It's been a couple of years since Frictional Games, the studio that over the past decade has given us the Penumbra trilogy, Amnesia: The Dark Descent, and Soma, revealed that its next "horrific" game was in full production, yet we still know nothing about it. That may be about to change, however. Rock, Paper, Shotgun recently noticed that the Frictional website has been updated with a link to "Next Frictional Game," and more importantly the nextfrictionalgame.com website is doing something different now, too.

The fun thing about that site is that Frictional has maintained it for more than a decade, updating it very slowly to promote whatever project it currently has in the pipe. In September 2008, for instance (via the Internet Archive), it teased the followup to the Penumbra games: "Set in the late 18th century the player will explore the eerie environments of an old castle. It's a journey through horrors and disturbing sights, built up during centuries of decay."

That, as we know now, became the spectacularly scary Amnesia: The Dark Descent. The second Amnesia game, the Chinese Room-developed A Machine for Pigs, and Soma got the same sort of treatment.

For the past four years, the site has displayed just a single line of text—"Our next project has not yet been announced."—on a black background. But at some point between November 28 and today, that changed. The text is gone, and in its place is a pulsating... something. A small ball of electricity, perhaps, or a sentient bit of bellybutton lint. Or a Stalker anomaly! Honestly, I have no idea. But it's definitely ominous.

An obligatory glance at the page source doesn't reveal any secrets, but that's okay because what's important at this early stage is that things are happening. Frictional's games are awful (in the best possible ways) and I honestly don't enjoy playing them, but at the same time I can't not play them and I'm really excited to see what it's getting up to next, even though I wish I wasn't. 

Yeah, it's weird, but as our review of The Dark Descent makes clear, that's the way it goes: "It was utterly, panic-inducingly horrible ... When it was all over, I nearly had a little cry"—loved it, 88/100.

With the commercial release of Dear Esther in 2012, The Chinese Room had no idea that their interactive ghost story would cause quite the cultural shift in the video game world. Originally developed as a Half-Life 2 mod, Dear Esther was an experiment of sorts, created by Dr. Dan Pinchbeck at the University of Portsmouth. In his project, Dr. Pinchback would explore the nature of narrative in videogames by stripping back traditional game mechanics to a bare minimum. His results created something that was completely original to games and started a discussion that got right to the heart of videogames. 

Dear Esther has no NPCs, challenges, collectibles, combat, and no fail state. You wander around an ambient island and a narrator guides your journey, a man reading aloud a number of letters he has written to his dead wife. It's eerie, solemn and quietly poetic and a first in a long line of games to test the interaction and relationship between player, story, and environment. 

Looking back at the quotes from Pinchbeck about Dear Esther being made for academic reasons, its pretty weird, especially now that his project, made over a decade ago, has influenced how exploration and environments are now used in video game storytelling. From its lack of traditional game mechanics, and deciding to prioritise the player's interaction with its story and environment, Dear Esther spurred on an important discussion: do you play Dear Esther? And, speaking of playing, what exactly makes a video game a video game in the first place?

With Dear Esther beginning to break the mold, 2013 was the year where this discussion really started to kick-off with Proteus releasing in January followed by Gone Home later in the year. Proteus was created by Ed Key and David Kanaga and had even less traditional game elements than Dear Esther. In Proteus, you walk around an island as day turns to night and seasons pass you by, it's a relaxing game where players have a wander and just submit themselves to the game's peaceful ambiance. Proteus' minimalism focused more on the player’s experience of the game is through interpretation, imagination and their own discovery rather than being a piece of entertainment with a story and characters. 

In Fullbright's Gone Home, you play as a young woman named Katie who returns to her family home to find it completely empty. As you start to explore the house, picking up objects and reading bits of paper here and there, you begin to learn about the drama surrounding the family and their subsequent disappearing act. Learning about the family through their personal living space was a deeply intimate way to tell its compelling story.

Proteus and Gone Home built upon the foundations of a new emerging genre that Dear Esther had built before it. The three games' slow-pace exploration spurred on by player curiosity created a polarized, and quite frankly, confused reception. What do you categorize a game where you walk around, explore the environment, and look at things? Empathy game, exploration game, narrative exploration games, interactive narrative exploration game, first-person exploration game, atmospheric game, ambient game, art game?  

But these unique play styles and storytelling was not celebrated by all and so anti-game, nongame, and walking simulator were also used as descriptions, the idea that Dear Esther, Proteus, and Gone Home had little to no gameplay and thus, not a game. 

Although there was criticism, slow-exploration and environmental storytelling started to root its way into game design, in the years following Gone Home there has been a burst of narrative first-person atmospheric art exploration games from a bunch of different genres. 

Released commercially in 2013, The Stanley Parable lets players explore a drab empty office building and lets the player make narrative decisions through walking to certain routes, choosing to take the omnipresent narrator's advice or to go against it with comedic consequences. The Layers of Fear series took note from the spooky house vibes of Gone Home and built a horror game about a tortured artist who is losing his mind, trapped in his mansion.

Firewatch, The Vanishing of Ethan Carter, Virginia, and What Remains of Edith Finch all create compelling stories through their exploration mechanics, with both The Chinese Room and Fullbright developed on their storytelling style releasing Everybody's Gone to the Rapture and Tacoma.

The play style of exploration games has even influenced big-budget games like Uncharted 4: A Thief's End where developer Naughty Dog told Polygon in 2016 took inspiration from Gone Home and Everybody's Gone to the Rapture saying that they like people being able to "walk around, look at things, just take in their environment ー without being shot at." Even this year we've seen elements of walking sims make it into blockbuster games with the term being thrown around once or twice when describing Death Stranding. 

Walking sims, exploration games, interactive narratives ー whatever you want to call them ー have challenged the way in how videogames are played, experienced and defined. The term walking simulator is now an indication of a game that encompasses diverse, compelling narratives through great writing and engaging exploration. Walking simulators were, and still are, criticized for their mechanics, but over the decade that attitude began to shift from what they don't have to what they do differently. 

Welcome to our guide to the best Terraria builds. Among the game's many systems, there are few as poorly explained as the Terraria classes system. In fact, it's hardly mentioned at all, its existence may even be news to you. If you're in that camp, or you're just looking for a refresher, below is our breakdown, along with the equipment you should be keeping an eye out for.

What Terraria classes are there?

There are four main classes in Terraria. Rather than being based on stats or anything that a traditional RPG would use, your class is defined by your equipment. While it's possible to mix and match these classes, it's rarely wise to. 

There's is a fifth class—one that uses throwing weapons—it gets outclassed so quickly you're better off sticking to one of the others. These are your four main classes:

Melee

In most cases, melee characters are close-range fighters who hit things, but that's not always the case in Terraria. While some of the weapons this class uses are designed for close-quarters combat, we also get boomerangs, and projectile-firing swords. Melee armour boasts the highest defensive values in the game, so this is a great class for beginners.

Ranged

Ranged characters use a combination of bows and guns to deal huge damage quickly. What's more, you have special weapons that turn your arrows into bees, or fire piranhas. That might sound cool, but you'll need to grind to keep on time of crafting your special ammo stocks.

Magic

Terraria mage builds offer some frankly obnoxious spells. This includes ray guns, short range spikes, and controllable fireballs—and that's just the early game. Later on you'll wield massive beams of light, meteor showers, and a rainbow gun. While mages can unleash high damage, their relative lack of armour means you needplenty of healing potions in your inventory.

Summons

If you prefer to delegate tasks rather than do the dirty work yourself, this is the class for you. Summoners call on spiders, imps, and dragons to do their fighting for them. That said, you'll need a backup weapon if enemies get dangerously close. Summoner is the closest you'll get to a mixed class, and it's handy for farming specific ores.

Getting started

You'll need to wait a while before you can properly choose your class: it's unlikely you'll get class-specific armour until you've taken out the first few bosses. Your best bet is to create some gold or platinum weapons and armour and stick to that until you've defeated the first major targets. 

A good way to get a good weapon early is to dig underground and raid chests you come across; just use whatever feels good or drops with decent stats. It's also worth grabbing any stars that fall to increase your mana and hunting down life crystals to boost your maximum health. Both actions will make you more powerful, and mana is essential to Mages and Summoners.

You should get some good drops from any of the bosses you fight up to the Wall of Flesh. Try to farming Queen Bee for some of the best possible gear at this early stage: she drops some of the best weapons pre-Hard Mode.

Getting to grips with the Wall of Flesh

Hell is approaching fast, so now you can start thinking about your desired class. Class-specific armour should be cropping up for you to unlock, and weapons will be buffed when you find them. This is the kind of gear you want when you're preparing to take down the Wall of Flesh, and some of it will see you through the early stages of Hard Mode too. A fair warning for budding summoners, it's a tough pick at this point. 

Melee

Weapons: Cascade (dropped by enemies in The Underworld after beating Skeletron), Starfury (found on floating islands).Armour: Molten Armour (crafted using Hellstone Bars).Accessories: Feral Claw (Jungle chests) for all, String (crafted with Cobweb) and Counterweight (bought from Travelling Merchant or Skeleton Merchant) for yoyos.

Ranged

Weapons: Minishark with Meteor Shot (purchase the gun from the Arms Dealer and craft the ammo from Meteorite Bars and Musket Balls), Molten Fury (crafted with Hellstone Bars).Armour: Necro Armour (crafted with Bone and Cobweb).Accessories: Whatever is available. 

Magic

Weapons: Space Gun (crafted with Meteorite Bars).Armour: Meteor Armour (crafted with Meteorite Bars).Accessories: Celestial Cuffs (crafted by following this guide)

Summons

Weapons: Imp Staff (crafted with Hellstone Bars).Armour: Bee Armour (crafted with Bee Wax).Accessories: Whatever you want. 

Getting to grips with Hard Mode

So things will be getting bad right about now. It turns out that sacrificing someone to summon a Wall of Flesh really hurts your karma. Welcome to Hard Mode. Your first task is to try and take out the Mechanical Bosses, which are upgraded versions of fights you'll have completed already. You can get great equipment by just running around and farming the new ores, but keep an eye out for the following drops, too. 

Melee

Weapons: Shadowflame Knife (drops from Goblin Summoner in Hard Mode Goblin Invasion), Amarok (drops from Snow Biome enemies in Hard Mode).Armour: Adamantite or Titanium Amour with the Helmet (crafted from the corresponding bars).Accessories: Warrior Emblem (drops from Wall of Flesh), Yoyo Bag (crafted with this recipe)

Ranged

Weapons: Onyx Blaster (crafted with Shotgun, Dark shard, Soul of Night) and an Endless Musket Pouch (requires four stacks of 999 Musket Balls).Armour: Adamantite or Titanium Amour with the Headgear (crafted from the corresponding bars).Accessories: Ranger Emblem (drops from Wall of Flesh) 

Magic

Weapons: Sky Fracture (crafted with a Magic Missile, Lights Shard, Soul of Light)Armour: Adamantite or Titanium Amour with the Mask (crafted from the corresponding bars).Accessories: Celestial Cuffs, Sorcerer Emblem (drops from Wall of Flesh) 

Summons

Weapons: Spider Staff and Queen Spider Staff (crafted with Spider Fang).Armour: Spider Armour (crafted with Spider Fang).Accessories: Summoner Emblem (drops from Wall of Flesh) 

Preparing for Plantera

So you've beaten the upgraded bosses, what's next? Well, now you've got access to all the Mechanical Boss items and drops, so now it's time to upgrade further for the fight against the mighty Plantera. The good news is there's new ore to mine with your fancy Pickaxe. The bad news is Summoners can fall behind here again. It may be worth jumping to a different class until you've bested Plantera. 

Melee

Weapons: Yelets (dropped by Jungle enemies), Terra Blade (follow this recipe).Armour: Chlorophyte Armour with Mask (crafted using Chlorophyte Bars).Accessories: Warrior Emblem, Yoyo Bag, Mechanical Glove (this recipe).

Ranged

Weapons: Megashark (this recipe), Daedalus Stormbow (dropped by Hallowed Mimics).Armour: Chlorophyte Armour with Helmet (crafted using Chlorophyte Bars).Accessories: Ranger Emblem, Avenger Emblem (this recipe), Magic Quiver if using a bow (drops from Skeleton Archers).

Magic

Weapons: Sky Fracture, Crystal Serpent (fishing in the Hallow) .Armour: Chlorophyte Armour with Headgear (crafted using Chlorophyte Bars).Accessories: Celestial Cuffs, Celestial Emblem (this recipe here), Sorcerer Emblem.

Summons

Weapons: Optic Staff (crafted with Black Lens, Lens, Hallowed Bars, Soul of Sights), Queen Spider Staff.Armour: Spider Armour.Accessories: Summoner Emblem. 

Taking down the Golem

With Planetera down you now have access to the jungle temple, which leads to the tough Golem fight. If you've been grinding hard then you could ease through this stage, but it depends on your gear, and luck. Here, summoners are viable again: in fact, they're just as useful as the other classes. 

Melee

Weapons: Terra Blade, The Eye of Cthulu (drops from Mothron during a Solar Eclipse)Armour: Chlorophyte Armour with Mask.Accessories: Warrior Emblem, Mechanical Glove, Yoyo Bad with a Yoyo. 

Ranged

Weapons: Megashark, Pulse Bow (purchased from the Travelling Merchant)Armour: Shroomite Armour with the headpiece that boosts your chosen weapon (crafted using Shroomite Bars).Accessories: Ranger Emblem, Avenger Emblem, Magic Quiver.

Magic

Weapons: Magnet Sphere (drops from enemies in the Dungeon after Plantera), Rainbow Gun (found in the Dungeon's Hallowed Chest, which can be unlocked with a Hallowed Key, which drops from enemies in the Hallowed Biome).Armour: Spectre Armour with the Hood for healing and Mask for DPS (crafted using Spectre Bars)Accessories: Celestial Cuffs, Celestial Emblem, Sorcerer Emblem. 

Summons

Weapons: Deadly Sphere Staff (drops from Deadly Spheres during a Solar Eclipse), Staff of the Frost Hydra (Found in the Frozen Chest in the Dungeon, open it with the Frozen Key which can drop form any enemy in the Snow Biome)Armour: Tiki Armour (purchased from the Witch Doctor when you have the Pygmy Staff in your inventory)Accessories: Summoner Emblem, Papyrus Scarab (by combining the Hercules Beetle and Necromantic Scroll), Pygmy Necklace (purchased from the Witch Doctor when you have the Pygmy Staff in your inventory and it is nighttime), Hercules Beetle (bought from the Witch Doctor with the Pygmy Staff is in your inventory and the Witch Doctor is in the Jungle), Necromantic Scroll (dropped by Mourning Wood in the Pumpkin Moon event). 

Grinding special events

Once you've conquered the Golem you're getting pretty close to the end. Now is the best time to grind the game's special events, like Frost Moon and Martian Madness. Both can take numerous attempts , but each piece of upgraded equipment will help your chances. 

One of the things that helps all Terraria classes is the UFO mount, which you can get from the Martian Madness event. Above all, it lets you fly, which is reason enough in our book. 

Melee

Weapons: The Eye of Cthulu, Influx Waver (drops from Martian Saucer in the Martian Madness event).Armour: Beetle Armour (which is obtained like this).Accessories: Warrior Emblem, Mechanical Glove, Avenger Emblem, Yoyo Bag. 

Ranged

Weapons: Chain Gun with Chlorophyte Bullets (gun is dropped by Santa-NK1 during the Frost Moon), Xenopopper (dropped by Martian Saucers during the Martian Madness event).Armour: Shroomite Armour.Accessories: Ranger Emblem, Destroyer Emblem (crafted by combining Avenger Emblem and Eye of the Golem).

Magic

Weapons: Magnet Sphere, Razorpine (dropped by Everscream during Frost Moon events).Armour: Spectre Armour.Accessories: Celestial Cuffs, Celestial Emblem, Sorcerer Emblem. 

Summons

Weapons: Xeno Staff (drops from Martian Saucer in the Martian Madness event), Staff of the Frost Hydra.Armour: Tiki Armour.Accessories: Summoner Emblem, Papyrus Scarab, Pygmy Necklace, Hercules Beetle, Necromantic Scroll.

Beating Moon Lord

This is where to get the best armour in the game, but not quite the best weapons. Grab the building blocks for the armour by destroying Pillars that help summon the Moon Lord. Beware: it's tough at this point in the game, especially in Expert Mode. 

Melee

Weapons: Solar Eruption (crafted with Solar Fragments).Armour: Solar Flare Armour (crafted with Solar Fragments).Accessories: Warrior Emblem, Destroyer Emblem, Mechanical Glove, Yoyo Bag.

Ranged

Weapons: Phantasm (crafted with Vortex Fragments).Armour: Vortex Armour (crafted with Vortex Fragments).Accessories: Ranger Emblem, Destroyer Emblem, Magic Quiver. 

Magic

Weapons: Nebula Blaze (crafted with Nebula Fragments).Armour: Nebula Armour (crafted with Nebula Fragments).Accessories: Celestial Cuffs, Celestial Emblem, Sorcerer Emblem. 

Summons

Weapons: Stardust Dragon Staff (crafted with Stardust Fragments).Armour: Stardust Armour (crafted with Stardust Fragments).Accessories: Summoner Emblem, Papyrus Scarab, Pygmy Necklace, Hercules Beetle, Necromantic Scroll.

Messing around in endgame

Congratulations, you've made it to endgame. Now your focus should be to prepare your character for Expert Mode, and beyond. All the best weapons drop from the Moon Lord fight, so just farm it for those. 

Basically, just go and mess stuff up or play around with the best Terraria mods. That's when things get even more extreme, transforming Terraria into a different game, entirely. 

Update: The Twitter account and teaser are not official. Hotline Miami developer Dennaton confirmed that no sequel was in development, unfortunately. It's still a neat teaser and the full trailer should be worth keeping an eye out for.

Original story: A new Twitter account referencing Hotline Miami's original protagonist popped up over the weekend, posting a single video. It's a short, slick and appropriately gory teaser of a fight frozen in time that perfectly matches the series' tone and aesthetic, even though it appears to be live action. It ends with the promise of a trailer coming soon. 

Though it's clearly connected to Hotline Miami, it could be a fan film or some other kind of unofficial project. The Twitter account is new, unverified and, while it follows some people involved with the game, it has hardly any followers. It does link back to the Hotline Miami website, however. 

It looks good enough to be an official teaser, but a lot of fan projects are extremely high quality, so that alone doesn't mean Hotline Miami 3 is coming. That it's not presenting itself as a fan creation does at least suggest it's trying to appear official. Regardless, the full trailer should be a grisly treat.

Cheers, GamesRadar.

The fourth major Terraria update is on its way to us at some point near the end of this year, and it’s bringing more content than you could fit in a thousand chests. It's also planned to be the final big update for Terraria, hence the name: Journey's End.

The Journey’s End update will be free to those who own Terraria—as is always the way—and will be revisiting nearly everything in the game, making wide ranging changes that would be major even if there weren't any new content. But there is: over 800 new items are being added.

In case you’re keeping count, that’s an increase of roughly 120% over what's in the game currently. Some of these will be things you can stumble across in your adventure, while others will be craftable.

What's being added in Journey's End?

The official blog post breaks down the additions, though it doesn't go into too many specifics. Here's what's planned:

• 800 new items
• New enemies and challenges
• "A full revamp of world generation"
• New mini-biomes
• Quality of life improvements
• An "in-game Bestiary" which will record "key statistics" and loot information about the enemies you kill, with your knowledge increasing with more kills.
• Golf
• A new difficulty mode that will be "a true gauntlet for the best of the best"
• "All new and enhanced weather effects"

New enemies are exciting for sure, though whether or not that means new bosses remains to be seen. The new challenges bit could be relating to the special events like the Pirate Invasion and Frost Moon, which would almost definitely mean new bosses, but we have to wait for confirmation. 

There’ll be some new mini-biomes too which are coming in along with a new world-generation system. What these are is a mystery, but you can probably expect more nests and dungeons if what we have now is anything to go by. 

Perhaps the two biggest new features are the ability to play golf and another even harder difficulty mode called Master Mode. If you’ve ever made it through Expert mode then you know just how challenging Terraria can be, so to ramp it up even more is going to take some doing. Maybe we’ll be getting a new accessory slot and special items to go with the new mode, or maybe it’s just for the masochists out there. Golf, on the other hand, should be a pretty chill experience.

Terraria: Journey's End is coming later this year. There are "a handful of other surprises and features" that haven't been announced yet, so we'll be keeping an eye out for more.

Freebird Games, the indie studio behind the tear-jerker adventures To the Moon and Finding Paradise, has announced that its next project will be entitled Impostor Factory, and it will be all about, let's see here... uhh, murder. 

There's very little to go on at this point, besides the title, the teaser, and what is effectively a placeholder page at freebirdgames.com, but Freebird said that the new game will be "familiar" to followers of its previous work. 

It will also, however, mark "an end of an era for the development team," and yes, it really is about violent homicide: "In a stark shift from the developer's past story structure style, players will take part in a time-resetting thriller-mystery that involves a series of bloody murders," Freebird said. 

For those who prefer Freebird's previous stuff, the studio has also released Paper Memories: Comic Stories from To the Moon and Finding Paradise. Available as DLC for either game, Paper Memories includes three comics featuring characters from the games, "snippets" from the SigCorp Doctors, and bonus music tracks.   

Paper Memories is available now on Steam. Impostor Factory is expected to be out sometime in 2020.

This article was originally published in PC Gamer UK 327 back in January. Consider subscribing to get our long-running magazine sent to your door. 

I had not considered that in this, the sixth Year of Luigi, finding music to play in Audiosurf would be a problem. Turns out I stream everything. The only CD I actually own is Bette Midler’s It’s The Girls album and even then I’d need to stream the tracks from that via Spotify because I don’t have a disc drive on my PC anymore.    

After exhausting the sole track included with the game (Audiosurf Overture by Pedro Macedo Camacho) I decide to stream Audiosurf Online Radio, which is basically just a Soundcloud playlist. The only song on the playlist is Audiosurf Overture by Pedro Macedo Camacho. 

I only discover this later when Phil looks it up, as trying to connect to Audiosurf Online Radio by clicking a very 2008-looking button marked ‘www’ causes the entire game to crash. Even Windows’ task manager can’t help me fix it, so I have to reboot my whole PC. 

Rather than risk the World Wide Web again, I’ll need to feed Audiosurf some MP3s directly. This is how I end up on the Free Music Archive downloading songs like ‘Happy Birthday’ by Eric Rogers (a celebration of the birthdays of people called Eric and Shelly) and ‘i love you’ by Catherine Pancake (a woman who says the words ‘olive juice’ over and over until they gradually turn into ‘I love you’). 

Making a point

Audiosurf takes these files and turns them into futuristic racecourses, each spackled with coloured blocks. Collecting groups of matching coloured blocks in each lane of the track is how you earn points. Warmer colours are worth more points, so red is the most desirable pickup and blue is chump change. If you clog up a lane with non-matching colours you can’t pick anything up for a while. 

'Happy Birthday' is too short to be an enjoyable course, and 'i love you' is slightly too weird. The Freak Fandango Orchestra’s Requiem for a Fish works surprisingly well. The latter has a jaunty folk rock thing going on which means there are plenty of blocks on the screen to maintain your attention, but after that I was struggling for mp3 options. Ambient electronica makes for absolutely tedious racing, while punk started giving me a headache, because I’m a million years old and deeply uncool. 

This is when I took my problem to the rest of the PC Gamer team.  

“No can do on the Reinstall, Phil,” I say. “No one actually owns any music nowadays.” 

This is how I come to learn that Phil paid money for an album called Monster Halloween Hits (full track listings here). He is very keen to distance himself from his purchase of Monster Halloween Hits, insisting that it was ‘necessary’ for a party his stepfather’s pub was hosting back in 2010. I don’t remember anything I bought in 2010 so it seems unlikely that Phil would recall this album so easily if he wasn’t still listening to it regularly. 

Regular haunts

The track listing of Monster Halloween Hits reads like an exercise in Halloween keyword searches. Sure, there are classic tunes like Michael Jackson’s Thriller and Monster Mash, but the rest are just songs with vaguely spooky words in the title. And where the hell is the sublime Things That Go Bump In The Night by allSTARS* (a band which no one seems to remember except me, and whose members included a woman who played an Australian housemate in the eighth season of UK version of Big Brother and the guy who plays Darren Osborne in Hollyoaks)? 

While I listen to Things That Go Bump In The Night via a terribly low-quality YouTube video, I decide the biggest stumbling block with Monster Halloween Hits is that tonally it’s all over the place. 

Picture the scene: you go to the pub (the one which Phil may or may not have made up) expecting cheesy over-the-top cobwebstravaganza realness, and as you walk through the door the CD spits out Radiohead’s Creep. You go to the loo to try to get over your sudden waves of angst and alienation and by the time you get back it’s barrelled on towards Iron Maiden (The Number of the Beast, since you asked). 

You try to order a snakebite and black because memories of some metal club night at university are stirring and while you shout your order Ding Dong! The Witch is Dead pops up. You don’t know how to deal with this change in mood so you slide a quid onto the side of the pool table. You know pool. You like pool. Pool is pretty low-stress for you. Then O Fortuna from Carmina Burana starts up. Your pool game is now the most dramatic event of your life. You throw the pool cue onto the floor and run to the taxi rank. It’s all too much. You never attend another Halloween party as long as you live. 

I mean, Ghost Town by The Specials in on there. I assume it’s because it namechecks ghosts. Ghost Town is a song about unemployment and the decay of once-thriving areas. There’s a creeping horror there, sure, but not in the kind of campy over-the-top Halloween way. More in the way of political unrest and a loss of faith in governance. There’s also Black Night by Deep Purple, maybe because dark, gothy colour palettes and night are spooky? 

Shakira’s She Wolf is more interesting. It is ostensibly about werewolves, but, look, the werewolf is a metaphor for sexual agency and freedom. It’s a lot like Dracula, but instead of trying to put an end to all the sucking and seducing, Shakira’s like, “Mate, I’ve got a radar to track down eligible dudes and the emergency services on speed dial in case it gets so hot it catches fire.” She Wolf is also a total CHOON. 

Further complaints

I suspect that embracing a playful riff on folklore was less important to the selection process for Monster Halloween Hits than the fact it has the word ‘Wolf’ in the title. It is on the same CD as Creep and the only reason I can see for choosing Creep as a Monster Halloween Hit is that creep is part of the word ‘creepy’. This logic also would help explain Poison by Alice Cooper. Actually, it wouldn’t. 

My beef with Ding Dong! The Witch Is Dead is a little more nuanced. Ding Dong! The Witch is Dead is about a witch, and witches are a Halloween staple. So far, so logical. But Ding Dong! is from The Wizard of Oz. It’s about a very specific witch being killed in extremely specific circumstances, i.e. being crushed to death under a gallivanting house. The commercial and party-focused strands of Halloween are not so much about eradicating witches as plastering them over everything. 

The only thing I can think of here is that in the movie, the singing of the song is overseen by Glinda the Good Witch so maybe there’s an ambient non-squashed witch in the song’s general orbit. I will, however, point out that Glinda dresses more like a tooth fairy or the kind of doll with a massive skirt your grandparents might use in the bathroom to hide spare rolls of toilet paper, and is not anything remotely Halloweeny. 

What it all comes down to is that there doesn’t seem to be any form of curation here. A compilation done right feels coherent. It feels like it’s either worth listening to the songs in order, or that it offers a comprehensible tone which can withstand being put on shuffle. Monster Halloween Hits avoids both. If one were to, for example, crack it out for use at some definitely non-fictional Halloween party at one’s stepdad’s pub, you’d be signing up to spend the entire evening with a finger hovering over the skip button. 

This is why no one owns music nowadays. We saw Monster Halloween Hits and decided that life was too short for these shenanigans. Well, everyone except Phil. Phil decided that this was exactly the lifestyle he was going to embrace. A life with Ding Dong! The Witch Is Dead and no Things That Go Bump In The Night. 

I guess what I am trying to say here is that this Reinstall of Monster Halloween Hits was a complete disaster. 

Audiosurf is fine. 

There you are idly using your computer when, suddenly, you begin to hear a series of terrifyingly ominous noises coming out of your speakers. Among them is the horrifically wet sound of someone being stabbed, the manic laugh of a woman (or is she sobbing?), and an atmospheric rumbling that evokes the creepy feeling of being deep, deep underground. These sounds repeat again and again until you finally identify the source: Somehow, Steam's music player (you didn't even know it had one, did you?) is randomly playing sound effects from horror classic Amnesia: The Dark Descent. It sounds like the beginning of some creepypasta internet myth, but this is exactly what's been haunting redditor 'YouNiqueUser' and others over on the Steam subreddit.

Yesterday, YouNiqueUser posted a thread on the Steam subreddit begging for help after twice returning to their computer to find it randomly playing that series of creepy Amnesia sound effects. "Anyone know what they are/or how to delete them?" They implored, including a screenshot of Steam's media player with a playlist of several inconspicuous sound files with names like "00_laugh - sounds". I've uploaded the tracks and embedded them below so you can hear them yourself.

"Once I came home after work and they were playing," YouNiqueUser explains. "Second time after I came back to PC after dinner. They even play with my PC sleeping/monitor black. Can't remember if my PC was hibernating in the instance I came home from work. I think it was as I was gone for 10 hours."

Understandably confused and a little creeped out, YouNiqueUser thought someone might've hacked into their computer and was playing a very cruel trick, but a virus scan turned up nothing and the thread quickly filled with comments from others experiencing the same strange phenomenon.

"Are you serious? It's been happening to me to, and its freaking me the fuck out," wrote CabbageMans. Others chimed in saying they were having the same problem but with different games ranging from Cities: Skylines to Dota 2. 

"I don't even own [Amnesia: The Dark Descent] and I got the files," says another redditor. "Don't know how, I'm too much of a chicken to play the game. It started last week for me, every now and again I here grunting and other ominous sounds."

What's weird though, is that no one knows exactly why this is happening. Steam has a lot of unnecessary and easy-to-miss features like its music player, which can be set to automatically import sound files from downloaded Steam games or other directories. The idea, presumably, is to make it easy to access the soundtracks of games you own. But the problem is that Steam's music library can't distinguish between a music and, say, the sound of a demon eviscerating a corpse (though I guess we all have a different preference for background music).

Above: A video of Steam playing a Franklin D. Roosevelt speech.

For years now, players have been complaining about a bug that causes Steam to automatically start playing random sound files loaded into its music library. My favorite is a thread from three years ago when some poor user's Steam client kept playing Franklin D. Roosevelt presidential speeches—though, god knows how they got into his Steam library. Curious, I set up my own music library to auto-import sound files from my games directory, which mysteriously turned up rock classics like Jimmy Hendrix's "All Along The Watchtower". I have no idea why this is in my Steam folder.

What's clear is that either Steam has a very weird bug or people somehow keep unintentionally triggering Steam's music player—but no one is exactly sure. That isn't much consolation if you, like YouNiqueUser, are not keen on randomly hearing terrifying ghost noises. The only way to be safe is to follow one redditor's advice and turn off automatic importing and clearing out Steam's music library.

Or just throw your whole computer out because it's obviously haunted.

If you loved the world of Amnesia: The Dark Descent but found it all too scary, then The Shadow of the Ramlord might be more your speed. It's an hour-long Lovecraftian adventure built using assets from The Dark Descent and its sequel, A Machine for Pigs, and promises to be light on scares but heavy on environmental storytelling, atmosphere and necromancy.

"Our custom story is very much directed towards the player who enjoys a deliberate pace, absorbing the narrative and level design clues, and feeling immersed in a story-first experience," says the development team at Dark Craft Studios. They say it'll appeal to those who enjoyed SOMA, the semi-scary, philosophical survival horror from Frictional Games, the same developer that made the Amnesia games.

The Shadow of the Ramlord tells the story of the Baron of Caecea Manor, who wants to summon a "malignant being" known as the Ramlord. His wife, who is being held prisoner, has smuggled a letter out of the manor, begging for help. It arrives in your hands, and it's up to you to investigate. "The three characters' fates are woven together in an intricate, disquieting narrative through the occult, madness, and despair," says the description on the ModDB page.

You'll explore seven separate maps, including the manor itself and the catacombs below, and it'll take between 45 minutes and an hour to finish. It's the third part of a Lovecraftian trilogy made by Dark Craft Studios—the previous two were mods for Crysis. 

It's one of the most popular mods on ModDB right now, and the early reviews from players are promising. If you have a spare hour, it might be worth checking out. You can download it here.

The stealthy murder game Mark of the Ninja is really good, but it's also getting up there in years. To address that, Klei announced back in March that a remastered version was in the works and would be out later this year. Now we've got a more properly detailed look at what the updated version will deliver, and a release date of October 9. 

The new version of the game will include the Dosan's Tale DLC that was released for the 2013 Special Edition of the game, which adds a new character, level, items, and developer commentary. The graphics have been updated to support 4K resolution, the soundtrack has been remixed and remastered in 5.1 audio, and an unlockable New Game+ mode will add "new challenges and rewards." 

Mark of the Ninja: Remastered will go for $20 on Steam, although you can pick it up at a 15 percent discount if you pre-purchase on Steam. Owners of the base game can upgrade to the Remastered version, with the Special Edition DLC, for $5, and if you already own the special edition, the Remastered upgrade is free.