Two very different horror games arrive in the week of Halloween, and between them they cover the full range of folk wisdom. One tells you not to go out at night. The other tells you not to look out of the window. Your grandmother would have approved of both.
Village in the Shade reaches the West on 27 October for Switch, Switch 2, PS5 and PC, courtesy of NIS America. On the surface it’s a hand-painted farming sim, all crops, livestock, fishing, cherry-blossom viewing and summer festivals in the Japanese mountain village of Kagatsu. You play a lost child taken in by the villagers, who offer you a plot of land on condition that you follow a few simple rules: don’t talk to strangers, don’t leave the village and, whatever you do, don’t go out after dark. If that setup brings to mind Sergeant Howie stepping off his seaplane on Summerisle, you’re in precisely the right frame of mind.
The game comes from Nippon Ichi Software, with Yu Mizokami, the creator of the Yomawari games, as planner and designer, so its pedigree in small children wandering through haunted Japanese towns is impeccable. It came out in Japan as Honogurashi no Niwa on 30 July and has since sold more than 250,000 copies there, which suggests the Japanese public has a healthy appetite for turnips with a side of dread. Early Western reviews are excellent: Shacknews gave it nine out of ten, finding a genuinely affecting rural gothic tale beneath the vegetable patch, with only slightly fumbly controls to grumble about. The faint-hearted can choose a “Village in the Sunshine” mode, in which the rules can’t be broken and the horrors stay politely out of sight. There are more details at NIS America.
Look Outside has been terrorising PC players since March 2025, and on 30 October Devolver Digital and its creator Francis Coulombe bring it to PS5, PS4, Switch 2 and Switch. The premise is a beauty. A mysterious event has transformed anyone who looks out of the window into something grotesque, and you’re stuck in a single apartment block with dwindling food, makeshift weapons and neighbours who have become, shall we say, difficult. It’s a pixel-art survival horror RPG with turn-based fights against more than 150 hand-made creatures, where the distance between you and whatever is shambling down the corridor genuinely matters, and it runs to ten or twelve hours with several endings.
It began life as a game made in a month for a game jam, attracted rather more attention than anyone expected, and ended up with Devolver. Its Steam page is sitting on an Overwhelmingly Positive rating, with 98 per cent of nearly ten thousand English-language reviews in its favour. Think J.G. Ballard’s High-Rise with the body horror of early Cronenberg. John Wyndham played a similar trick in The Day of the Triffids, where watching the green meteor shower cost everyone their sight; here, a peek past the net curtains costs you your humanity. It’s on Steam now if you can’t wait for the console release.
Two games, then, that understand the oldest rule of horror: the scariest thing is always a rule, because sooner or later somebody breaks it. Usually you.
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