Making "retro plus" horror with The Tartarus Key

gamedeveloper.com:

What do you do when you want to create a horror game without it being too scary? Two-person developer team Vertical Reach ran into that conundrum with their latest game. Creators Kevin Colegate and Leonor Parra liked the feeling of being scared but didn't want to deal with the jump scares and other elements associated with horror games.

"We wanted to make a horror game that was a lot more about the kind of the atmosphere or the tenseness of everything instead of necessarily like, 'Oh boo, something jumped out at you,'" Colegate told Game Developer. "And that naturally sort of evolved into this kind of escape room format."

That idea grew into The Tartarus Key, out now on all platforms. It's a PlayStation 1-style escape room game where you have to solve a number of increasingly complex puzzles to get out of a mysterious mansion alive. Along the way, you'll have to help other victims while learning about the rich weirdos who put the whole plan in motion.

So what starts off as an eerie game with darkness lurking around every corner morphs into something much more palatable, even for non-horror fans. It also allowed the team to create a throwback PS1 game, which has become more common over the past few years, especially for indie development, and put what they wanted into it. The result is a game that feels very retro but also subtly modern.

Colegate and Parra are fans of old-school horror games like the first Resident Evil. They used some of its least scary elements to craft The Tartarus Key's atmosphere. So while the game is technically classified as horror, it has this over-the-top, campy charm that makes it suitable for those who can't stand jump scares.

A lot of its light-hearted nature stems from the content of the puzzles