If you're in the market for a spooky game to augment your Halloween, GOG's discounted more than 300 games for the season of scares. It's not just horror or horror-adjacent romps—there are sedate adventures, CCGs and the occasional action sandbox. 

Blair Witch, Layers of Fear 2 and Call of Cthulhu have all shed their price, but unfortunately they're not very good, so instead we'll have to go further back in time for some quality scares. 

Sanitarium should leave you feeling very uneasy and is easily one of the most unsettling adventure games I've muddled through. It's a surreal psychological thriller full of unusual characters and not so many scares, but it's still good Halloween fodder. 

Unavowed has demons, haunted houses, grisly murders and—most terrifying of all—existential crises. It's perfect for Halloween. Wadjet Eye's supernatural point-and-click is also one of the best adventure games ever made, so you should probably pick it up. 

If you're in the mood for something brief but memorable, Stories Untold is worth a look. It's a horror anthology where your only point of interaction is outdated machinery that reveals each of the four short stories. 

Frankly, there are far too many great horror games to list. Amnesia, Sunless Skies, Alan Wake, Outlast, Metro 2033—you'll find something. Browse the list here. 

In 2018, one of the best point-and-click adventure games was conjured into existence. Unavowed leaves you picking up the pieces after you were possessed by a demon for a year, kicking off the strongest story Dave Gilbert’s written, so far. And, as always, it's accompanied by striking art from Ben Chandler, who manages to capture New York while simultaneously transforming it into somewhere otherworldly and magical. 

It’s urban fantasy with pulp noir undertones, but instead of devolving into gritty, detective cliches and hard-boiled cynicism, it’s an empathetic story full of complicated, believable characters who learn and forgive. There’s a lot of humanity in this game about stopping monsters.

The world they inhabit is just as fascinating and well realised. Instead of a tour of internationally famous landmarks, it’s a quieter, smaller vision of New York. I felt like a local in a city I’ve only visited once for a few days. And it feels old. The titular Unavowed, an ancient order determined to stop evil, have called it home for centuries and share some of its secret past. There’s always the juxtaposition of the magical and mundane, from djinn riding in subways to monsters lurking in the New York harbour.  

Puzzles are elegantly woven into the story and avoid classic pixel hunting frustrations and faffing around in your inventory. They’re not especially tricky head-scratchers, but they’re usually inventive enough that solving them is just as satisfying. That's a tricky balance to find, and Unavowed rarely slips. And you're not solving them alone. The Unavowed are all about teamwork, and the one conundrum that really gave me pause was figuring out who to take with me on my adventures.

Companions can help, or at least offer guidance, acting like an unobtrusive hint system, as well as potential solution themselves. They otherwise function a lot like BioWare companions, grounding you in the world by giving you friendships to hold onto. Bringing specific buddies opens up new dialogue options and solutions, and the system fits as comfortably with an adventure game as it does an RPG. Better, perhaps, since their most important attributes aren't combat related (though one of them has a sword that comes in handy), it's their expertise and insight.  

Another arguably RPG-like trait is the importance Unavowed places on the choices you make at key points throughout the game. Sometimes it can be a bit too obvious that you’re making a Meaningful Choice™, but I’m still thinking about them months later. I was agonising over the final moments of the game again yesterday, replaying my last decision and the closing seconds in my mind. It wasn’t really a decision, though. My choice was inevitable, based on my version of the protagonist, developed over 10 hours of supernatural crises. Despite starting out as an amnesiac—a tired trope that’s used surprisingly well here—I knew exactly who I was playing by the end. 

Unavowed isn’t a love letter to traditional adventure games or trading in nostalgia—it’s an adventure game with forward momentum. Sure, at times it’s evocative of games like Gabriel Knight, but it also feels new and novel. When it plays with the familiar, it subverts it, dragging us along in an unexpected direction. And it knows when to end! How many games know that, these days? It clips along at a reasonable pace, ramps up towards the end and then boom, big finale and then it’s done, probably in a few sittings. I’m ravenous for more but don’t feel short-changed. A compelling yarn doesn’t need to take 60 hours. 

Not that I wouldn’t happily play 60 hours of Unavowed.   

There's an unappreciated art to adventure game backgrounds. They need to be pleasant backdrops to walk in front of multiple times while you're trying to figure out what to do with the custard and the octopus, yet they also need to stand up to the rigorous attention of players hunting for a hotspot because there's a vital clue hidden in that long grass (it's a tiny snake scale, of course). Maybe that's why these environments stick with us. All it takes is a glimpse of the carnival America of Sam & Max: Hit the Road or the imposing Ankh-Morpork buildings of Discworld to take me right back to playing those games.

Ben Chandler is an expert on the subject, having served as artist and animator for Wadjet Eye adventure games like The Shivah: Kosher Edition and Technobabylon. He also wrote a blog about art and composition, and last year we called on his expertise in assembling a gallery of gorgeous adventure game scenes from the pixel art era. Now it's time to celebrate his own work on Wadjet's latest game, Unavowed.

An urban fantasy story set in New York, where a secret society protects the world from various supernatural evils, Unavowed brings some new ideas to the genre. There are four companions with their own abilities, a customisable protagonist, and pop-up descriptions that appear at mouseover so you don't have to right-click to look at every single thing. But Unavowed is still a classic point-and-click, as this collection of backgrounds shows. From its Chinatown streets to a dive bar and a spooky basement, these are  all places that immediately look like they're worth waggling a mouse cursor over.

Click the top-right of each image to embiggen them.

If you’ve ever woken up after a wild night out and cringed as a friend recounted every embarrassing thing you did, you’ll resonate with Unavowed. Except the main character didn’t drink too many Caipirinhas at happy hour and get thrown out of a club for being sick on the dancefloor: they were possessed by a demon who used their body to go on a murderous rampage across New York City.

Unavowed begins as the demon is being forcibly extracted from you on a rain-lashed rooftop. In this dramatic intro you decide whether you’re playing as a man or a woman and choose from three backgrounds—actor, cop, or bartender—each of which has its own origin story and unlocks unique dialogue options later in the story.

This is one example of how Unavowed seasons its familiar point-and-click adventure template with light role-playing elements. I love it, because you rarely get to choose who you play as in these games, but it does take some getting used to. Whether it’s Guybrush Threepwood, George Stobbart, or Manny Calavera, graphic adventures are often defined by strong lead characters. Here the protagonist feels much more like a blank cipher for the player.

Shortly after the exorcism you join a secret paranormal police force called the Unavowed. For thousands of years they’ve been protecting the ‘mundanes’ (regular, non-magical people) from ghosts, demons, monsters, and other threats. Work had dried up lately, but your possession sparks a surge of supernatural events that give the Unavowed more work than they’ve had in decades.

In another example of genres colliding, you can choose which Unavowed members to take on a mission with you, essentially forming a party. They have conversations with each other and give you hints about what to do next, but more practically, you can use their powers to help you solve puzzles and bypass obstacles. Eli, for example, is a mage who can conjure up fire, while Mandana, a Jinn, wields a sword. I can’t give specific examples for fear of ruining puzzle solutions, but one involving a sprinkler system was particularly clever.

At first you don’t remember what you—or, rather, that pesky demon—did while you were possessed. But as you retrace your steps, meet survivors, and discover clues about your past, the blanks are filled in. The anthology-like structure works really well, because you’re never quite sure what kind of bizarre, paranormal weirdness each mission will throw at you, but there’s also a larger, well-told story connecting everything to give it some thematic consistency.

Unavowed is also incredibly atmospheric. The shadowy, rain-soaked streets of New York provide an evocative backdrop for its urban fantasy, and the marriage of the everyday with the supernatural is classily done. The detailed background art by Wadjet Eye regular Ben Chandler are the highlight, with tasteful, considered use of light and shadow making the city ooze dark mystery. Throw in a jazzy, downbeat film noir soundtrack and you have a world that’s very easy to get lost in.

Between missions you can explore the Unavowed’s headquarters and have long, revealing conversations with your companions, which reminds me a lot of Commander Shepard and their interactions with the crew of the Normandy in Mass Effect. There’s a lot of dialogue, all of which is voiced except for the protagonist, who remains mute throughout. The characters are nuanced and interesting, and have backstories that are genuinely worth uncovering.

Puzzles are mostly the usual point-and-click fare, but a bit smarter and less obtuse than I’ve come to expect from the genre. More than once I felt a surge of satisfaction for divining the solution to something that wasn’t immediately obvious, and any adventure game that gives me that feeling is doing something right. Some require slight leaps of logic that adventure-trained brains will be used to, but most of the time you just have to be observant, paying attention to clues and dialogue, which makes the cop origin story feel like a neat fit.

Unavowed is another fantastic adventure from Wadjet Eye, and it’s great to see studio founder Dave Gilbert back in the saddle. The humour didn’t always land for me and some of the voice acting is a little iffy, but otherwise this is a fine example of a modern point-and-click adventure. The addition of character customisation and companions doesn’t sound like much, but it massively changes the feel of the game, even if other aspects, such as the puzzles, are still steeped in the past. The next time you wake up with a sore head and no memory of the night before, be thankful you didn’t leave a trail of death in your wake.

More than two years after revealing it to the world, old-time adventure outfit Wadjet Eye Games has announced that its latest project, Unavowed, will be out on August 8. The new game is a supernatural thriller about a victim of demonic possession, freed after committing numerous violent crimes while under the fiend's control. Homeless, friendless, and wanted by the police, you're given a new identity and invited to join the Unavowed, an ancient society dedicated to the fight against evil. 

It may sound a little hackneyed but Wadjet Eye adventures are generally sharply written and unafraid to take risks. No spoilers, but in one game the apparently-lead character was murdered halfway through (I did not see that coming) and at least three of them that I've played ended on an ambiguous, "could be worse" note. Most of those games were developed by other indie studios and published by Wadjet Eye (Unavowed will be its first original game since Blackwell Epiphany in 2014), but there's a definite style that runs through them: Unabashedly retro, and more engaging than they might look. 

Beyond Wadjet Eye's "usual guff," Unavowed will enable players to select a male or female lead character with one of three playable origin stories and choose from among four companions, each with unique talents and abilities. It also supports double the visual resolution of any previous Wadjet Eye release: That's 640x360, which, okay, maybe that's not a huge selling point. I told you they were retro. 

Unavowed is listed on Steam but not yet available for pre-purchase, nor is the price currently listed. If you'd like to get a taste for what it's all about, demos for most Wadjet Eye games (I'd recommend Gemini Rue, Primordia, and Resonance as excellent places to start, and definitely not Da New Guys) are available at wadjeteyegames.com.