A Field Guide to Folk Horror Games

It can be surprisingly tricky to spot a folk horror game in the wild. Sometimes, you may catch a glimpse of a game that looks just like one, only to realise that the similarity doesn’t extend beyond an earthy aesthetic or shared iconography of wicker dolls and horned masks. Other times, you may be halfway through playing a game before it suddenly hits you that you’ve been playing a folk horror game all along.

To make sure the creature in front of you is in fact a work of folk horror, you often need to get quite close and observe it in its natural habitat. Do you observe a preoccupation with the deep-rooted but fraught relationship between a community and its environment, mediated by supernatural manifestations of nature (whether real or imagined), and the customs and rituals performed to placate or sway these forces? If so, you can put down your binoculars and confirm a sighting.

To help you get started or simply to scratch your folk horror itch, I’ve compiled a list of games of my personal favourites (in no particular order). Each of them is a unique beast, but whether they take us to Japan, the Swiss Alps, Great Britain or Quebec, whether they play like survival horror or a detective game, whether they abide by folk horror tropes or challenge them, every one of them is a great example of the genre.

Silent Hill f

It took me a while before realising that the latest entry in the Silent Hill series is a full-blown work of folk horror. More than that, it is an example of folk horror that shows just how relevant and versatile the genre can be, and how comfortably it can coexist with—and even enrich—psychological horror.

Folk horror is all about the layers of soil, history and experience that make up our world. In Silent Hill f, these layers are intricately entangled with the conflicting layers of Hinako’s own psyche, creating an uneasy and ambiguous tapestry of rituals and beliefs that explore a core anxiety of folk horror: the realisation that communities are more than willing to sacrifice their own in the name of custom, tradition and the illusion of a cosmos in order.

Mundaun

As a Swiss person and contributor to the upcoming Mundaun: Design Works, I might be a tad biased, but Mundaun might just be my favourite game on this list. What makes it so special—aside from its unique hand-drawn black and white aesthetics—is the way it recreates the places, stories and folklore that inspired it in a way that’s somehow both faithful and wildly original and postmodern.

Mundaun transforms the Swiss Alps into a liminal space that’s both serene and eerie, grounded and dreamlike, familiar and utterly strange. A place of quiet mountain hikes and talking goat heads, where one moment you may be brewing a cup of coffee in a cozy cabin and the next bump into the devil on a ski-lift. You can read more about the folk horror weirdness of Mundaun in an article I wrote for RPS.

Daemonologie

Daemonologie is a bite-sized piece of indie folk horror with an oppressive atmosphere and—not unlike Mundaun—a highly idiosyncratic approach to a creepy black and white art styles and animations. As a Scottish witch finder, you have a couple of days to interrogate the inhabitants of a remote village and to decide which of them should be executed as a witch. Interrogation ranges from picking the right questions to successfully completing grotesquely gory torture "minigames".

To explain what makes Daemonologie so effective, some light spoilers are necessary: The truth is that the entire framing of the game as a detective game is false. There are no right questions, because there is no real witch, and whoever you decide should die in the end is innocent. Just like the best works of folk horror exploring witchcraft and its persecution, the true horror in Daemonologie is not black magic, but the beliefs that justify torture and violence.

Saturnalia

Saturnalia offers a highly inventive, fresh approach to the survival horror genre on pretty much every level, from its setting to its audio-visual design, roguelite mechanics and open narrative structure from several perspectives. Playing as a whole cast of characters, each with their own goals, backstory and tools or skills, you explore the labyrinthine streets of a small Sardinian town in the midst of a peculiar festival rooted in twisted local folklore.

There’s a unnerving monster to run and hide from, but the true thrill of Saturnalia lies in slowly peeling away layers of mystery and revealing the surprising narrative depths of its cast and twisted town history.

Horses

While Saturnalia developer Santa Ragione’s latest game might not be strictly speaking folk horror, there are just enough parallels for me to excuse sneaking it in here. For one, it shares an interest in the customs and beliefs used by communities to justify violence against their own, as well as in the line that separates (or rather connects?) humans and animals.

Horses is a beautifully uncomfortable arthouse gut-punch of a game that has more in common with Pasolini’s Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom than any other horror game I’ve ever played. Since Horses has been sacrificed to whatever bloody gods Steam and Epic are beholden to, you’ll need to buy it somewhere else.

The Excavation of Hob’s Barrow

This point’n’click adventure game revolves around an intrepid amateur archeologist’s quest to excavate a strange burial mound called Hob’s barrow in the remote countryside of Victorian England. There, we grapple with dark local folklore, strange pagan holdovers, and locals eying outsiders with suspicion and hostility—the quintessential ingredients of a classic folk horror story.

The Excavation of Hob’s Barrow is full of fascinating historical allusions to England’s pagan past and the ways it remains alive in folklore. It would be enough to recommend it, but as the game progresses and—quite literally—delves into deeper and deeper historical strata, it becomes something more strange and layered than it first appears. For an in-depth, spoilery exploration, feel free to dig into this article.

Year Walk

This humble little game helped spark my interest in the folk horror genre when I first played it a decade ago. Year Walk imagines the eponymous Swedish custom (Årsgång in Swedish) that was performed as a means of divination. Wandering through a silent, labyrinthine forests, you encounter visions of otherworldly beings from Scandinavian folklore such as the brook horse or the Church Grim, the spirit of an animal sacrificed for and buried beneath a newly built church.

What sets Year Walk apart even from other games on this list and makes it feel especially folk-horror-y is its dedication to exploring real-world folk customs and beliefs by letting us participate in them through play—and asking us to navigate the dangerous manifestations of an ambivalent natural world not through fight or flight, but negotiation and appeasement.

Black Book

Like Year Walk, Black Book was created with the help of anthropologists and shows a deep commitment to capturing real-world folk customs and beliefs—so much so that it is impossible to play it without feeling you have unwittingly attended a crash course in Slavic folklore.

Even putting this educational aspect aside, Black Book is a truly original piece of folk horror that combines elements of adventure, RPG and deck-building as you face dark spirits—either by confronting them with your wealth of occult knowledge or by exorcising them with magic spells in card-based battles.

The Whispering Valley

A remote community weighed down by religious dogma and terrible guilt, besieged by a malevolent force in the woods. Set in Quebec in 1896, The Whispering Valley is the kind of folk horror that trades the luridly imagined bloodthirstiness of pagan or Satanic cults for the historical barbarities of mainstream Christianity, colonialism and genocide.

It also happens to be a very enjoyable point’n’click adventure game with satisfying puzzles and gorgeously detailed, atmospheric 3D environments. But don’t let it’s slow pace and calm rural charms fool you: this game features some truly bloodcurdling and disturbing moments.