Old Flash Horror Games You Can Still Play

Start with the classics. Exmortis, Ben Leffler's 2004 game, is the one most often named as the scariest of the Flash era: you wake in the woods with no memory, shelter in a house in a clearing, and read your way into its dark past and the ancient beings behind it. Exmortis 2 picks up a year later with you as the last survivor, fleeing through a church, an abandoned ranch and stranger places while a sinister figure follows. Leffler's Goliath The Soothsayer, made with The Mars Volta, locks you in your missing brother's attic, held by a malevolent force, and his Purgatorium, made in about a week for Halloween 2006, is a few minutes in a filthy room with grisly images that jump at you.

Arrival in Hell, from 2006, is where skideh and cicla's prison series began: you wake in a cell as a beast tears through the building, and you walk your prisoner between a handful of rooms using whatever you find, a dead man's hand included. Arrival in Hell 2 puts you in a demonic prison with dozens of puzzles across sixteen scenes and three endings, though players warn that a key card can vanish and leave you stuck.

Some of the best known turn fairy tales dark. Gretel and Hansel, by makopudding, looks like a watercolour storybook and plays like a trap: you walk the children through a Brothers Grimm tale where almost every wrong click ends in an animated, often gruesome death, and Part 2 takes them deep into the woods. Alice is Dead, by ImpendingRiot and Hyptosis, starts with you locked in a Wonderland room beside Alice's body with no memory of who you are; the first episode takes about ten minutes, and the second follows the Rabbit into a seedy, gangster-run Wonderland with harder puzzles. Hyptosis, who drew Alice is Dead, went on to Red Oz Episode 1 in 2015, a macabre Wizard of Oz in which a crash wakes you in your dark house, cryptic messages appear on the walls and something is plainly wrong outside.

The Visitor turns the creature feature around: you are the alien parasite, solving each scene so it can eat its way from frogs and birds up to the family in the farmhouse, growing more grotesque with every meal. The Visitor Returns, by ClickShake Games, adds seven new scenes and six ways the final kill can end. Both are bloody and darkly funny rather than tense.

Ghostscape turns the haunted house into a ghost hunt, gathering evidence and diary pages before an occult ceremony with five red candles lets you out, and Ghostscape 2 - The Cabin sends you to investigate a cabin in the woods and its old owner. The same maker, Psionic, made Killer Escape in 2012: a masked serial killer has locked you in his basement cell, and the notes of the people he held before you, valves, fuses and a safe code are your way out. Killer Escape 2: The Surgery picks up straight after, on a blood-soaked floor run by a second psychopath, and Killer Escape 3 sends you after your own identity while a figure called the Observer watches, turning the series toward science fiction.

Inculcation, from Halloween 2009, is a first-person survival horror adventure its maker says was inspired by Silent Hill and Resident Evil: still, grey scenes of a house and a block of flats, puzzles built from what you find, and sudden appearances that make players hesitate before every door. Bars of Black and White is the quietest and strangest: you have not left your room in a long time, a barcode reader arrives in the mail, and what it scans shows the world is not what it seems.

If you want a gun in your hand, two sci-fi games answer a distress call. The Breach, by Berzerk Studio, sends a lone head of security aboard a prototype starship that has gone silent, a side-on shooter through red-lit corridors full of creatures and gore. Outpost:Haven is played from above: a station with a radiation leak, aliens that burst out of the vents and the dark, hacking, upgrades and one level seen only through night vision. Shadow Tag is the shortest, made in 48 hours for a game jam: two children have pulled you into a paranormal game of tag outside a cabin at night, and you have a flashlight and a car to reach.

Some Flash classics no longer run in a browser at all; Newgrounds asks for its desktop player for those, as it does for Psionic's Urbex and for Lost Outpost, the follow-up to Outpost:Haven. Deep Sleep, Deeper Sleep and The Deepest Sleep, scriptwelder's pixel-art dream trilogy, are the best known, and they live on as the Deep Sleep Trilogy on Steam, preserved as they were. The same maker's Don't Escape games, from 2013 on, turned the escape room around, asking you to lock yourself in before nightfall turns you into a werewolf or a zombie horde arrives; the originals still run free on Newgrounds, and the three are sold together on Steam as Don't Escape Trilogy.

If you only try one, play Exmortis for where Flash horror began, Gretel and Hansel or Alice is Dead for the most memorable look, The Visitor to be the monster for once, or The Breach if you would rather fight back.

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