DEEP-HELL.COM is one of those websites that immediately screams that we are ran by goths. Not only do we have a skull in our logo, our primary colors are pumpkins and swamps.
That is the truth of DEEP-HELL.com. I can’t tell you to do something special and spooky this month, because we basically do that every month. What I can do is suggest that you attempt to do something
a little different.

Every year October hits and the routine is the same. Play Castlevania a bunch. Sit around in a dusty office chair and look at crumbling Silent Hill websites from yore. I have been celebrating Halloween Online the same way for a decade or more, but there’s a little more to this tradition.

Every October we try to scare ourselves. No matter what it takes.

There can never be enough horror videogames. This is a statement that the incredible prevalence of them on websites like Gamejolt and Itch.io can be easily backed up by. Almost monthly now it seems like there is yet another horror game jam. I love each and every one of them, like a horrid little child that crawls out of the shadows in my closet. This is one of the few calls to action I’ll ever make directly asking anyone to play something, but: It is incredibly important you scare yourself once a year.

Horror is, to me, the most important way of telling a story. If you’ll even look into the most popular media out there now, you’ll see horror tropes have slowly been infiltrating them. Not just the simple aesthetic trappings of horror either, but writers and creators are less afraid of making the audience feel fear. Horror is important because it allows you to tell stories about things you generally cannot get away with. Not only does it allow storytellers to approach difficult subject matter, it also taps into emotions that other works simply cannot.

A friend of ours once said that as long as you kill someone every ten minutes, Horror can tackle any subject matter you desire. Richard Rouse III, the director of The Suffering: Ties That Bind similarly surmised that Horror can touch topics otherwise unavailable to other genres. Horror is almost immediately dismissed as pure drivel or only created to scare. While many videogames fit into the latter camp, there are dozens that use horror to navigate concepts like the physical body and the space it dwells in.

The game we chose to terrify ourselves with this month is The Evil Within 2. One of the few games that directly approaches the concept of trauma and coping mechanisms without turning them into a joke.
Being firmly centered on the protagonist of the first game being dragged back into similar events, The Evil Within 2 uniquely questions what the player knows and remembers all the same.
We’re likely going to review that game at the end of this month, so I don’t want to say too much here.

This is so short because I want to invite everyone to introduce a little terror into their lives this month. We’ll be right over here the whole time doing the exact same thing.