The Survival Horror Iceberg Explained

Iceberg's weren't my thing at all when they first came out. I thought they were a dumb fad that youtubers exploited for clickbait... and a lot of the time they were. The idea behind them is that the further you go down, the more obscure a property of media related to the subject becomes, but a lot of icebergs out there are just a list of things everyone knows and a list of things no one knows, with no progression or build up between them. But this "survival" horror iceberg I found is pretty good and I'm gonna mumble my way through it #icebergs #survivalhorror #obscurehorror

When Icebergs first started popping up, I didn’t really like them a whole lot.

They often to me, seemed to boil down to Shit everyone knows and shit no one knows with no in between, but I’ve seen some lately that I thought were really cool, and where there was a clear progression from shit everyone knows to shit no one knows…. Unless you’re me, because I know about a lot of these on this “survival” horror game iceberg I’ve found.

If you’re unaware, an iceberg in this context is a topic and then pieces of media that fit within that topic. At the top you have the stuff that everyone knows, and then the further down you go, the more obscure the piece of media becomes… So let’s have a look, at the horror game iceberg, starting with games everyone knows, even people that don’t play horror games, and lets move down down down far down… Until we get to the weird Turkish stuff from the 2000’s…. and remember to ignore that not all of these are gonna fit your or my or anyone’s definition of  horror, it even calls itself a survival horror iceberg which it absolutely isn’t…. just roll with it.

LEVEL 0 – The Sky Above

Yeah level 0 is obvious, it’s the sky above the iceberg and it consists of games that everyone that has played a video game know about.

Silent Hill which came out in 1999, was Konami’s answer to the popularity of Resident Evil. It’s a series of mostly 3rd person survival horror games where the protagonist is drawn to the mysterious town of Silent Hill, and here they will confront a part of themselves that they thought they had buried so deep that it could never resurface.

While it would never quite compete in sales, its critical reception is to my knowledge better than Resident Evil’s, at least for the first 3 entries, and culturally it has a disproportionately large presence. It’s a game that hasn’t had a new installment in 10 years and we still talk about it, and we talk about it almost as much as Resident Evil, which has a new installment every year and sells millions of units.

Which speaking of

Resident Evil from 1996, another series of mostly 3rd person survival horror games. In the first game you go to look into some disappearances and find yourself surrounded by zombies and other creepy crawlies, as well as uncover a mystery hidden beneath a mansion and how a massive bio tech corporation fits into all of it.

It’s often wrongly hailed as the first survival horror game, and less often it’s also wrong hailed as the first survival horror game to coin that definition. It’s not and the genre and the verbiage has been around long before. The first adventure game with a limited inventory was created back in the 60’s by some lady on a mainframe computer, and arguably the first survival horror game was released in 1973 and you can check out the first episode of my History of Survival Horror documentary series if you want to know more about that.

Amnesia from 2010 is the game that made the hide and seek sub genre of horror games incredibly popular, thanks to youtubers playing the game and screaming at it, and millions of people wanting to watch that. It’s Frictional Games’ 4th game, and I’m sure we’ll be talking about their first trilogy a little way down the iceberg.

Coming out the same year as the gaming horror youtuber craze, Slender the 8 pages is a fairly short hide and seek game where the protagonist has to find the titular 8 pages, meanwhile dodging the also titular Slenderman who was popularized in internet culture a couple of years before this game came out.

It’s not a great game but it made for great entertainment to watch someone else play it, and it would run on pretty much anything.

Outlast from 2014 is like if Slender the 8 pages was good, and it marked a change for the genre. Suddenly there was money in horror again, and we’ve gotten a lot of horror games since Outlast because of Outlast and those youtubers that screamed at it and the many games like it. It’s an on going series of hide and seek games that focuses more on running than hiding, and it’s pretty good.

The same year as Outlast we got Five Night at Freddy’s, a game that quickly turned into 4 more games due to the very simple game design. You’re a night watchman who has to keep an eye on a pizzeria at night from a security room. The pizzeria is home to haunted animatronics that come alive at night, and you have to keep an eye on them using the security room’s cameras, and then… Do stuff. The creator is a piece of human garbage and I don’t want to talk about his work.

PHASMOPHOBIA released in early access in September 2020 and became quite popular due to its 4 player cooperative survival horror gameplay, and the streamers and youtubers that played it with their peers. I don’t really think it’s fitting for this tier, as it’s not quite a finished game yet, and it really hasn’t reached the heights in popularity of most other entries on this tier, and probably never will due to how saturated the genre is, and how fast it moves these days.

And The Evil Within from 2014 is another title I don’t think fits here either. It’s a game directed by Resident Evil 1, 2 and 4 director Shinji Mikami, and it borrows a lot of its gameplay and general style from the last one, but with a return to the more horror ish style of his earlier games. It received a somewhat mixed critical and audience reception, and the series has been dormant since the sequel released, which for different reasons, had a similar mixed critical and audience reception.

LEVEL 1 – The Tip

Now we’re getting into something a little more meaty. These are the games that you know about if you like and play horror games. The incredibly sad thing about this tier is that… I don’t think a single one of these have gotten a sequel in almost 10 years?

Fatal Frame is a series that started on the Playstation 2 and could only really ever have gotten as far as it did by starting there. It’s essentially Namco’s take on a survival horror game. In each installment you follow a cast of characters as they investigate a haunted house to try and figure out what happened. What sets this series apart from most survival horror games, is that you do not have a weapon.

Armed with only the mystical camera, the Camera Obscura, you fight ghosts by taking pictures of them and trapping their souls.

While it was a hit with critics, it didn’t set the world on fire in the sales department, and it only survived as long as it did, by jumping to the Wii, where it could be produced cheaper due to that console’s simpler graphics, and then later on, on the Wii U where it performed alright because it was pretty much the only horror game on that platform.

The first F.E.A.R. released in 2005 and the series concluded with the idiotically titled. F.3.A.R. in 2011, the 3rd in the trilogy and the conclusion to the story that started in the first game. It’s an odd inclusion on the iceberg, because the absolute worst parts of F.E.A.R. is the horror. The story sees you step into the shoes of Point Man… yes really, a new recruit of a task force that hunts and stops supernatural phenomena. You and your team is called in to stop an escaped psychic and then things go Half-Life.

Gameplay itself is absolutely amazing, and is a combination of high octane Matrix Style action and tactical shooting, and there has never quite been anything since it.

The Suffering released in 2004 is a game about a man named Torque who’s a prisoner sent to deathrow for murdering his wife. An earthquake happens at the prison he’s incarcerated at, and out of the ground crawls terrible horrible monsters.

It’s a very of the era console shooter, meaning that it’s a little awkward to control and it doesn’t run terribly smooth. A neat little thing though, is that you have the option of playing in either 3rd or 1st person which is nice.

Dead Space from 2008 should probably have switched tiers with The Evil Within, as it’s arguably the most famous and probably the best horror franchise to come out of the 2000’s. The game stars Isaac Clark who’s a space man engineer guy who’s accompanying an investigation team that’s heading to a spaceship that has gone dark. The reason Isaac is there is that his girlfriend is supposedly on the ship.

Shit quickly gets real and spooky monsters assault and slaughter most of the investigation team, and it becomes clear that they’ve laid waste to most of the original crew that was aboard the ship.

Gameplay is mostly a standard 3rd person survival horror game, with the standout feature being the live dismemberment system that enables Isaac to tactically cripple his enemies.

Directed by Silent Hill director Keiichiro Toyama, 2003’s Siren is Sony’s attempt to emulate the success and feel of the Silent Hill games. They failed but it’s not for a lack of trying, and the series has a lot of good qualities… but they’re unfortunately outweighed by the bad.

The first game is impossible to complete without a guide, but the 2nd one is better and I hear the 3rd one on the PS3 is pretty good. If you’ve played a survival horror game you kinda know what you’re in for, except that it’s light on combat and heavy on puzzles and features a strange character switching mechanic where you play as certain characters at certain points in the game and need to do very specific things in order for other characters to be able to later on progress, and if you don’t, the game locks up and you can’t progress and complete it.

The xbox 360 needed a launch window title to show off what the new console could do, and Monolith productions provided.

2005’s condemned is an investigation 1st person brawler horror game that in the first game, sees you step into the shoes of a grizzled police investigator as he responds to disturbance and finds himself locked inside an apartment building that’s crawling with dudes that wanna kill him. It received a followup a few years later and it concluded the story that the first game started.

When you think Japanese Super Nintendo you don’t exactly think horror, but in 1995 during the twilight years of the platform, it got Clock Tower, a point and click adventure horror game where you’re put in the shoes of a young girl named Jennifer, who has just been adopted by a strange and mysterious man Mr. Burrows.

She arrives at the house and then… no Burrows, and before long she finds herself stalked by Scissor man, a hideous little goblin creature that wields a pair of giant scissors.

Jennifer can’t fight so she has to run and hide from Scissor man, and when she’s not being hunted by him, try and figure out what happened to the other girls that were also adopted, and maybe figure out how to escape the mansion.

The game would get ported to the play station later on, and it would receive 2 sequels on that platform, and one on the PS2, and a couple vaguely spiritual successor spin offs, and a spiritual successor directed by the original creator on ios a couple years back.

2012’s Cry of Fear is the most famous Source mod that isn’t a source mod, because it’s actually a goldsource mod, meaning that it was made in Half-Life 1’s engine and not Half-Life 2’s. It’s a first person investigative horror game with a healthy dose of combat. What sets it apart, is that it’s available for free and it's also set in Sweden, unlike a lot of other games. It’s pretty good but I think its prequel is better.

Released in 2003, Manhunt is more famous for the idiotic moral panic it caused among parents than it is for anything else. It’s a sort of reverse horror game, where you’re trapped within a murder gauntlet competition, and you have to murder the psychopaths sent to murder you.

It visually looks like a GTA game and it was made in a modified version of GTA 3’s engine I believe, and it plays a bit like Hitman except that the enemies are aware that you’re around

2010’s Deadly Premonition is often incorrectly referred to as the king of so bad it’s good video games.

Released on the xbox 360, it does have incredibly dated visuals, and it was made by a very inexperienced team and was stuck in development hell for quite a while, as the team failed to make the game run smoothly for the longest time. It was also briefly cancelled due to the producers of Twin Peaks thinking that it was a little too close to that series.

If you can look past its scuffed presentation, you’re in for an amazing tear jerker of a game that will make you both cry and laugh, and sometimes at the same time.

You play as FBI special agent Francis York Morgan, as he arrives in the sleepy town of Greenvale, following the murder of a teenage girl, and you then begin investigating what happened, and how it relates to other murders you’ve been investigating around the country.

Alone in the Dark from 1992 is the original classic survival horror game. It has fixed camera angles, limited inventory, and terrible graphics. It would go on to spawn quite a few sequels, including 2 soft reboots, and while the last soft reboot was commercially successful, its critical reception was understandably middling, and its very late 00’s design has not aged very well. There has been an attempt to revive the series with a light on story objective based coop game, but it was panned harder than any of the other reboots, and it sold poorly.

LEVEL 2 – Below the surface

We’re now submerged, we’ll be looking at a couple lesser known prequels, spiritual successors, cult faves, and of course, some weird Japanese shit.

Cold Fear from 2005 is a 3rd person survival horror game in the vein of Resident Evil 4. It stars a man who’s a part of a coast guard rescue team that receives a distress call from a Russian freighter which they go to investigate and then things of course get weird and zombie ish.

It takes place largely on one ship or another, and there are some absolutely epic weather effects at display that wow you a lot when you first play.

1989’s Sweet Home is sometimes wrongly referred to as the game that inspired Resident Evil. It did not. Capcom asked Shinji Mikami to make a sequel or remake of it, and he had just played Alone in the Dark and wanted to make something like that instead which he did.

Released on the NES the game is not terribly spooky but not from a lack of trying. It’s a top down RPG that sees you control a team of 5 paranormal investigators as they try and figure out what happened to a mysterious rich family. There is a heavy emphasis on puzzle solving. Each team member has different abilities and there are different items you need to pick up to progress. Like a board to create a bridge, a rope etc. Combat is turn based and as you’re walking through the mansion you’ll get assaulted by the monsters that lurk here random encounter Dragon Quest style. It was made as a tie in to a made for TV movie of the same name, and the movie is a better experience than the game. It’s not bad it’s just a NES RPG from 1989 that’s about 3 hours too long.

Call of Cthulhu Dark Corners of the Earth from 2005 is a first person survival horror game based on an HP Lovecraft story. In the game you arrive in a mysterious town full of mysterious people and you start investigating something and then the townspeople begin to try and murder you.

Silent Hill: The Arcade is an arcade light gun shooter that was developed with some involvement from the original members of team silent, and it was released in 2007 in Japan and then elsewhere in 2008. The story is that a team of paranormal nerds go to Silent Hill to check out the rumors and check in at a motel for the night. One of them has a terrible nightmare and when he wakes up, his friends are missing and he has to gun his way through the town to find them.

Before Frictional made it big with Amnesia, they developed and released the Penumbra trilogy, starting with the first game in 2007. The story is that Phillip, a physicist, receives a mysterious letter from his dead father that beckons him to come to a research facility in Northern Greenland, and here shit goes down.

If you’ve played Amnesia then you know what you’re in for with the gameplay, lots of looking through drawers, manipulating physics, and unlike Amnesia, engaging in dogshit melee combat

Hellnight was originally released in 1998 in Japan, and in 1999 in Europe on the last fiscal day of the year for what I assume are borderline tax evasion reasons… Like seriously I’m pretty sure they released it on that exact day so that they could write off its cost as a lost and stay in a lower tax bracket.

And it’s a shame, because Hellnight is a brilliant first person exploration horror game, that opens up when you the protagonist, is on a metro train that mysteriously crashes, and you then find yourself in a pseudo society that exists beneath the streets of Tokyo in old WW2 doomsday bunkers, which is a common spooky setting in Japanese media that we’re not terribly aware of in the west, and it has some truth to it, as there are urban legends, rumors and somewhat credible reports, of Japanese soldiers being down in those bunkers and tunnels for quite some time following the war awaiting orders, orders which didn’t come because Japan burned all files and traces of their military installations following the war so they wouldn’t be held accountable for the millions of Chinese people they exterminated.

Alien vs Predator can refer to a few things, but I’m guessing that it’s either the 1994 first person shooter for the Atari Jaguar, the 1999 PC update and its sequel, or the 2010 reboot.

The 1999 game is the one I’m the most familiar with, and in that, you can play through 3 different singleplayer campaigns, Alien, Predator, Marine. Each follows a different story, and plays very different because the creatures you’re playing as are very different.

The game is most remembered for its multiplayer mode in which players picked one of the three teams and then went toe to toe against each other. It was so popular that it was eventually supplanted by a Half-Life mod featuring the same concept called Natural Selection, one of many mods that were essentially Left 4 Dead, before Left 4 Dead was really a thing.

Cryostatis is a Russian game from 2008. In it, you play as a Russian meteorologist named Alex, who in 1981, after having completed a tour at a research station North Pole, attempts to hitch a ride on a ship to go back home to Russia. Things don’t quite go according to plan, and Alex finds himself trapped on the ship which has apparently been missing since the 60’s, and he must battle the crazed passengers, and attempt to rewrite history, by entering the memories of the passengers, and changing their actions in the past, so that the future might change. It’s a beautifully told, presented and paced game, and it's very tense as you’re creeping your way through the hallways, always keeping an eye out for where there might be some ammo, and an ear out for where there might be enemies.

It's I think one of the most underrated games of the 2000’s, and it’s a shame we havn’t seen a modern re-release of yet.

Obscure is a 2004 coop survival horror game about a group of teenagers who come to their school at night to try and find out what happened to their missing friend. They discover that the faculty of the school has been abducting and experimenting on students in order to give  themselves immortality, and that some of them are over 100 years old, despite only looking 60.

It's very campy and the story plays out like a mix between the Elijah Woods movie The Faculty and an episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

Nightmare Creatures is a 1997 game that I don’t think should be on here, and if it should then there are a lot of other games that should be as well. The story is that you play as one of two characters, and that you have to stop a cult from taking over the world by turning people into grotesque monsters that they can use as soldiers in their infernal army. It’s not really framed as a horror game plot wise, it just takes place in a dark and twisted Gothic world, and if that makes it a horror game, then Castlevania and Bloodbourne, as well as hundreds of other games.

You could argue that the setting doesn’t make the horror game but the gameplay, and Nightmare Creatures is really not a horror game in that respect either. It’s a beat em up and it even has an adrenaline meter that will make you loose health if you go too long in between killing monsters.

D aka D’s Diner or D’s Dinner from 1995 stars Laura Harris who gets a call that her father has gone on a shooting spree and she goes to the hospital where he has barricaded himself to find out what has happened. Horrified by what she sees at the scene of the crime, she covers her eyes, and when she opens them again, she’s in a medieval castle. Gameplay can best be described as an interactive movie, as it plays out a bit like a 1st person adventure game, but is light on actual puzzle solving. Its director Kenji Eno is argueably more famous than the game itself, and he became an industry legend, when he purposefully submitted the game late for approval, and was scolded and told that he had to deliver the final build to the manufacturer himself as punishment. Eno had submitted the game late for this purpose, and he had submitted a less gory and violent version for approval, and when delivering to the manufacturer, he delivered to them the gorier version which was then printed and distributed

Before team Psyskallar made Cry of Fear, they in 2007 made Afraid of Monsters, of which Cry of Fear is kind of a remake of. It follows a lot of the same beats and some of the locations and monster designs here, feel like prototypes of Cry of Fear locations and monsters.

The story in Afraid of Monsters is a lot more simplistic, and there is a greater emphasis on combat, scares, platforming and exploration, and I think it’s a greater game for it.

Rule of Rose from 2006 is a classic survival horror game with most of the trappings. It takes place in the 1930’s and stars Jennifer, a young woman who befriends a boy while on a bus ride. The boy gives her a book and then gets off the bus and runs off, and for whatever reason, Jennifer follows him and arrives at an orphanage that seems a little familiar. It’s a story about confronting the past, and if you told me it was a Clock Tower game, I would have believed you.

The Wii was a bit of a godsend for budget developers. It was essentially the PS2… 2, and a lot of what had worked on the PS2, also worked on the Wii, and sometimes it didn’t because the developer decided to include motion controls, and Cursed Mountain from 2009 is that. It’s got a great premise, it takes place in the 1980’s in the Himalayan mountains, and it stars Eric Simmons, an experienced mountain climber who sets out to track down his brother who went missing in the region.

The finds himself in a village that’s completely deserted, and after being assaulted by and fighting off an evil spirit, he’s taught to open his third eye so that he can rid the titular cursed mountain of evil and find out what happened to his brother. The plot is great and I enjoy the exploration bits, but the motion control combat is such a slog unfortunately, and the game is way too long for its own good.

Released in its various incarnatons between 2003 and 2004, Curse: The Eye of Isis is a karmic justice tale about a British archeologist who finds himself besieged by terrible monsters, as a group of thieves break into the museum he works at and accidentally unleash a curse while trying to steal a mummy. Gameplay can best be described as pretty standard survival horror affair, which will be something I’ll be saying more and more from here on out, as it’s a fair description of the gameplay of a lot of the games on the lower tiers.

LEVEL 3 – Halfway Down

The light from above is dim, and that fittingly reflects the lack of spotlight these games got when they came out, which doomed them to a faith of obscurity…. I’ll also be googling a few things from here on out as we’re moving into things so obscure that I don’t have first hand knowledge of each and every one of them, and for transparency’s sake, I will be putting an on screen disclaimer up for the ones that are new to me.

You are empty is a horror shooter developed in Ukraine and released in 2006. It’s a little infamous for its Z grade localization that cast what I can only assume to be the localizers American teenage children as its Soviet era characters, which does pull you out of the experience a little bit. It takes place in the 50’s as a soviet man is hit by a car and then wakes up sometime later in a hospital and finds himself under attack from big titty zombie nurses and other morphed monsters. It reminds me a lot of Cry of Fear and I wouldn’t be surprised if Team Psyskallar were inspired by this. Like with many other games on this list, it’s available for free on various abandonware sites, check my website for a download, link is in the description.

White Day can either refer to the original 2001 game or the 2015 remake. In the original. A school built during the Korean war was cursed because its feng shui is out of balance, and yes, Feng Shui is an architectural and interior decoration school of thought, but they take it a lot more serious in Korea. This imbalance caused the school to be haunted, and 5 medallions were created to bring back balance, but unfortunately this had the side effect of trapping everyone that dies inside it, keeping them from entering the afterlife.

About 50 years later, a lady pleads with a mysterious man to bring back her daughter to life who killed herself at the school, and get her out. He agrees and performs a ritual with some students at the school, but the ritual goes wrong, partially because a spirit trapped within known as the master of the labyrinth sabotages it, and in the game you play as one of the students trying to escape in this first person survival horror game.

Dr. Hauzer

2 years before Resident Evil in 1994, another Japanese Software house took a crack at replicating the Alone in the Dark Formula, and they developed Dr. Hauzer, a clone of that game for the 3DO. There is not a whole lot to say about it. It’s a clone of Alone in the Dark, made by Riverhill Soft, a software house that would go to make quite a lot of clones for more popular games, including a clone of Resident Evil called Overblood, and a mashup of Ocarina of Time and Final Fantasy 7 called Overblood 2.

Terror TRAX: Track of the Vampire is a 1995 FMV game that was released for PC and Mac, with a rumored Apple Bandai Pippin release which has never been confirmed to be real. In the game, you’re the commander of a nation wide organization of supernatural hunters, and you will be commanding your men from the control room, as they respond to various disturbances. How this works is that the agents are wearing a pair of camera enabled googles, and they will enter an investigate the various scenes, and when something happens, button prompts will appear on screen, and those will be the commands you issue them. It’s kind of neat but the game is fairly forgettable, and of the thousands of FMV games of the 90’s, it’s only remembered because it was supposed to appear on a strange console.

Garage: Bad Dream Adventure is a 1995 point and click adventure game conceptualized by Japanese Surrealist Tomomi Yuki Sakuba. It takes place in a disgusting biomechanical future where you play as a tiny robot that tries to escape the world it lives in. It’s place on this level of the iceberg is due to its rarity. It was published and manufactured by Toshiba as they were shutting down production of their CD printing factory, and as a result only 3000 copies were produced.

The director, Sakuba, refused to produce more copies as he felt that the game would be outdated to new audiences, and also explained that he didn’t have to rights to do so, even if he wanted to. However, a copy of the game went up for auction a few years ago, and 4chan users pooled together the funds to buy it and dumped it on the internet. It’s unknown how much money they paid, but rumor as it that it was quite a lot.

The Dark Eye is a 1995 surreal first person point and click adventure game in the vein of Myst, but with no puzzles to speak of and a great emphasis on story. You as the protagonist arrives in classic Poe fashion at a mansion, and there things go from bad to worse. The game’s story alternates between what happens in the real world, and what happens in the protagonists paint thinner induced fever dreams, where recitals of Edgar Allan Poe short stories are played out.

Last Rites is a 1997 DOOM clone in which it’s literally hell on earth and you’re a military commander of some sorts who has to go on rescue missions to save whoever is left. Only thing of note with this game, is that it features friendly NPCs that will help you murder the hordes of demons and zombies and other infernal creatures standing in your way.

2003’s Hungry Ghost is a Japan only survival horror game where you play as an unnamed protanogist who arrives in the underworld. You’re some kind of warrior and many people have died by your hand, and you will certainly be going to hell, but a mysterious man offers you a possible way out. Nearby there is a village full of damned souls that cannot move on, and if you can find out why, the gods may judge you more favorably, and you may be reborn as a human, and get to try and live a better life this time around.

Gameplay is your classic mega clunky PS2 first person game. The game doesn’t utilize dual analog controls despite those having been mainstreamed by this point, and it uses a weird interaction system where you need to press multiple buttons to do an action because of course you do… But it’s almost worth it, because the game is gorgeous in the way that a hellish nightmare landscape can be gorgeous. It’s unfortunately only available in Japanese with no available fan translation.

I think The 4th Wall refers to a freeware horror game made in 2012 available on PC and I think the Xbox Live Indie Marketplace for 360, which is now defunct. Due to the terrible name, any mentions of it gets buried in the search results, but I did find the website where it’s available, and on youtube Markiplier apparently did a lets play of it.

Nocturne and Blair Witch Volume 1-3 should be grouped together, because Blair Witch Volume 1 is a sequel to the 1999 survival horror game Nocturne. Set in the 1920’s and 30’s, Nocturne is about a group of agents working for the Spookhouse taskforce, and we follow them as they investigate and exterminate one supernatural threat after another. The developer then got the license to make a Blair Witch game, and an event in the Blair Witch lore, just so happens to line up with the time that Nocturne is set in, so in Blair Witch Volume 1, the protagonist is a supporting character from Nocturne who then goes to investigate the original murders that form the origin of the Blair Witch myth, because the protagonist of Nocturne thinks that ghosts are lame and doesn’t believe in them… yes, that’s real, and it gets crazier because the developer would go on to make BloodRayne which takes place in the same universe as Nocturne, so Blair Witch is a prequel to BloodRayne… And Dale Cooper makes a cameo in Blair Witch… somehow…

Gameplay in Nocturne is a very combat oriented Resident Evil, and the sequel dials down the combat down a bit and focuses more on the story and the investigation part. It’s neatly divided into investigation segments and combat segments.

Barrow Hill Curse of the Ancient Circle from 2006 is a point and click adventure game in the vein of Myst. Like Myst it consists of static pre rendered backgrounds, and you click your way through them and look for clues and interact with objects. The story is that you investigate why a seemingly normal archeological dig has gone wrong and why it’s upsetting the local community so much.

Nosferatu: Wrath of Malachi is a 2003 first person action horror game, where the protagonist travels to a castle in Transylvania to attend his sister’s wedding, but when he arrives, the castle is crawling with monsters, and he finds himself trying to rescue the other attendants still alive, and also find his sister.

LEVEL 4 – The lightless depths

We’re now firmly in the realm of abandonia, the gravesite of the  failed games of yesteryear and odd games from the lands to the east, European east but also the far east.

Bureau 13 is a 1995 point and click adventure game based on a table top RPG system of the same name. The plot sees you play as one of two agents with different skills, journey to a Cyberpunk city to eliminate one of their own agents, and remove all traces of their organizations involvement. It’s abandonware and available for free on the web.

1998’s Iru…! Is a Japan only first person hide and seek horror game. In it, you play as a school student who is along with other people in his class, staying after school to finish preperations for an upcoming festival. Something goes wrong and his school mates start showing up dead, and it’s up to him to find out why and also hide from whoever is trying to kill everyone.

Dysthymia 6 is a 2003 or 2011 depending on who you ask, Serious Sam mod made by an unknown Russian modder. It has both a cult fanbase and also a cult hatebase for whatever reason. It’s available out there for free, but fair warning, it has a lot of jump scares and some cryptic design choices.

The Hunt aka Traqué Bloodline aka Chernaja Metka from 2008 is a fully localized Russian made Condemned clone. The strong similarities to Condemned is probably the reason why it was never released in the west… officially.

You play as man named Nikolai, wrongly translated to Nicholas in the English dub, and you’ve been infected with the mark, a virus that marks you for death in an undergrown illegal web show where psychotic killers hunt and stalk you. You’re contacted by a mysterious man who you team up with, he will bet on the competition and make some money, and in return he will help you find the Anti mark group that can remove the virus from the system, making you untraceable to the psycho killers.

Gameplay consists of a lot of running, hiding, solving basic puzzles and fighting back when it’s opportune

The Fear is a 2001 interactive movie horror game for the PS2. The PS2 is not very well known for its FMV games, but it did receive a handful, and this is one of the better ones. The story is that you’re a Camera Man who’s a part of a film crew shooting a horror movie at a haunted mansion, but then the horrors become real, and you have to escape by solving puzzles and stuff. It’s got some great FMV sequences, and I don’t know how they did it, but there are sections where you’re able to move the camera around inside the FMV sequences, and it’s really neat. I think they might have filmed some sequences with a 360 degree camera, which explains why you can’t move the camera up or down and can only spin in place from side to side.

The Path is a 2008 experimental art game. It’s a contemporary adaptation of Little Red Riding Hood, and in it, you guide 6 sisters to grandmother’s house. On the path between their apartment and grandmother’s house, there are objects off the path, and you can choose to let the sisters go fetch it or not. The Wolf is also present and means something different to each of the sisters. Every little action the player does or does not take has a lot of influence on the ending of the game, but you’re not supposed to think of it as an ending, and each time you get to the end, the game just starts over.

Ghost Temple is a 2001 Chinese only RPG with fixed camera angles ala Resident Evil. The story is that you’re a young warrior and you go to battle a thousand year old demon, but to get to him, you will need to defeat his army of demons first. It’s hard to get any substantial info about it and the only descriptions I can find are in unintentionally funny engrish like While leading our hero, we must use the power of our muscles, white weapons and magic to oppose the numerous servants of evil and ultimately defeat the powerful enemy. There seems to be multiple playable characters and it seems to be inspired a little or a lot by Yamaraja, a 1998 Chinese only title made by a Taiwanese developer.

Erevos is a 2001 point and click game in the vein of Myst. It’s very graphic and comes with a user disclaimer. In the game you play as either a martial arts master or as an escaped mental patient. Unique to the game it seems to be divided into levels unlike the usual open ended nature of these kinds of games.

Glass Rose is a 2001 point and click adventure game for the PS2. It should be a lot higher on this list because it’s fairly well known, it’s just not very well liked because it’s a little boring. In the game you play as a journalist exploring an abandoned mansion with his friend. You’re then knocked out and when you wake up, you’re 70 years in the past and the mansion is now in its full glory. The objective of the game is to figure out how to get back to your own time, and to aid you, you have the ability to glimpse into peoples minds and reveals their hidden thoughts and actions, something that will of course help you in figuring out what happened.

Ghost hunter Series – Kuro Kishi no Kamen from 1994 is a first person point and click adventure game in the vein of… you guessed it, Myst, with a sprinkle of black and white FMV sequences to keep things fresh. It’s entirely in Japanese and text heavy, but I think it’s about a group of ghost hunters going to hunt some ghosts.

Robert D. Andersen & The Legacy of Cthulhu is a 2007 multi media project. It tells the story of a hardboiled detective from New York who is secretly German, and he travels to Germany during the Nazi regime to solve a mystery involving his family at a secluded castle. The multi media project refers to how the game is both a movie and a game. Most of the exposition is told through filmed live action sequences, and in between, you gun down nazies and other baddies.

Kabus 22/Fearzone Strefa 22 is a 2006 fixed camera action horror game from Turkey. It takes place in a near alternate future with an evil Christian cult is slowly taking over the world, and you play as a member of the resistance and must shoot your way through all the baddies and stop the evil cult. It’s basically Turkish Resident Evil

2000’s Reikoku – Kizoku Ikeda’s Physics Laboratory is a first person exploration horror game about a paranormal investigator entering a spooky mansion looking for clues as to why it’s a haunted spooky mansion, while also trying to night die of being scared by the monsters. It looks pretty good but it was only ever released in Japan in Japanese and it hasn’t been translated yet.

Yaku: Yuujou Dangi is a 1996 choose your own adventure horror game released exclusively in Japan. You play as 2 characters who enter a spooky mansion to investigate and find out why it’s spooky. They get split up at one point, and you play as one and then the other, and choices and actions you take as one character has influence on what you play through as the other. In Resident Evil 2 style, you need to complete the game as one character and then play through it as another to get the “true” ending.

Day of the Zombie is a 2009 FPS zombie shooter game. It was allegedly made by a studio that got their hands on the master files for the game Land of the Dead Road to Fiddlers Green from 2005, and they made 14 new levels for the game and called it Day of the Zombie and sold it as an original do not steal project. I don’t know if any of that is true but it does kind of look a little familiar.

The story is pretty basic. You’re a university student and a zombie outbreak happens at your school, and you shoot your way through hordes of the undead, and also armed soldiers sent in to stop the outbreak, in search of your girlfriend.

LEVEL 5 – The Endless Abyss….

We’re now at the bottom, the endless bottom. Down where the games that never saw the light of day lurk about… Kind of? I don’t see how these are any more obscure than a lot of the games on level 4 but who am I to question whoever made this iceberg, in general they did a pretty good job and I’m a big nerd.

Executioner: The Sinister Horror is a 2001 lost media point and click FMV adventure game… or it would be lost media if I didn’t download 20 different virus to uncover the last download on the web. I don’t know a ton about it because it’s made for windows 98, and while I can get it to boot, I can’t get very far as the original Russian text doesn’t seem to play very nicely with my English language windows 10 install. I have downloaded the Russian typeset and I’m gonna try again at some point, but if you want to take a crack at it yourself, I have left a link to my website where it’s hosted.

IGED a 2007 freeware point and click horror game that is borderline lost media. It’s only available if you DM the creator of this iceberg and ask about it and get a link to the site where it’s hosted, because that site is so old and crusty and badly optimized that it’s not showing up in the search results…. It's also available on my site now.

Gercegin Ötesinde is a point and click FMV game from 1997 or 1998 depending on who you ask. It was developed in Turkey and premiered at a trade show and has never surfaced in the west, aside from when it was uploaded to archive.org after becoming abandonware.

Bloody Aria is a 1997 Korean developed PC Resident Evil clone about a night arriving at a castle in Romanian where he battles a lot of monsters. It’s more action oriented than Resident Evil and I guess since it takes place in Medieval knight times, it doesn’t have a lot of guns.

So that was the big survival horror iceberg. Not all of them fit mine, yours or anyone’s definition of survival horror and who cares. It was very fun for me to take a look at this, like a trivia night but it’s just me playing because who else would have. I’ll have to tally it up, but I’m pretty sure I knew about 95% of these off hand and have played most of them to some extent, and I even found one that was borderline lost and I’ve now saved it, so that’s neat.

I know it doesn’t include every survival horror game and I don’t think it’s supposed to. If I was to add anything to to it, aside from swap a few titles around, it would probably be to include general trend words and sub genres, like you don’t need to include all the PS1 Resident Evil clones, but you could maybe include them as a grouping on the berg. I think this is in general captures broadly what’s available, and it would be a chore to get through if I had to talk about every single Resi clone or every single Amnesia clone, because there are so so many.

Anyways, I hope you’ve enjoyed this breakdown of the Survival Horror iceberg, and let me know if you saw something here you would want to play, and what you would have liked to see included on it.

Until I see you again, goodnight