Tag: ps1
The Tartarus Key looks like a fabulous PS1 version of Saw
Waking up in a room you don’t recognise with a camera trained on you: the result of a heavy Saturday night, or the opening salvo in an inexplicable kidnapping? In The Tartarus Key, a PS1-style thriller/puzzle/horror game, it’s definitely the latter. The free demo is out now, and throws you into the first couple of puzzles for the game as Alex, whose last memory is of being at home in her apartment. Now she finds herself locked in a weird study in a poorly lit mansion, with only a stranger on the end of a walkie-talkie for company. It was enough to staple this game right into the middle of my disorganised Charlie Day conspiracy board of games I’m interested in, I’ll tell you that much.
Callisto Protocol PC stuttering? Try the horror game’s PS1 demake
Callisto Protocol PC stuttering issues have marred the Steam launch of Striking Distance’s Dead Space-like horror game, with users reporting frame rate drops and a slew of performance problems. But as noted in our Callisto Protocol review, it’s still a great game, perhaps made even better when you remove the modern-day, hardware-choking sheen, and play Callisto Protocol as a new demake designed to feel like a PS1 classic.
MORE FROM PCGAMESN: The Callisto Protocol review, The Callisto Protocol weapons, The Callisto Protocol upgrades
Signalis review: PS1 survival horror fans, rejoice
As Replika Elster, Signalis will force you to untangle a mess of writhing flesh and malfunctioning memories to separate dream from lived experience. So, in keeping with dream logic: You’ve played Signalis before, and you’ve never played anything like it. It lovingly adopts the trappings of PS1-era survival horror, and more importantly, it fully understands why those systems, aesthetics, tropes, and technical limits are so engaging. But it also presents and explores love and loss, freedom and manipulation, fear and trauma, in its own cruelly captivating way. It’s strange and familiar, gorgeous and horrible. It’s an absolute banger of a videogame, made all the more impressive by its indiest of indies price tag and two-person dev team.
Fundamentally, it’s a love story. Things go bad for space technician Elster, but she made a promise she intends to keep. We’ll get back to this later. First up: Signalis excels at capturing the essence of survival horror – those juxtaposed feelings of possibility and unease that hit you entering a long hallway, flanked by doors, only to find all but two locked or malfunctioning. You’ll be back here soon enough, you know that. Probably with a new key. Maybe with a new gun. But there’s also a good chance things will have…changed, by then. A floor tile might reveal new horrors. You might have spent your last bullet. So, left or right? Or maybe back? You can only carry six items, after all.