Early 3D games were chilling precisely because their ambition outpaced their technology: they reached for immersive realism with tools that were still primitive and unstable, creating worlds that felt uneasy and out of control. Though those rough 90s visuals are outdated today, their grungy approximations of reality have grown uncanny with time, inspiring modern developers to resurrect the feeling of the PS1 era..
Last October, I looked at three such so-called retreaux games, and now I’m going to look at three more.
Iron Lung by David Szymanski (played on Steam)
The beauty of retro style horror is that they really benefit from being kept simple – often all you need is a good hook. And 2022’s Iron Lung is all hook and nothing else. You are a prisoner who is alone in a tiny, rusted submarine, submerged in an ocean of blood, on a moon in a universe where almost everyone and everything else is gone. There are no stars, no planets, just decaying space stations.
You’ve been put there by the fascist government, partly to prove that dying in a poorly built submarine isn’t just for billionaires, but to investigate just what the hell is going on under the sea. And spoiler alert: it ain’t no singing crab. It’s an intriguing premise and gives you all the context and incentive you need to blindly bump around the blood ocean for the next half an hour taking photographs using some x-ray like machine.
And when I say you’ll be spending that time taking photos, I mean it. Visibility is zero. Because, you know, it’s fucking blood. The only way to see anything outside of the submarine is by taking photographs – quick, blurry snapshots that develop slowly, and give you just enough to go on so that your imagination fills in the worst possibilities. You’ll quickly realise that Szymanski is an evil bastard and uses this restrictive way of interacting with the world to really fuck with the player.
What makes Iron Lung so effective is that despite how cosmic its premise is, what you are actually doing is aggressively mundane. You’re not fighting anything; you’re operating labourous machinery and checking coordinates, collecting data for indifferent masters who’ve literally shit canned you. It’s the horror of having a really tedious corporate job: no wonder this game scares the shit out of YouTubers.
When Iron Lung does finally show its hand, it does so sparingly and with restraint that borders on cruelty. There are things in the blood. Big things. You will glimpse them. The game never lingers, never explains, never gives you the satisfaction of a clean look. But they are out there. And as you’ll soon realise there’s only a very thin layer of material between you and being drowned in blood, like you’ve just gone down on your partner during “that time of the month”.
Crow Country by SFB Games (played on PS5)
Crow Country takes the classic survival horror formula and drops it into an abandoned theme park. You may think that a theme park is an odd setting for a horror story, but that just tells me you’ve never been face to face with a dead-eyed Goofy mascot.
Set in 1990, you play Mara Forest, a FBI agent who was out the day they were handing out grey suits and matching personalities, so has to make do with a white dress and purple bob cut. She’s been sent to investigate the disappearance of Edward Crow and the unexplained closure of his once-beloved amusement park. From the moment you step inside, the place feels wrong – a piece of cheerful Americana left to rot in the dark. Every area looks like it used to be fun, but is now a filthy deathtrap filled with monsters. But hey, at least there’s no feral children.
Mechanically, Crow Country plays like a love letter to the PS1 classics. Exploration is slow and deliberate, puzzles and bizarre locking mechanisms gate your progress, and ammunition is scarce enough to make every encounter matter. Combat is stiff by design – stop, aim, fire, move, repeat – forcing you to choose when to fight and when to run. You’re given a laser sight and the game encourages to go for headshots, ‘natch. But this is easier said than done, especially when they’re spazzing out and look like the Peperami mascot.
What keeps Crow Country compelling is its restraint in delivering its story. There are no big “boo” moments or indulgent horror theatrics – just a slow, methodical drip-feed of unease. The story seeps out through scattered notes, environmental details, and conversations with increasingly unhinged characters, pulling you deeper into an intricate mystery.
If you’re like me, you’ll guess the big twist regarding Mara very quickly. I’ve played Silent Hill 2 far too many times for anyone to get their “main character with secret tragic backstory” past me. However, the big, big twist is so wild you’ll never see it coming. Imagine that Silent Hill 2 has the usual twist, right, but it also has an second twist where it turns out that Mary was actually one of the Biker Mice From Mars. Something like that.
Paratropic (Definitive Cut) by Arbitrary Metric (played on Switch)
Paratropic is a weird little experience. It can be completed in around an hour – in fact there’s no way to save – and is probably the least “gamey game” on this list. It’s atmospheric horror stripped to its bare essential elements; which usually means that the pretentious gits would rather have made a movie but, for some reason, decided to make a game instead.
Told across three intersecting perspectives — a VHS tape smuggler crossing a border, an assassin waiting out a job in a grimy diner, and a birdwatcher wandering into something deeply wrong – Paratropic drops you into a low-poly nightmare and refuses to explain how any of it fits together. The VHS smuggler’s section is the most obtuse – because the others you can easily get on board with, but what’s a VHS smuggler? Probably some type of folk hero we’ll soon have in the UK now we have to have a wanking licence.
As much as I can tell, the overall story is something like a cross between Videodrome or Roadside Picnic (the novel that “inspired” the Stalker games). The story involves a cache of illegal videotapes that seem to warp reality (and people) around them. There are strange, anomalous areas containing monsters. Society seems to be crumbling – dead bodies are left for the birds in public places – and there is a vaguely dystopian feel to the whole thing. It’s the kind of narrative that trusts implication over explanation, which I do appreciate.
As mentioned, it’s not really much of a game in the traditional sense. What passes for gameplay ultimately amounts to merely different ways of moving from A to B (travelling through a forest, driving down a motorway, etc) with some limited environmental interaction. It feels somewhat remiss to criticise these segments, because what else have we got? But you can only aimlessly drive down an empty motorway (that’s a straight line) for so long before you start to feel like a toddler that’s been given a toy car, in hopes of keeping you amused for just ten minutes, so that your broken parents don’t kill themselves.
So, if the gameplay’s barely present, what makes it a great game then? Well, it’s such an atmospheric experience. There’s a deep dread and unique strangeness to proceedings. The visuals lean hard into the jagged, low-poly aesthetic of early 3D, while the soundscape drifts between unsettling industrial drones and synthwave bangers. There’s also some gnarly Cronenbergian body horror that sells the corrupting influence of the tapes. Taken together, it captures that uncanny moment of waking up after dozing off in front of the TV and into that strange limbo of 2 a.m. infomercials selling things that are definitely not cults.
Midnight Cinema Junkyard 
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