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.

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.

Frictional Games has announced that Amnesia: The Dark Descent will be getting a "hard mode" on September 28.

In a move that's a huge contrast to the Safe Mode, introduced to Frictional's SOMA, a couple of years ago, Amnesia will now be even more challenging. According to Frictional, the new beefed up difficulty will make it "a little harder to beat the game."

The changes from the original difficulty mean autosaves will be disabled, manual saving will cost four tinderboxes, losing all sanity will result in death, and oil and tinderboxes will be more hard to come by. 

And if that's not enough to get you crying into your keyboard, monsters will be able to locate you more easily, they'll be faster when they do, and are likely to make shorter work of you as their damage has also been increased. They'll stick around for longer too, presumably to bask in your misery and/or death. Yikes.

Completing the game on Hard mode will net you a sparkly, new trophy, aptly called 'Masochist'. You'll be able to choose between 'normal' and 'hard' mode when starting a new game but will be unable to switch part-way through, so choose carefully.  

Earlier this week, we asked you to tell us the last physical copy of a PC game you bought, while sharing our own choices. Today, as a kind of sequel to that question, we ask, what was the first downloadable game you bought on PC? 

In the PC Gamer Q&A, we ask the global PC Gamer team for their thoughts on a particular subject, then invite you to add your thoughts in the comments below. We'll also feature a few answers from the PC Gamer Club Discord, accessible to anyone who's a part of our membership program.

You'll find our answers below, and we'd love to hear what your first paid downloadable game was too. 

Jarred Walton: Half-Life 2

I'll take the easy route on this one, because it's also true: Half-Life 2 was the first downloadable game I bought. I also played Counter-Strike 1.6 on the platform (including using the Steam beta), but that was a mod for Half-Life so I didn't pay for it. Anyway, HL2 required Steam, so what else was I going to do? I'm old enough that having a credit card and high-speed internet back in 2004 wasn't a problem, and I was luckier than some, in that Steam worked basically without a hitch for me. Sure, there were a few outages, but I don't recall them ever really affecting me. 

I played (and benchmarked) Half-Life 2 all the way to the end in the first week or so after its release, and I thought the convenience of downloading a game was pretty awesome. Others hated the idea, but I don't think any of us could have guessed how huge Steam would become over the next decade. It went from a place where you bought Valve games and maybe a few others, to eventually becoming the virtual storefront for 95 percent of all the games I own. No wonder EA, Ubisoft, and Activision want a piece of that pie.

Jody Macgregor: Uplink

I kept buying boxed copies of games for ages because slow Australian internet made downloading them a hassle, until I got into small indie games that wouldn't bust my data limit. The first was Uplink, which let me live out the fantasy of being an elite computer hacker and also the fantasy of having really fast internet.

It's designed to make you feel like you're in the movie Sneakers, and for a while it did. Like every other hacking game I've tried—games like Hack 'n' Slash, and else.Heart.Break()—it eventually started to feel like work instead of fun. Now when I want to pretend I'm a hacker I just go to hackertyper.net. What it did get me into was playing more small, personal projects and I found plenty of those to love. The next two were Atom Zombie Smasher and Audiosurf, both of which became favorites.

Samuel Roberts: Audiosurf

Right when rhythm action games were blowing up on console, but tended to focus on guitar music that I didn't really like and plastic controllers that took up way too much space in a single person's bedroom, a friend explained how there was a rhythm action game where you could play your own songs. The novelty of this was huge to me. I was 20 at the time, working on a PlayStation magazine, and I didn't really have the cash for a good PC, having wasted hundreds of pounds on a PS3 I needed for work—which broke a year later. Sigh. At least I got to play Uncharted, I suppose. Eventually, my parents bought me an okayish laptop, and one of the first things I did was download Audiosurf on Steam. 

It was pretty amazing, to upload my favourite tracks into the game and to have so many cool and challenging ways to play them, along with leaderboards. This was one of the first PC games of the modern era that really showed me why playing on PC was better—both in terms of the variety of games available, and the experiences that only PC could give you. If I wanted to play the theme tune from Max Payne 2 in a rhythm action game, I could do it, damn it! 

Now I own close to 1000 games across Steam, GOG, uPlay, Battle.net and Origin, and I don't know why I've done that to myself. 

James Davenport: SiN Episodes

Remember the short-lived SiN Episodes reboot? I can't remember why I chose to make that my first digital purchase rather than, say, Half-Life 2, but it was. It was this whole ordeal. I didn't have a credit card and Steam bucks weren't really a thing back then, so I went to a friend's house (hey, Anton, I'll find that copy of Kingdom Hearts and return it as soon as I can) just to ask their older sister to let me use hers. Digital game marketplaces were a new concept back then, and she didn't play many games anyway, so it 100-percent came off as a con. 

Your little brother's good friend rolls in with wearing the edgiest Linkin Park t-shirt he could find at Goodwill, then asks, under his breath, to borrow your credit card to purchase something from "Steam" called "Sin". My ma had just started preaching at the local Presbyterian church and everyone knew it, so the look Anton's sister threw my way had me worried her eyes might pop out. Not sure why she agreed in the end, but thanks, Roxie. Only had dial-up internet at the time, so my parents paid for it next with a phone line that wouldn't put a call through for a day or two. And when I finally played Episode 1, the only episode ever released, I remember feeling like all the trouble was worth it. The novelty of a game floating somewhere in the ether that I could call mine and play from any computer was incredibly empowering. Bit of a shit game, but SiN Episode 1 got me hooked on Steam, and set me right in the path of innumerable indie games I would have missed otherwise. 

Phil Savage: Prey, the original one

I spent most of my 2000s dealing with a laptop that became too hot to handle after just 20 minutes of Command & Conquer: Generals. As such, the advent of Steam passed me by—if it wasn't a sedate isometric strategy game or RPG, I wasn't prepared to suffer the third-degree burns required to play it. In 2008, though, I got a real job and saved enough money to buy a desktop PC. I downloaded Steam, fully intending to finally play Half-Life 2. Instead, I ran face first into a Steam sale. Prey was on offer for about £3. I didn't know what it was, or if it was any good, but at that price how could I not immediately buy it?

It was good. Prey is far from amazing, but if you don't know any better—for instance if you hadn't played an FPS since Quake because your last decade had been spent ordering many sprites to gib many orcs in the various Infinity Engine RPGs—it looked spectacular. I also bought Audiosurf on the same day, because everyone bought Audiosurf in 2008.

Chris Livingston: Half-Life 2, probably

My Steam purchase history only goes back to 2007 for some reason, but I have to assume it was Half-Life 2. I remember staying up late to unlock it. It launched fine, and I remember seeing those Combine metrocops walking around on the menu screen. Instead of playing, though, I decided to change a couple graphics options, and then had to restart. And that's when Steam completely tanked. I couldn't get back in. I missed my window to play a game I'd been waiting years for, and after about three hours of not being able to connect, I just had to give up and go to sleep because I had work in the morning. I'm sure glad that 15 years later games no longer have launch day issues, huh? Huh?

The PC Gamer Club

We got a few answers from the Club Discord, so thanks all who responded. "I'm pretty sure my first digital game was Mass Effect 1 &2 in 2010 because I'm old and until that point I always got games from a store," says user IronGnomee. "A podcast I listened to at the time was always saying how amazing Commander Shepard was so I finally tried it out." 

"As far as I can remember, it would be The Orange Box," says user Buttface Jones in Discord. "I had played PC games before TOB, like Quake, Command and Conquer, and WoW but always from a disc. I bought TOB on Xbox and fell in love with TF2, despite how bad and limited the Xbox version was. I eventually got fed up and downloaded Steam specifically to play 'the real TF2'."

User Buttz says Garry's Mod on Steam. Imbaer adds, "Orange box in 2008 for me." Fellow user erdelf adds "Stargate Resistance honestly, before that I bought games in the store or played f2p online games." 

Let us know the first downloadable game you bought below!

The quality of Amadeus, an Amnesia mod by Swedish creator Reminiscity, becomes clear when I step into the main hall of the old house where the story takes place. It’s a beautiful, grand room, with cold moonlight pouring through stained-glass windows, glass domes in the ceiling, a velvet-carpeted stairway, and eerie oil paintings hanging on the walls. It’s probably prettier than the main game’s Brennenburg Castle, which is quite an achievement for a free mod. 

Inspired by Christopher Nolan’s wonderful The Prestige and, curiously, the work of TV mind-wizard Derren Brown, Amadeus tells the story of Cornelius Campbell, a magician trading under the name The Amazing Alduin. Cornelius’ career has come grinding to an undignified halt, and where once he was able to fill the biggest theatres, he now struggles to attract even a meagre audience. This is what tips him over the edge, sending him spiralling down a path of madness as he does whatever it takes to become popular again—even if that involves something unsavoury. Which, this being a mod for Amnesia: The Dark Descent, is a distinct possibility.

Clocking in at four-to-six hours, depending on how cautious a player you are, there’s a significant chunk of game to be found here. And it has the production values you’d usually expect from an in-house Frictional project, with surprisingly decent voice acting, bespoke animations and some stunning environmental art. Early in the game I wake up in a cell and find myself walking through an underground cave network, with waterfalls and shafts of light spilling through cracks in the rocks. It’s a really impressive space, and I’m not surprised when I learn that it took Reminiscity over three years to complete this mod. I’m sure he feels well rewarded: the game has received a parade of enthusiastic 10/10 user reviews on ModDB, and was also voted as that site’s Amnesia Mod of the Year for 2017.

As a studio, Frictional encourages modding, and released a level editor to allow Amnesia players to create their own custom stories with relative ease. This, however, means there are a lot of mods out there and many of them are, honestly, pretty rubbish. But Amadeus is striking in that almost every aspect of it feels professional. The pacing is magnificent, leaving a good amount of tension-building space between the scares to really make them count. And that’s something that eludes even the creators of big, commercial horror games with Hollywood movie budgets. Reminiscity seems to understand the importance of restraint and subtlety. 

Although the mod does stick closely to the Amnesia formula, it also mixes things up a little—and makes some changes for the better. Some of you will disagree, but I always thought the sanity-health-lamp management side of Amnesia was a chore, and got in the way of the story. So I was glad to discover that Amadeus gets rid of the need to constantly hunt down laudanum, sanity potions, and tinderboxes, making it feel more like divisive sequel A Machine for Pigs—which it also borrows some assets from. That will turn some hardcore Amnesia fans off, but for me it gives the story and atmosphere room to breathe.

Monster mash

Amadeus does fall flat occasionally, however. Although I do appreciate the decision to create original monsters for the mod, I never found any of them that scary. A lot of the puzzles are cleverly designed—particularly the one that involves playing a tune on a piano—but the difficulty of some of the trickier ones left me frustrated rather than challenged. And there’s a general feeling of front-loading, with some of the later scenes lacking the finesse of the opening hours. But in light of everything else it does well, I’d still recommend it, flaws and all. Especially since it costs absolutely nothing to play, providing you own an up-to-date copy of Amnesia. 

Designing horror games is difficult, and for every one that nails it, there are a dozen that sink into cliche and lazy jump scares. Other mods for Amnesia shoot themselves in the foot by relying on things leaping out of the shadows, or sudden loud noises, too much. And that’s why Amadeus stands out: it knows when to hold back, teasing you, keeping the tension tight like piano wire. If you want to play for yourself, Amadeus is available on ModDB and installation is as easy as dropping a folder into your install directory and running a .bat file. Eight years later, it’s great to see Amnesia still firing modders’ imaginations.

A telling difference between today's indie games scene and that of 10 years ago is how excited Dylan Fitterer was to hear his game was going to be on Steam. 

Audiosurf had just been nominated for three IGF awards in the categories of Technical Excellence, Excellence in Audio, and the Seamus McNally Grand Prize. As Dylan tells it, "Then I got a call from Jason Holtman at Valve who said, 'Hey, you want to sell this on Steam?' That blew me away. That was crazy to get an offer like that."

Audiosurf went on to win the audio category as well as the audience vote, but the bigger prize was that it became February 2008's top seller on Steam, both by number of copies sold and revenue, despite being an indie rhythm game that cost 10 bucks. It eventually sold over a million copies. Of course since this was 2008, it was one of only five games released on Steam that month.

Best Game Ever Dot Com 

Getting to that point was a road as bumpy as any of the rollercoaster levels Audiosurf makes out of the music you feed it. Like a lot of designers, Dylan's first game ideas were way beyond his capabilities. "I was trying to build the biggest videogame possible, that incorporated everything," he says. "My first game I was working on was like Magic: The Gathering meets first-person shooter meets something else. Had everything in it, the one game that was all games. That was what I figured I'd just build, by myself."

After a couple of years hitting his head against that wall he changed tack and went as far in the other direction as possible. From then on he only worked on games that could be finished in a week. "What I did is I launched this website called bestgameever.com and put up this promise that I'm gonna release a new game every Friday just to see if I could actually finish some things. And one of the things that I finished on there was called Tune Racer."

Tune Racer auto-detected whichever CD was in your drive at the time—this was 14 years ago, so of course you had CDs near at hand—and then matched the tempo of that music to a simple game about a car racing along a tube, overtaking other cars. Two sequels followed, tweaking the idea so that cars had to be dodged around instead of just overtaken (an idea that would return as Audiosurf 2's Dusk skin). 

There was clearly something to the idea, something that kept drawing Dylan back. When he eventually decided it was time to invest more than a week in one of his concepts, to monetize one of those bestgameever.com prototypes, it was Tune Racer he turned to. He figured he could turn around a deluxe version in "like a month." 

Spoiler: it took longer than a month.

"You should probably usability test your game" 

Dylan wasn't alone. His wife Elizabeth, who had a day job at Microsoft, helped him over the course of what turned out to be several years of work. The two encountered plenty of dead ends along the way. They even tried to give Audiosurf a plot for a while, though he doesn't recall the details. "My wife and I worked on a story, and I don't remember if the motivation was like as an extended tutorial, or if it was just this lack of confidence that a game with no story would be compelling for people," he recalls. "I'm not sure. It didn't come together. It wasn't a good idea."

What was a good idea was letting people use their own mp3s. Rhythm games with original scores have a hurdle to get over because players need to get used to the music before they can tap along with it, and even something like Rock Band can fall flat with players who don't listen to the bands it favors. Audiosurf's algorithm matches the curves of the track, the speed of your craft, and the placement of blocks to elements of the songs you choose, songs you already love. It transforms your mp3 collection into an explorable space.

"My absolute favorite thing was to play this track from OCRemix in the game's Mono mode. The simplicity of Mono mode and the intensity of the track made for a great flow experience."—Ben Prunty, composer of FTL and Into the Breach

The big beat

But for most of Audiosurf's development, the placement of blocks wasn't in sync with the beat. "Those were basically random," Dylan admits. "I had convinced myself that didn't really matter. The track was shaped to the music and you just had these random patterns and you could maybe see the music in the patterns if you look hard enough or something. It made sense to me but Elizabeth, my wife, finally convinced me that was not a good idea." 

The extra effort was worth it, although even then it wasn't a game that clicked with everybody. Some people sat down to play and don't feel the connection between the game and the song, no matter what music they choose. There just seems to be something in the way people are wired that determines whether it works for them or not. "We noticed that early on at trade shows. I think most people would see how it worked right away once they played, but some people get in and play and say, 'I don't see how it's synchronized to the music.' We'd be in there clapping and stamping our feet."

Another worthwhile idea was thorough playtesting, and not just at conventions. The value of seeing how new players react to a game repeatedly over the course of its development is impossible to overstate. "My wife did a lot on it before anyone else," Dylan says. "Toward the tail end she was working at Microsoft as a usability engineer in the Xbox group and so one night she comes home and says, 'You should probably usability-test your game.' 'Oh, yeah. That's a good idea.' We just hired friends and different people to play it and watch them play, and [we would] not talk. See where they get hung up. That is so hard. Watching people play your game that you think is almost there and you discover that you're not even close."

"I'll always connect Audiosurf to the voluptuous hillsides produced by Wuthering Heights, specifically the swell into the orgasmic walls of red. A decade on, I still shiver."—Kieron Gillen, former PC Gamer editor and Audiosurf leaderboard champ

Going ninja 

One of the ways Audiosurf began to differ from Tune Racer was that it wasn't just about avoiding obstacles. It stopped being a game about weaving between blocks and became a game about collecting them, matching three of a kind into the grid at the bottom of the screen. "Through that usability testing that my wife and I did, we discovered that that was really hard to teach," Dylan says. "It was hard enough explaining to people that you use your own music, that was foreign, then this other thing where you're playing a match-3 game on this racetrack to music, it was too much to teach."

The optional mono mode was the solution. It simplified things by reducing the blocks to two varieties, one to collect and one to dodge. "I thought that would just be a stepping stone or maybe just a tutorial mode and then that ended up being super popular." Players wanted it to be more than just an introductory way of playing, so Dylan created 'ninja mono' as the hardcore variant, and it became the way most players experienced Audiosurf.

The Fitterers were helped across the finish line by several contractors, including artist Goran Delic who drew characters like the ninja for the select screen, and Paladin Studios, who built various 3D assets. "They did the vehicles and the geometry that's alongside the track and the squid that's at the end," Dylan says. "That was a week or two weeks of work, right before launch. That was a lot of fun. Our timezones were so different that we'd have a call at midnight and tell them what we thought about the last batch of stuff and what we wanted the next day and we'd get up in the morning and check it out and put new stuff in the game." 

And finally, there was Valve. Their involvement went beyond just putting Audiosurf on Steam—it was the first third-party game given access to Steamworks, the full suite of tools Valve's games use for everything from leaderboards to achievements. It also shipped with the soundtracks to The Orange Box games packaged in, and selecting certain songs from Portal triggered a "secret level" where you have a portal gun and some of the blocks are companion cubes.

On Audiosurf's release those songs immediately became the most popular on its leaderboards, but competition broke out wherever players found songs that made particularly fun levels. So did arguments about which genres suited it best. "I don't think there is an objective best or anything," Dylan says, although he notes that his preference is for bands like Tool and Nine Inch Nails. "One of the things I like about industrial, Nine Inch Nails kind of stuff is it tends to have very big changes very rapidly, so a slow part, a very intense part, and that creates very cool moments."

Those moments of drama and intensity when everything lights up and the track swoops around at speed are key to the appeal of Audiosurf, and when you find out a song you love hits one of those it's even better. But as well as connecting you with music you're already into, Audiosurf has helped players discover new music. Dylan himself learned a lot about what was popular in 2008. "I was a little behind the times I think. Like Dragonforce, that was huge. 'What is this song everybody's playing?' Podcasts were funny, there were people playing podcasts. I hadn't thought to try that."

The Fitterers followed Audiosurf with a sequel and a VR spin-off called Audioshield. But some day, Dylan says he'd like to go back to bestgameever.com and see what other forgotten treasures it holds. "I still have the domain, I just have this lame little placeholder on there right now. I have that site backed up I keep meaning to get it back online. That'd be fun."

This article is part of the Class of 2008, a series of retrospectives about indie games that were released 10 years ago.

Stressful horror romp Amnesia: Dark Descent and its follow-up, A Machine for Pigs, have been in so many bundles that you might already own them without realising it, but if you don’t, then you can pick them up on Steam for free. The deal is for a limited time, but we don’t know how long that will be, so you’ll probably want to snatch them up right now. 

Both Amnesia games are free individually, but for some reason the Amnesia Collection still has the full price. Instead, you can either get them separately, or you can click on 'package info' and get taken to the free version of the collection. It’s a little bit counter-intuitive.

Occasionally I’ll fire up the game that made screaming on YouTube popular, only to be reminded that I can only stomach about 30 minutes in this brilliant but terrifying haunted house. I’ll probably finish it after every single human on the planet owns a copy. 

Once you add Dark Descent and A Machine for Pigs to your Steam account, you’ll be able to keep them after the free period has ended. So go do that. 

The Humble Store is offering a sweet deal on two of the most frightening, disturbing videogames ever created. For the next two days, the Amnesia Collection—The Dark Descent and A Machine For Pigs—is completely free. 

Amnesia: The Dark Descent is famously scary, to the point that it became staple fare for reaction video freakouts on YouTube. It's an utterly crushing, physically and emotionally exhausting experience that somehow manages to keep getting worse, almost to the very end—and I mean that in an entirely complimentary way. A Machine For Pigs is very different—creepy, disturbing, but more cerebral than in-your-face, and almost certainly a better candidate for a replay. 

The Amnesia Collection will be available until 1 pm ET on January 27. Take note that the individual games are still full price, so if you want them free, the collection is the way to go. And speaking of freebies, the Humblers also recently announced that Owlboy, the "lush, story-driven" 16-bit-style platformer, has been added as an immediately-unlocked game to the current Humble Monthly Bundle, headlined by Civilization 6 and a pair of DLC packs.