This year's EEK3 had survival horror, fishing horror, and a management RPG in a haunted supermarket

Indie low-poly horror showcase EEK3 returned this year in the form of an hour-long selection of trailers for upcoming games, hosted as always by a purple skeleton named Skully. While the Nintendo Switch logo appeared multiple times, don't worry, every game featured is coming to PC.

This year's complement of trailers included a few games we've seen before, like GoldenEye homage Agent 64: Spies Never Die, as well as Ghostlore, which is basically Diablo 2 only with monsters from Southeast Asian folklore, and Signalis, which reimagines The Thing as a cyberpunk anime with Resident Evil's inventory and Silent Hill's atmosphere. 

But there were plenty more we hadn't seen before, many of which are now on my wishlist. Like Mother of Many, in which you're a mouse farmer who has to grow vegetables, cook food, and fight to end the curse your family suffers under by defeating hordes of enemies with a scythe. Or Loretta, a rural noir adventure set in the 1940s that's about covering up a murder. Or Fish Cymophis, which starts out like an ordinary fishing game where you explore a lake on a motorboat, then switches to horror once night falls and you become the prey.

A bunch of the games highlighted at EEK3 are available to try right now on the latest Haunted PS1 Demo Disc, which contains 18 demos in all. You might like to jump into retro FPS Enchain, which gives you a hook on a chain to air-juggle skeletons after you've softened them up, or Sorry, We're Open, a supermarket management RPG where you hire a party of employees and set out to clean up a haunted retail establishment. 

Of the ones I tried, my favorite was Fear the Spotlight, a stealth-horror game where you're trapped in a school after dark with a lamp-headed monster. Solving puzzles while playing my flashlight over the walls for clues was strongly reminiscent of Midwich Elementary School from Silent Hill in the best possible way. It's due out this year too.

Jody Macgregor
Weekend/AU Editor

Jody's first computer was a Commodore 64, so he remembers having to use a code wheel to play Pool of Radiance. A former music journalist who interviewed everyone from Giorgio Moroder to Trent Reznor, Jody also co-hosted Australia's first radio show about videogames, Zed Games. He's written for Rock Paper Shotgun, The Big Issue, GamesRadar, Zam, Glixel, Five Out of Ten Magazine, and Playboy.com, whose cheques with the bunny logo made for fun conversations at the bank. Jody's first article for PC Gamer was about the audio of Alien Isolation, published in 2015, and since then he's written about why Silent Hill belongs on PC, why Recettear: An Item Shop's Tale is the best fantasy shopkeeper tycoon game, and how weird Lost Ark can get. Jody edited PC Gamer Indie from 2017 to 2018, and he eventually lived up to his promise to play every Warhammer videogame.

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