Octave

Point and click games have a few big advantages, such as the freedom to focus less on complicated animations for characters and dedicate more time to visual and audio design. Octave is a horror game in which those two are of high quality and make the atmosphere very eerie and unsettling.

Octave starts off with you kneeling on the ground in some dark forest with a guy pointing a gun to your head. A second before the trigger gets pulled, everything turns dark, your almost killer has disappeared and you were untied and set free.

With no pieces to put together about what just happened, you start to wonder through the forest, looking for a way out. Along the way you run across some candles, a cemetery, a black cat, a ghost, a temple but the game gets weird after the candles part. With no clue as to what’s going on or who is watching you with strange eyes from behind the foliage, you push on, only to see that things are starting to get out of control.

Point and click games usually have a great narrative to them and you immerse yourself into the story with every click but that’s not the case here. In Octave you have no clue as to how you got stuck with a gun to your head, who rescued you and so on. There is no dialog and throughout the game you will have to make sense of things by studying your surroundings, events and gathering several clues and objects.

Finding them isn’t really a problem and neither is figuring out what to do with them but what get you are the consequences of your actions. Each puzzle you solve (some are really hard), each item you use correctly triggers a response in the game that makes things increasingly strange, to the point where they become disturbing.

From an atmospheric point of view, Octave is great. The music and audio effects are excellent and they really keep you on your toes. Combine that with some great environment design and you get a couple of really good scares.