Jocuri de groază din anii 80 și 90

Old horror games frighten differently. Without high-resolution faces or convincing light, designers of the late 1980s and 1990s had to work with what they had: silence, awkward camera angles, sudden noise and the peculiar unease of grainy digitised video. The result is a body of work that has aged into something stranger and often more effective than its budget suggested, and this collection gathers the most important pieces of it.

Alone in the Dark is the foundation stone. Polygonal characters moving through hand-painted rooms, fixed cameras that hide what is coming and a Lovecraftian mansion full of things better left in their boxes: every survival horror series that followed borrowed its grammar from this game. Blood answers with the opposite mood, a loud and gleefully nasty shooter whose undead protagonist quotes old films while clearing cultists out of carnivals and mortuaries with a pitchfork and a can of hairspray.

From full-motion video to pure atmosphere

The mid-1990s CD-ROM boom left behind a set of curiosities worth revisiting. Phantasmagoria and Phantasmagoria 2 filmed live actors against rendered sets for a horror story told at feature length, while The 7th Guest turned a haunted house into a puzzle box and Night Trap built a whole game around watching security cameras and pressing a button at the right second. Clock Tower took a quieter route, giving you no weapons at all and a pursuer who appears without warning.

Elsewhere the collection covers the Elvira adventures, the Splatterhouse beat-em-ups, Heretic and Hexen for gothic first-person action, and two of the best-written games of the decade: I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream, adapted from Harlan Ellison, and Sanitarium, an isometric adventure through the delusions of a man who cannot trust anything he sees.

All of it runs in your browser. Click a title, wait for the emulator to load, and play with the lights off if you like. Nothing is installed, no plugin is needed, no account is created and no registration is asked for - the keyboard and mouse mapping is printed on each game page and that is the whole setup.