon-style combat into Amnesia: The Dark Descent. The mod is called Monsters, and no, it doesn't feature fiery lizards and and squirting turtles and yellow electric squirrels (sorry, I don't really know much about Pok mon, which is going to become quite clear). Instead, your monsters are props from the game, like chairs, boxes, tables, wine barrels, and stoves.

After a brief intro where you find an orb and rub it with some orb wax, you unleash some sort of... I don't really know what it is. A powerful spirit that wants to play Pok mon against you? Something like that. After fleeing the energy being, you encounter an angry walking suit of armor, and a small friendly crate who fights it for you. This crate is your first Pok mon, and it has a single power, wood aura, which flings boxes at your enemy.

With your trusty crate (fully voiced, and quite well, by the way), you can visit various rooms and find opponents waiting for you. Use your crate to defeat, say, a stove, and you gain a power from that stove. You also gain experience points to increase your level, and can evolve into other forms. I presume actual Pok mon works in roughly the same way?

I played for a bit and it's fun. I evolved my crate into a chair, gaining a dust storm power, and then evolved from a chair into a stove, gaining a smoke power. Then, I tried to alt-tab out to read the manual and the game crashed, so don't do that. But do download the manual, as it lets you know what sorts of powers do best against which sorts of monsters.

I started over and became a chair again, and then tried to take on the boss of the level, which turned out to be quite a powerful monster and not as warm and cuddly as the various pieces of furniture I'd been battling with. I think I'll go back to fighting tables and wardrobes until I've gotten a bit better.

This is a really fun mod and a very unusual idea: bringing turn-based furniture combat into a game famous for having no combat at all. You can grab it off moddb.com.

This is what I like to call a total cheat. You see, we hadn't previously covered Penumbra: Necrologue. That feels like a mistake, given that the Amnesia: The Dark Descent mod is a fan-made follow-up to Frictional's Penumbra series. It's seemingly well loved, too. Released last October, it currently enjoys an impressive user rating on ModDB, and also won 'Best Singleplayer' in that site's Mod of the Year awards.

Fortunately, it recently popped up on Steam Greenlight with a new trailer. That means I safely post about it without attracting the ire of The Old Ones—the ancient race of internet commenters that trawl news sites looking for anyone reporting a story more than a couple of days old. "Old!" they cry, having found a suitable victim. Then they leave. Admittedly, they're not very scary.

Here's the trailer:

If you don't want to wait for a Steam Greenlight release, you don't have to. Penumbra: Necrologue is available to download right now.

Just in time for (a few days after) Halloween, two full conversion mods for Amnesia: The Dark Descent, both by the same modder, umbakarna, both creepy and atmospheric in their own ways, yet entirely distinct from one another.

The first mod is called Meta, and concerns a journalist who has uncovered a scandal involving a powerful baron. The baron isn't particularly happy about being exposed for his "filthiness" and knocks the journalist unconscious, banishing him to a dungeon full of horrors. I guess he's not a fan of ethics in journalism.

Meta is straight-forward horror. Ghouls pursue you as you investigate dark torture chambers, claustrophobic tunnels, pitch-black hallways, and other creepy and disturbing environments while trying to puzzle-solve your way to freedom. The scares are very effective: at one moment about ten minutes into the mod I experienced more fright than I did in the entire sixteen hours I spent with The Evil Within. I actually jumped in my chair and shouted, well, a very bad swear.

There's a lot of custom features in addition to new maps and a new story: new objects, custom skins, maps, voice work and sound effects, and a fairly nice inventory and journal system. Mostly, though, the modder just does a great job by slathering on the dread. At one point I discovered another victim of the baron, sitting on a table in chains, his body mutilated and twisted. It took me a while to even work up the nerve to approach him, and I kept my eye on him for a while, figuring he'd lurch to life and shamble after me. He didn't, though. What he actually did was far worse: when I bent over to retrieve an object from the floor, I turned around to see that he'd completely vanished. Guhhhhh. The only thing worse than a monster you can see is one you can't, right?

There's probably about an hour or so of playtime in Meta, depending on how easily spooked you are and how good you are at solving puzzles in the dark. The mod ends with the promise of a sequel.

The second mod, Mana, is a bit different. Still definitely creepy at times, but less about straight-up nightmare fuel and more focused on exploration, puzzle-solving, and experimental gameplay.

Mana tells the story of a young woman discovering an evil presence at the magic school she's attending. Shocking, I know, that a school that teaches magic might contain some less-than-proper behavior. The young sorcerer, named Elisa, has decided to ditch the evil university, and the mod challenges you to help her escape.

Mana, much more than Meta, marks a real departure from vanilla Amnesia. There's naturally a mana system, in which you can illuminate rooms at a cost to your mana meter and later perform other magical feats like passing through certain walls and obstacles. Rather than chambers of pain and blood, there's a number of interesting, creative environments: shadowy bedrooms, hallways lit only by mystical runes, shimmering portals, and other eerie, enchanted places you might expect to find in a school of magic. You can recharge your mana in interesting ways: at one point, upon finding several dead pigs, I was able to enchant them back to life, refilling my magical batteries. Makes sense to me: seeing some pigs snorfling happily around, even re-animated zombie pigs, is a general mood-lifter.

There's still a bit of horror in Mana: a zombie-like hall monitor chased me around for a bit, slashing at me, and there are other ghouls and creatures lurking here and there, though some are harmless and others only bite if you're stupid enough (like me) to walk right up to them and peer into their faces. Mostly, though, Mana is more enchanting than scary.

To install one or both of these mods, download them here and here. Navigate to your main Amnesia: The Dark Descent installation folder, and drop the downloaded files right in there (they're named fullconversion_1 and fullconversion_2). To run them, open those folders and click the full_launcher .bat file contained within. There are also readme files in the downloaded folders if that's not clear.

After a good start yesterday, day two of Steam s dozen-day Summer Sale isn t necessarily obliterating our minds with savings, but there s still some great values available today or through shorter-term flash sales. Within, find our picks for the best current deals on Steam. Don t forget that GOG is having a summer sale of its own, too.

Reminder: if a game isn't a daily deal or a flash sale, it could pop up later in the sale for an even lower price. If you want to be safe, wait until June 30 to pick up a sale-long deal.

5 - Ikaruga
50% off: $4.99 / 3.49 Steam store page | Note: May be reduced further in a Flash sale
50% may not be a huge discount, but one of the best SHMUPS of all time is worth every penny. Unlike most bullet hell shooters, Ikaruga's polarity-switching gameplay gives you the power to absorb some bullets while dodging others. At first, switching from white to black and back to stay alive just seems cool. Once you discover how the polarity system plays into scoring, you realize how deep and intimidating and brilliant it really is. Ikaruga's developer Treasure has been mostly dormant for the past few years, and this is their first-ever port to the PC. Back in January, the developer said it was mulling a new game for Steam. The more successful Ikaruga is on PC, the more likely that is to happen.

4 - Amnesia Collection
80% off: $6.99 / 4.79 - Steam store page
The Dark Descent and A Machine for Pigs, conveniently bundled into one cheap night terror. We loved both of them. Unlike horror games which arm you with evil-defeating ghost bullets, Amnesia is about being hunted: running, hiding, being disgustingly terrified by a sound effect. What Amnesia gets more than other survival horror games is that the things you can imagine are far more horrifying than anything it can show you on the screen. Even so, it ll show you some damn nasty stuff.

2 - The Walking Dead: Season 2
50% off: $12.49 / 9.49 - Steam store page
Putting players into Clementine's tiny shoes in season two of The Walking Dead was a gamble. In the first season, Lee was a grown-up, with the strength to fight walkers and the authority to make big decisions. How would that translate to playing a young girl? While episode one was a step down in quality, episode two was one of the best episodes Telltale has ever created. It proved that players can still make tough decisions as Clementine, and the season has mostly made her a believable protagonist. She can seem a little too grown up now and then, but the season is both gripping and heartbreaking so far. $2.50 per episode is a fantastic price.

2 - Prison Architect
66% off: $10.19 / 6.79 - Steam store page
Introversion s security sim is an interesting confluence of capitalism, architecture, management, and morality. The theme puts multiple, often contradicting goals before you: prisoner safety, spatial efficiency, prisoner well-being, making a profit, and making sure your prison is totally secure. Building a space that supports these goals is a fascinating exercise.

1 - Mount & Blade Collection
80% off: $6.99 / 4.99 - Steam store page | Flash sale: Buy it before 8 p.m. EST
It won t make your GPU sweat, but Taleworlds medieval sandbox action-RPG is one of our favorite open-ended experiences on PC. M&B s go anywhere, pillage anything approach to the genre is unlike anything else: a dynamic world populated by dozens of lords and dukes serving multiple factions, each roaming the same massive medieval landscape as you. Steal from farmers. Get married. Siege a castle. The combat is clumsy at times, but we love loosing arrows packs of bandits. Warband is what you should play, but this collection is a ticket to the ridiculous Star Wars Conquest mod for the original Mount & Blade.

Other great deals today
Remember that games not categorized as Daily Deals or Flash Sales may be reduced further.

Retro/Grade (90% off) $0.99 / 0.69
Deponia (90% off) $1.99 / 1.59
L.A. Noire: The Complete Edition (75% off) $7.49 / 6.24
Cloudbuilt (75% off) $4.99 / 3.74
Euro Truck Simulator 2 Collector's Bundle (75% off) $9.99 / 7.49
Defense Grid: The Awakening (75% off) $2.49 / 1.74
Devil May Cry 4 (75% off) $4.99 / 3.49
Unity of Command Trilogy Bundle (70% off) $8.99 / 6.89
Bit.Trip.Runner Franchise Pack (65% off) $5.94 / 4.54
Don't Starve + Reign of Giants DLC (60% off) $7.59 / 5.59

There s a big reveal in Soma that only became big by accident: Frictional Games long-in-the-making horror follow-up to Amnesia is set underwater.

Initially some pockets of people (not us) thought it was set on a spaceship due to the abundance of grimy Giger-influenced corridors, which seemed to imply something Alienesque. Instead, I ve been walking across the ocean floor, following red lights in the dark and cowering at horrendous noises echoing through the waters. At no point was I in outer space.

So your first thought is BioShock, right? Soma s definitely not that. Horror is tonally dominant here, and the parts I played were entirely focused on exploration and puzzle elements. Like Amnesia, then, but with a greater emphasis on poking around. Of the various BioShocks, the second in the series comes closest, given your ability to wander around on the seabed, but the grim art direction of Soma sets it apart.

It s worth explaining at this point that Frictional made me play their game in the dark in the hotel room where the demo was being staged, while they went next door. Part of me hoped they d jump out at me dressed as a fish (they didn t).



What I played of their game is better described as tense, rather than scary. The two sections of the demo were taken from entirely different parts of the game, which was made fairly obvious by the abrupt change in setting. The first was set in an abandoned manufacturing facility, a mostly puzzle-driven area where I had to power-up a switch in a control room to open up a larger chamber. The only background information I d been given on the story was that the protagonist I was playing, Simon, was lost, and trying to work out where he was. OK then. A later task required me to look for a fuse in a maintenance room by moving objects around until I found it a task I initially failed by walking into water with an electrical current.

There was nothing too tricky in the game I played, however, and it was pretty much in line with Amnesia in terms of interface and moving objects around. The setting, however, was impressively detailed. This looks like a big-budget game, its production values no doubt helped by Amnesia s colossal success and Frictional s third iteration of their HPL Engine.

The Giger influence is mostly seen in the organic-looking electronic design, where cables coming out of power generators look more like tentacles protruding from a hive, crawling over the walls. The cable-ends even have little claws that twitch. The murky screenshots Frictional provided don t really show off how successful they ve been in building a sci-fi horror setting with its own visual language.



The underwater sections must have been the biggest challenge in terms of environmental design. When the demo cut to Simon standing on the ocean floor, with limited vision of what lay ahead, Soma started to feel like something new.

The dark green colour palette, the momentary image of sea life hovering overhead, and the vague outline of structures in the distance all made the unknown feel pretty exciting.

It s an environment that enables Frictional to experiment with new ways of scaring you, aided by an ambient soundtrack and the constant noise of Simon s breathing apparatus, pretty much an essential horror device post-Dead Space.

The seabed setting isn t massive, but was still big enough that I managed to get lost. One of my favourite images of the demo was the giant sunken submarine I found embedded on the ocean floor, signifying that I d reached the edge of the map. If I hadn t foolishly ignored the flashing red lights that show you where to go, I would ve missed this admirably lavish detail.



Following the red lights in the right direction next time, I encountered two abandoned underwater structures along the way. I also heard a couple of horrendous screams, about 30 seconds apart another of Soma s subtle indicators you re heading in the right direction.

My last task in the demo was to find a cutting tool, in order to slice through the thick cable wrapped around a metal door and impeding my progress. Searching for this device took me through a lot of samey-looking corridors until I eventually found it in a small office. The inventory is contextual, so the cutter only appeared in front of me when I returned to the metal door to cut through the blockage.

In the last few seconds of the demo, a robotic creature shrieked and made a run at me. With only this encounter to go on, and the one before that where the creature killed me, it s too soon to say how dealing with enemies will work in Soma.



We re still a year out from release, but during my hour with the demo, I felt that this chunk of Soma was already better paced than Amnesia. Its puzzles were taxing without being too obtrusive. I think this is the optimum structure for Frictional, leaning more towards exploration and discovery. I hope that the sequence I played isn t the only time we re allowed underwater either, since this was by far the most interesting part of what I played.

Soma s voice-acting risks undermining its atmosphere. Throughout the demo, audiotapes activated by clicking on dead bodies and other scenery filled-in the story, but they were overcooked, let down by recordings that I m hoping are temporary or unfinished. Soma was far more effective when it let me piece together its story without people talking over it. While the audiovisual design is so credible, the cast drag this into B-movie territory.

This first look at Soma demonstrates how Frictional s world-building has escalated since Amnesia. I m intrigued to explore the other corners of this new environment, and spend some time in the company of its enemies to see how the developers are handling that side of the game. As far as subject matter goes, Soma is a strong move for Frictional, and one that could help them innovate the way they present horror.

Amnesia: The Dark Descent developer Frictional Games recently revealed that The Fullbright Company’s indie title, Gone Home, first saw life through the Amnesia engine. And if you're interested in the prototype, you can try it right now.

Frictional Games co-founder Thomas Grip notes in a company blog post that he denies all requests to use the HPL2 engine in a commercial game, as there’s no documentation for the engine and Frictional Games simply doesn’t have the time to support the engine. Instead, Grip would suggest using Unity or UDK (Unreal Development Kit). Steve Gaynor, who helped craft the haunting tale that is Gone Home, asked Grip whether his team could use the engine for what would become Gone Home, but received the same answer.

Fullbright ended up following Grip’s advice and used Unity to shape Gone Home—but not before building the first prototype with the HPL2 engine anyway. After all, Grip only denied requests to license the engine for commercial products.

Grip and Gaynor reconnected after Gone Home’s launch, with Grip asking if Gaynor still had the “Amnesia version” of Gone Home tucked away in his computer. Gaynor just so happened to have a copy, and now that copy is available to you.

Grip said Gaynor requested the HPL2 license way back in January of last year, and speculates that the Fullbright Company must have been utilizing the HPL2 engine before asking Grip if the final version of Gone Home could use that license. Basically, this means the Amnesia prototype is a very early version of what Gone Home would eventually become.

To navigate Gone Home’s earliest, creakiest walls, just download the prototype and extract the file into Amnesia: The Dark Descent’s “custom_stories” directory. If you see something called “Test Game” after selecting “Custom Stories” on Amnesia’s main menu, you’re good to go. At least the Gone Home prototype doesn’t have invincible flesh monsters roaming the halls…right?

After two freaky live action trailers, Frictional have finally unveiled the first in-game footage from their upcoming sci-fi horror SOMA. Judging from the trailer, it looks a bit 'Amnesia in space', and you'll play as a man who thinks it is a good idea to jam a weird metal device into the decapitated head of a corpse. Based purely on that performance, I'm not confident in his long term chance for survival.



Beyond that small sampler, details are few, although the game's website does reveal some basic info as to what's going on:

"The radio has gone silent on PATHOS-2. As isolation bears down on the staff of the remote research facility, strange things are happening.

"Machines are taking on human traits and alien constructions have started to interfere with routine. The world around them is turning into a nightmare.

"The only way out is to do something unimaginable."

Don't expect to find out much more for a while. SOMA is due out on PC and PS4, just not until 2015.

Here's a second video for Amnesia dev Frictional's next project, which might well be a game called SOMA. Then again, it might not be, with the studio not yet having confirmed what this series of hints are leading to. What we do know, from years of pop culture, is that taunting robots is almost always a terrible idea. Maybe this five minutes live action teaser will be the exception to that rule.



Not so much, then.

Ethically unsound and psychologically damaging experiments with technology would appear to be the order of the day. Knowing Frictional, everything will be kept within the bounds of sanity, and sense and safety will hold steady. No wait, not that, the other thing.

You can poke around the SOMA website here, not that it will clarify things any.