How Indie Horror Games Are Bringing Back Retro Grime

You don’t have having touched a PlayStation controller to recognize the console’s blocky, Nineties-era graphics. Big studios may be producing brilliant remakes of 20-year-old games like Resident Evil 4 (2023) and, more recently, Silent Hill 2 (2024), but indie games have taken a more rustic approach to sentimentality. By 2024, all the best indie horror games are rooted in the stringy, lo-fi textures and long-nosed polygons of the original PlayStation.

You can find them in survival horror Crow Countryis a mysterious and oxidizing theme park. They are on the black and white computer screens in the paranormal puzzle Lorelei and the laser eyesalso. And in tech-noir history Hollow bodygray buildings as well as the psychologically draining adventure game Mouthwash. But like the best bottle of red wine, the PS1-style horror trend has been in the works for a few years now, despite the mass influx of entries arriving this year.

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Johanna Kasurinen, whose studio Wrong Organ has just launched Mouthwasha psychedelic journey into the desolate reaches of space, reminiscent of when gaming was just beginning to return to the horror of the PS1. “My first exposure (to this) was with Puppet Combo games around 2015,” she says.

In the 2010s, developers like indie studio Puppet Combo and Kitty Horrorshow began releasing basic horror experiences clearly modeled on an old-school, pixelated aesthetic. Puppet combination Babysitter bloodbath (2013), for example, borrows the awkward shot and moon-shaped skull of the ponytailed protagonist from the 1999 film. silent Hill. But these early games weren’t always explicitly advertised as “PS1 style”. This clear distinction happened over time, as more developers realized and started making games influenced by their childhood and each other.

“I think people might be surprised by how long this (horror) subgenre has lasted,” says Kasurinen, “but part of the reason it’s so popular and long-lasting is the community. I would never have been able to learn how to recreate this graphic style if it weren’t for many artists before me making videos and tutorials explaining the process.”

Proliferating the grainy, creepy darkness of legendary PS1 titles like 1996 Resident Evil It’s also, for many developers, a matter of practicality. Vincent Adinolfi, the developer behind the upcoming survival horror game Heartwormsays Nineties graphics are particularly great for solo developers, who make up much of the indie gaming scene.

“When I realized I could make a 3D game and no creating AAA quality assets for everything, the wheels started turning,” he says. “It seems like a lot of other people have noticed this too, and now (PS1-style games) are being released more and more frequently.”

Adam Vian, the creative director behind Crow Countryagree. He remembers having no 3D modeling skills when he started working on his silent Hill-game-inspired, “which is partially why the character models are so simple and blocky.”

“In a funny way, my own lack of skills and experience acted as a proxy for the limitations that developers had to face in 1998,” he says.

Players are thrilled by these limitations. When a game is coated in PS1 film – the fluff and filaments that prevent its half-human faces from existing in the real world – it becomes truly transformative. It’s easy to map ideas and personal anxieties onto poorly defined environments, so even something as featureless as a coffee table in these games feels like a blurry cloud, always on the verge of transforming into something else. “I think the lack of visual fidelity allows our imagination to fill in the gaps,” says Adinolfi, “and the things we imagine are often much scarier than reality.”

Cozy Game Pals founders Bryan Singh and Crista Castro agree. Your next game Fear the spotlight (October 22) is one of the first games to be published by Blumhouse Games, the newest branch of the horror-centric studio behind hits like Insidious franchise and modern Halloween films. Fear the spotlight is Cozy Game Pals’ take on lo-fi third-person horror and follows two sisters after a failed séance.

“What’s interesting is that different people take different things away from PS1 horror games – whether it’s the story, the lore, the setting or something else,” say the duo. “For us, we remember games like (1996) Resident Evil and silent Hill being very cinematic and atmospheric. When we combine this distinct visual style with the same atmosphere, it really sparks our nostalgia.”

But the past doesn’t just provide warmth – it also offers insights.

“My favorite thing is when a player comments on a scene in our game and says, ‘That’s something I’ve felt before but couldn’t articulate,’” says Kasurinen. “There’s a lot of focus on nostalgia when we talk about lo-fi games, but I think an important aspect of that is that we don’t need next-gen graphics to make something impactful.”

As PlayStation is currently (and unpopularly) promoting its $700 PS5 Pro – which launches on November 7th – Kasurinen’s philosophy is almost transgressive. But horror’s current fascination with PS1-style graphics also proves how effective it is. Neither players nor developers to need your games feel as tangible as your own skin. They just want to feel a game beating in their hearts, providing imperfect humanity and perfect fun, two things encompassed by shitty nineties graphics. So while the new PS5 Pro features impressive AI upscaling and advanced ray tracing, its shiny new plastic casing is clearly no match for the 35-year-old grime.

“When it comes to the list of things that interest me – the things that stick with me most about the games I love – how ‘good’ the graphics are is almost never taken into consideration,” says Adinolfi. “I think it’s an easy crutch to use for high-budget studios, but graphics alone won’t save a game.”

That said, it’s also unlikely that PS1-inspired horror will stick around indefinitely. “From a business and marketing standpoint,” says Vian, “it’s already getting a lot harder for indie developers to get noticed making low-poly horror games.”

For now, though, you can keep screaming like it’s 1995.

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