Five Great Horror RPGs to Play During Halloween

ign.com:

Great horror RPGs are more difficult to find than you might think. Despite clever innovations like the sanity stat, role-playing designers still tend to favor swords and sorcery over everything else (just ask sci-fi fans). That doesn’t mean there aren’t some perfectly scary RPGs out there, though. Whether they feature raw psychological horror or more traditional werewolves and vampires, there’s plenty of spookiness to be found in the role-playing genre. So on this, the spookiest day of the year, here are five great RPGs to play on Halloween.

Troika was an RPG studio that was aptly named. Led by Fallout developers Tim Cain and Leonard Boyarsky, who would later go on to work on The Outer Worlds, Troika produced a trio of classic RPGs – Arcanum: Of Steamworks and Magick Obscura, The Temple of Elemental Evil, and Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines.

Bloodlines was barely more than half a game when it launched, rife as it was with bugs and hidden content. But what it lacked in polish it made up for in ambition, immersing you in vampiric politics, or allowing you to take on the role of a Nosferatu roaming the sewers beneath Los Angeles. The fans did the rest, producing a series of sprawling patches that addressed many of its most pressing problems.

Bloodlines’ creepiest quest is almost certainly The Ghost Haunts at Midnight, which sends players to explore the frightening Ocean House – a hotel haunted by a very active ghost. I won’t spoil it for you, but you’ll want to play this level with the lights off.

The first five minutes of Parasite Eve features an opera performance in which everyone bursts into flame. It’s a mood that encapsulates the Square of that era rather well: dramatic, slightly unhinged, and wildly experimental.