"Unloved dolls in the forst of bloodied light, at once familiar and alien"

In this episode we talked about Psy High by Rebecca Slitt, published by Choice of Games in 2014.

If you want to follow us on instagram we are stillscaredpodcast, and our email address is stillscaredpodcast@gmail.com. Intro music is by Maki Yamazaki, and you can find her work at her website, and music on her bandcamp. Outro music is by Joe Kelly, and you can find their music under the name Wendy Miasma on bandcamp. Artwork is by Letty Wilson, find their work at toadlett.com

Transcript

Ren: Welcome to Still Scared: Talking Children’s Horror, a podcast about creepy spooky and disturbing children’s books, films, TV and games — today we’re talking about a selection of children’s horror games spanning the last thirty years or so, and going into a bit more depth about the text adventure game Psy High. Enjoy!

Ren: Good evening, Adam!

Adam: Ahoy ahoy there!

Ren: I teased at the end of the last episode that we might be branching into a new genre this episode, and we are!

Adam: Yes, you dangled the branch of possibility before them and it wasn’t just a plastic bit of old tat, it was a resplendent branch of truth.

Ren: Mmhmm, yeah. Somehow this is the first time we’re talking directly about games, which seems a bit unlikely, but it’s true. Maybe there aren’t that many children’s horror games.

Adam: Yeah, I don’t think there are. In preparation for this episode I did some very cursory research and I looked up ‘best horror games for kids’ and frankly I was disappointed and troubled, because some of these games are really only horror in as much as Monster Valley High toys are horror.

They’ve got the skin of a horror game — like Plants Vs Zombies, for instance. Yeah, there are zombies staggering about like zombies, but they might as well be postboxes or robots, or bits of old sausage, it doesn’t matter. They’re slow, that’s what makes them zombies, but they’re not there to be scary. And then there’s other games that I really don’t think are kids games, so Little Nightmares I saw crop up?

Ren: Oh God, that’s not for kids!

Adam: That’s what I thought! I’m sure some kids have played Little Nightmares, but I dunno. Not only because the visuals — so if anyone doesn’t know Little Nightmares, it’s a stealth platformer where you play a little elf-like child trying to navigate these creepy environments and avoid these horrible, hulking, galumphing, shabby-looking murderous chefs and other giant figures.

Ren: And it has a very troubling atmosphere, it’s very intense.

Adam: It’s a very intense game and the way they did the animation, I think it’s that each of the body parts of the animated models were animated individually, almost like you used to do in Flash. So they all look weirdly disarticulated. They don’t quite move in the way you want them to move. So they’re really scary and there’s some very dark thematic undercurrents. I wonder if people just think of them as kids’ games because they have the word ‘little’ in the title, and puppet-like graphics, and people think puppets are for kids.

However, I started my teacher training and I heard a reference to a legitimate kids’ horror game in an English lesson earlier today, as it happens. This isn’t the first time I’ve mentioned kids games, a couple of episodes back I mentioned that I was in a primary school, and that kids had tried to engage me in a conversation about who would win in a battle: Pennywise from Stephen King’s It, or Huggy Wuggy. Huggy Wuggy is a razor-toothed teddy bear from Poppy Playtime, which is very popular with kids and is what you might call a mascot game, and we’ll come back to those.

But today I didn’t hear a reference to Poppy Playtime, but a different reference. The kids in the class were discussing Ghostbusters, and one of them said: ‘They have these vacuum cleaners that they suck up ghosts with,’ and a kid in the row behind said ‘No, that’s not Ghostbusters, that’s Luigi’s Mansion!’

So Luigi’s Mansion is a series that I think started on the Gamecube but are still being made, in which Mario’s much-maligned taller brother goes around a spooky mansion hoovering up ghosts. So that’s what I think of as children’s horror — it’s committed to its horror theme, it’s set in a haunted mansion, and they really have a ghost train like feel. You’ve got this creepy, haunted environment where ghosts pop out and they look a bit gooby. There’s nothing really unsuitable for kids, but it’s clearly going for that spooky atmosphere.

Ren: Yeah. Where do you stand on Halloween Pinball?

Adam: Do you mean a specific pinball game or just in general?

Ren: Well, I’m thinking of a specific pinball game that I had on Windows ’95 or ’98. I enjoyed it very much.

Adam: I mean, is it as scary as the 3D maze screensaver?

Ren: Well, what is? Frankly.

Adam: I remember the UFO pinball, so it must have been similar. Was it graveyard themed?

Ren: Yes, I think it had gargoyles and spooky midi music.

Adam: I do like spooky midi music. So the thing is, you said that there aren’t many horror kids games, but the tricky thing is that back in the 80s and the early 90s when games were moved out of the arcade and into people’s homes, I get the impression that distributors thought of all games as potentially for kids, no matter how inappropriate. Because video games are a great way of marketing films that kids would have no chance of seeing in the cinema to impressionable young minds.

It took a while for the rating system to be bought in for games, and I think there’s still this idea to a certain extent, but particularly when we were kids there was the idea that games were for kids, so when something like Grand Theft Auto came out you did have parents buying it for their kids, because they didn’t have a sense of it being inappropriate.

So what’s tricky is that it’s not like with fiction where you have children’s books, and young adult’s fiction and adult fiction. I don’t think it’s been so easily demarcated with video games. But I mentioned Luigi’s Mansion and Nintendo as major players in the console market have tended to market their games to children. Obviously they expanded into a family market with the Wii, but if you think of the Nintendo flagship games like Mario or Zelda they tend to be marketed towards a young audience.

But there were some games on the N64 that while not horror games, were definitely horror-adjacent. I don’t know if you even played Banjo-Kazooie?

Ren: No…

Adam: So I re-played a lot of these games on the Rare Replay on the Xbox over lockdown. So Rare games were a games studio from up north, possibly Yorkshire, and they made some really big N64 games like the Goldeneye game, for instance, but they also had their own properties like Banjo-Kazooie, which came out after Mario 64, which had a bit of an uneasy, haunted atmosphere. A lot of those early 3D games did. Banjo-Kazooie was a straightforward fun game, with Banjo the honeybear and his bird pal Kazooie, and they go round to various lands collecting puzzles pieces, there’s a kind of haunted house zone with a cemetery but it’s not very creepy. Now Banjo-Tooie, on the other hand, came out at the same time as Rare were working on Conker’s Bad Fur Day. This was an odd, unsavoury game where they tried to make a game aimed towards adolescents with a cutse-y aesthetic but then lots of smutty jokes.

Ren: That’s interesting. I inherited an N64 and games from my sibling a while back, and me and Maki went to trade in a bunch of these games and Conker’s Bad Fur Day ended up fetching about £50.

Adam: I’m not that keen on it. It’s got some interesting voice-acting, if you look on the Rare Replay of it, the guy, Chris something who designed the game, he’s quite worse for wear at this point, to be honest. He’s clearly a man who’s been a hard drinker through a lot of his life, and he talked about how Conker’s Bad Fur Day was not autobiographical, but he put a lot of himself into it. So I think the slight degeneracy of it, and the way that you have a lot of characters who are drinking too much or partying too hard, it comes across. He does some great voice acting in it, but it’s a weird game.

Anyway, at the same time Rare were doing the sequel to Banjo-Kazooie, called Banjo-Tooie. And it’s odd because Banjo-Kazooie has this fun, light-hearted feel and I started on Banjo-Tooie and I was playing Rare Replay with my partner Antonia during lockdown, and she described Banjo-Tooie as a hauntological video game, and I totally get what she means.

Without getting too academic-y, the idea of hauntology is something that’s eerie, something that feels emptied out and absent, and is kind of haunted by a vision of the future from the past. Which is a strange idea, but I think often early 3D games, have this optimism about the future of video games, but in retrospect look really janky, and they’re often very empty because they only had so much memory to populate these environments. So they often look a bit weird and a bit haunted.

And Banjo-Tooie is really weirdly dismal. It’s still colourful, but the colours have all curdled and turned nasty. So if anyone has seen the Tim Burton Charlie and the Chocolate Factory remake, the colours are a bit like that, or his Alice and Wonderland. Kind of garish but grey and dismal