Horror games, as a genre, are always looking back. Not only are horror games uniquely likely to herald back to their predecessors and influences, but, in the indie scene, there are a lot of games that intentionally try to replicate the look and feel of much older titles. PS1 and PS2 era graphics and game design elements are among the most common ways this adherence to the past appears in the indie scene. You can see this in such wide-ranging horror masterpieces as Paratopic, Iron Lung, Dread Delusion, Inscryption, SIGNALIS, and dozens more.
There is a technical reason for this: indie games are made by small teams of developers, if not individual “solo devs,” who operate on shoestring budgets (if that). For that reason, it is obviously easier to produce low-poly, low-resolution assets and to use simple, clunky gameplay elements that can be programmed quickly.
But there is more to it. In the same way many horror stories utilize ancient, cursed objects in their premise, many horror games seem to take that same approach to the technology that enabled the first real wave of “survival-horror” titles like Silent Hill or Resident Evil. Almost like there...
