Happy Monday, folks, and welcome to the Weekly Video Games Thread!

Earlier yesterday, I finished Crow Country, one of 2024’s most delightful gems. It’s a good example of a retro game that honors without slavishly imitating its inspirations—in this case Resident Evil, Silent Hill, and the Nineties horror and mystery stories—its art style is great, and I think it manages to thread a needle of being accessible and inscrutable. I wouldn’t put it as singularly great as Lorelei and the Laser Eyes, Balatro, or Animal Well, but I wholeheartedly recommend it. I certainly plan to replay it in the future, though maybe I’ll try the safe mode then.

But playing this game did make me think back to a topic that’s been on my mind for several years: the ways in which horror games incorporate the tropes of exploration. See, like the towns or mansions of PS1-era survival horror games it homages, the haunted theme park of Crow Country is a strange, labyrinthine setting. Doors are locked at every turn. Keys are hidden in all manner of bizarre and disgusting places. It often feels as though you have to schlep from one sub-area of the park to another. And yet, as you do this, you find shortcuts, open up alternate pathways, collect maps, but in general gain a greater understanding of the map. Of course, there are monsters that keep popping up whether or not you kill them, but that’s a different topic for a different day.

I’ve heard (and also) compared places like Crow Country or the Spencer Mansion to Metroidvanias in a soft way, where instead of getting a double jump or Ice Beam, the keys are just actual keys and not actual powers. I think that’s interesting for a lot of reasons, but primarily because it speaks to one aspect of horror games, which is the way space, setting, and environment work for and against the player. They are often tools of disempowerment filled with dangers or confusing layouts. However, they may also give you an edge, whether through handy items or knowledge. Throughout Crow Country, you’re put into a position of understanding the theme park, making it more accessible, and looping back around a million times for critical or optional items. You need to figure out which enemies are best left ignored, which pickups you should grab, which are actually traps, and which of the more formal traps you can avoid. Mastering the level is often more important than how well you take to the clunky combat.

Whether you’re playing Alien: Isolation, Resident Evil Village, Silent Hill 2, Dead Space, Eternal Darkness, Amnesia, or any multiplayer horror game, you really have to contend with the environment. Levels and maps are dangerous; they’re filled with traps and risks. They can hide the best stuff behind dangerous enemies or complex puzzles. They can restrict how much you can move or force you into strange patterns. And if a space is really well designed, like it is in Crow Country, wanting to explore is itself a tool of horror. You want to explore, to find more cool things, to uncover the plot, or to see what craziness the game has in store. That makes it even easier to stuff jump scares, monsters, locks, keys, and all manner of problems in your way. And so for today’s prompt: tell us about the most interesting settings, levels, or acts of exploration in a horror game. I’m really interested in hearing about how these kinds of games pushed you further and further into exploring. I want to hear about the best settings of horror games from an exploratory perspective. And I want to hear examples of how the environment—be it through layout, graphics, objects, enemy position, strange terrain, manual save stations, or anything else—jacked up the sense of fear.

And while you’re doing that, what did you play this weekend?