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, and Leffler's Goliath The Soothsayer, made with The Mars Volta, locks you in your missing brother's attic, held by a malevolent force.

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. Gretel and Hansel Part 2 is longer and takes them deep into the woods, and both parts are being remade for Steam. 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 later point-and-click games hold up just as well. 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 the kind of sudden appearances that make players hesitate before every door. 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. 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. 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.

If you only try one, play Exmortis for where Flash horror began, Gretel and Hansel for the most memorable look, or The Breach if you would rather fight back.

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