Forgotten Survival Horror Games Nobody Played

The horror medium changed forever when survival horror exploded onto the gaming scene. Franchises like Resident Evil, peaks and troughs and all, have become household names even among people who don’t enjoy horror. But you can’t say that for any of these survival horror games. Remember: do not speak ill of the Dreamcast.

 

ILLBLEED

Nobody knows what Illbleed means, but it’s provocative. It gets the people going. 5 people.

You should expect the guys behind Blue Stinger to go not just ham, but full blown Babe: Pig in the City for their follow up. And that’s exactly what they did with Illbleed. They even called themselves “Crazy Games.”

Released on the Dreamcast in its dying days, which were unfortunately…most of its days, in Illbleed, you play as Eriko, a horror-obsessed teenager drawn into a theme park where every attraction is a death trap. Each stage riffs on a different B-movie, with your character’s health tied to senses like hearing, smell, adrenaline and even eyesight.

The idea is super original, and it commits to its B-movie parody vibes with chainsaw maniacs, haunted appliances and slapstick gore. Few horror games were this willing to laugh at themselves while still being brutal like this. The trap detection system, the randomised item placements, and the sheer range of bizarre enemies give it a flavour unlike anything else on the Dreamcast.

But it’s also…not that great a game. The controls and camera are stiff, scanning every corridor quickly becomes exhausting, and the budget limitations show in the muddy visuals, kinda all over the place voice acting and pacing that can swing from hilarious to frustrating.

It sold about as well as you might expect, and so you should expect these insane prices. It never even came to Europe.

And yet, it does have a following. Granted, a following like the people who vote for Lord Buckethead each time as a commitment to the bit, but still.

 

Countdown Vampires

Not what happened when Richard Whiteley went to the wrong mansion one spooky October evening, Countdown Vampires is instead basically Namco’s very not very good attempt to copy Resident Evil.

It even borrows the same fixed-camera setup, tank controls, and key-hunting structure, though instead of zombies you’re dealing with “vampires” created by a mysterious drug. They are some very zombie-esque vampires, mind you.

The game opens in a Las Vegas-style casino where a fire breaks out, turning the guests into monsters, and from there you stalk through gaudy hotel lobbies and seedy backrooms in classic survival horror fashion.

Now, Countdown Vampires does have a few clever ideas. Instead of always killing enemies, you can tranquilise them and use a serum to turn them back into humans, which ties into the multiple endings. It’s kinda Bioshocky maybe. There’s also a more colourful setting than most horror games of the era, as here you got bright casinos and neon-lit bars instead of the usual mansions and labs. It also has the clever idea of making the main protagonist have his tits out the whole time, like a bloke in Rhyl when she’s turned the weans against him.

Everything else, though, is about as fun as modern day Countdown. How dare you stand where he stood.

Controls are stiff even by PS1 standards, animations are honking, and the story veers from nonsense noir to unintentional comedy. Yes, that is classic survival horror, but it doesn’t really work here.

Critics at the time were not kind — GameSpot gave it a 3.7/10 and Famitsu scored it 22/40. It never saw a sequel and quickly disappeared from shelves.

Today, Countdown Vampires is mostly just remembered as Namco’s awkward Resident Evil knockoff by all eight of us weirdos old enough to care.

 

Carrier

It’s funny how carrier can either refer to a bag or something or someone who might spread an infectious disease innit? Anyone who has one of these on their bag is definitely guilty of both.

Set in the far flung future of uhhh 2 years ago, Carrier was one of the Dreamcast’s earliest survival horror titles, releasing in 2000 and immediately getting tagged as “Resident Evil at sea.” We did get that eventually. Oh yeah it’s a CERTIFIED DEAD AIM MENTION TIME.

In this forgotten survival horror, a bioweapon outbreak hits a massive military ship, leaving it crawling with mutants. You play as a special forces operative sent to investigate, navigating claustrophobic corridors, locked bulkheads and the occasional wide-open deck, all while voraciously scavenging for ammo.

Carrier does nail a few things. The naval setting gives it a different flavour to the usual mansion or lab, and there’s a neat scanning mechanic where you can sweep crew members to see if they’re infected. It even has some real-time polygonal cutscenes rather than pre-rendered ones, showing off the Dreamcast’s horsepower.

But Carrier is also clunky as hell. Controls are stiff, combat is awkward, and enemy designs are fairly uninspired compared to Capcom’s grotesqueries. Puzzles are mostly generic key hunts, and the dialogue is memorably bad.

Reviews at the time were lukewarm, hovering around 60–70%, with NextGen noting it was functional but unimaginative. It sold modestly but was quickly overshadowed by Blue Stinger and later Code: Veronica.

These days, Carrier is barely remembered, but it did help carry a flag early on for the freakazoids on the Dreamcast.

 

Galerians Ash

I’ve mentioned the PS1’s Galerians a few times, but I haven’t really mentioned its PS2 sequel before. Well, nobody really does.

Picking up where the first game left off, Ash follows psychic teen Rion who wakes up years later to find a world overrun by the Galerians. Them’s bioengineered psychic beings bent on wiping out humanity. Fun stuff.

The story leans heavily into cyberpunk anime trope, with cloning, telepathy, bleak futures, and there are cool psychic powers instead of guns.

Mechanically, Ash has some intriguing ideas. Rion uses drugs to fuel his abilities, with different cocktails unlocking telekinetic blasts, firestorms, or psychic shields. Overuse leads to a psychic overload, turning him into an uncontrollable killing machine. It’s a clever analogue to ammo management in Resident Evil, but with a dangerous risk-reward curve. The game also isn’t shy about throwing big, minging bosses at you, many of them designed with a surreal, body-horror flair.

Unfortunately, Galerians: Ash arrived in 2002 looking a little dated. Critics pointed out its blocky character models, stiff animations, and clumsy camera work that felt more like late PS1 than early PS2. The pacing also struggled, with repetitive combat and heavy reliance on cutscenes. Reviews were mostly negative — IGN gave it 4.4/10, citing frustration and lack of polish, while sales were poor enough that the series quietly ended.

Today, Galerians: Ash is remembered only by die-hards and silly YouTubers, but it will always have super cool box art.

 

Doctor Hauzer

When people talk about the roots of survival horror, it usually sounds like a straight line. You had Alone in the Dark in 1992, then Resident Evil in 1996, and that’s survival horror, baby. But tucked between them was stuff like Doctor Hauzer, a 3DO exclusive from 1994 that experimented with the same building blocks. It never came west, so it slipped out of the conversation almost entirely, but in Japan it showed how the formula was already evolving.

Set in a creaky old mansion belonging to the vanished archaeologist Dr. Hauzer, the game drops you in as a journalist investigating his disappearance. Instead of non-stop combat, most of the tension comes from exploration, puzzles, and hazards, alll of which play out with early free-roaming 3D movement and switchable camera angles. You could say it’s too clunky to enjoy these days, but for the time it was doing something closer to what Resident Evil would later perfect than almost anything else on the market.

What makes Doctor Hauzer more fascinating in hindsight is the talent behind it. It was produced by a young Akihiro Hino, who would later direct Overblood 2 and then go on to found Level-5, the studio behind Dark Cloud, Ni no Kuni, and Professor Layton. That odd little 3DO horror prototype turns out to be the missing link in a career that became hugely influential.

Doctor Hauzer sold modestly in Japan and was never officially translated, but it’s quite the interesting tonic, and moment in game history. Survival horror didn’t just leap fully formed from Alone in the Dark to Resident Evil, and even failed experiments can plant seeds in surprising places.

 

D2

Only slightly more searchable in the modern world than the original game, D2 released on the Dreamcast in 1999 in Japan and 2000 in North America, the final work of the late Kenji Eno and his studio WARP.

It loosely follows on from D and Enemy Zero, though in true Eno fashion the connection is more thematic than direct. You play as Laura Parton, a woman who survives a plane crash in the Canadian wilderness only to find herself hunted by not pretty mutants spawned from a meteorite. It blends survival horror, adventure, and oddly enough, hunting-sim mechanics.

The visuals were striking, with cinematic cutscenes and an atmospheric snowbound setting that felt quite unique for the time. The story leaned into surrealism, mixing body horror, environmental themes, and Eno’s trademark dreamlike tone. It also offered a wide-open hunting system where you stalk wildlife for food and ammunition. It’s like Snake Eater without the ladders, ghost dads, or meowing.

The problems came in pacing and structure. Large stretches of repetitive random encounters like in Final Fantasy slowed the game to a crawl, and combat boiled down to standing in place and unloading ammo into bullet-sponge monsters. Critics noted that while the presentation was ambitious, the gameplay loop often felt shallow. Reviews were mixed, and sales weren’t D best either. Should’ve released it in Europe.

While not the smoothest game to play today, D2 is a very interesting building block for survival horror and one that wasn’t afraid to try new things rather than just copying the biggest boys.

 

Zombieville

By far the most obscure game I’ll cover today, ZombieVille shambled onto PC in 1997, published by Psygnosis of all people. You think you know Psygnosis history pretty well, and then you discover a new game they did every week. Want a video on them? Let us know below.

Zombieville is technically more of a third-person action-adventure than survival horror, but this is the only chance I will probably have to ever mention it. You play as a survivor who looks like he might own a horrific necktie and have a gay best friend with an awesome jacket. He’s hacking through a zombie-infested town, with melee weapons, clunky firearms, and tank-like movement that feels like the Austin Powers hallway scene on repeat.

This is an awkward, muddy-looking experiment with about as much tension as a GCSE drama project. Animations are hilariously stiff, the combat feels like swinging a cricket bat underwater, and environments are flat, repetitive stretches of greys and browns. There’s no real resource management or clever puzzle structure, just random sequences where zombies explode in blood. Here’s an interesting fact for you: all eight people who bought the game in America at release probably never completed it, as the game was often shipped without the second disc.

Zombieville pretty much died immediately, and nowadays there are games with the same name that are far more popular. But do they have Greg Proops in them? Thought not.

 

Back in 1995

Back in 1995, released back in 2016, is a deliberate throwback to the PlayStation survival horror era.

You know, it looks and moves like a lost prototype, or something you’d find on an old demo disc. There’s fixed cameras, tank controls, polygonal characters with muddy textures and jittery animations. You play as Kent, a man wandering through a city filled with shambling monsters, searching for his missing daughter while piecing together a fragmented mystery. Yeah, it is very 90s survival horror.

The commitment to the aesthetic is impressive. The models wobble, the textures warp, the sound is tinny and slightly off, and all of it is on purpose. The problem is that the imitation never gets beyond feeling like an itch.io passion project.

Beneath the retro filter there isn’t much to hold onto: combat is flat, environments are bare, and the monsters lack variety. Where Resident Evil or Silent Hill paired their clunky mechanics with genuine tension, Back in 1995 feels like how your dog remembers watching you play those games.

Some reviews appreciated the authenticity of the look, but most found it hollow, with little of the atmosphere that made the originals memorable. I actually remember buying it to review but just couldn’t be arsed long before the end. It sold modestly on PC, then drifted onto PS4, Switch, and even 3DS, that’s awesome, but it never built a following.

Back in 1995 kinda reminds me of Doctor Hauzer. It’s a modern retro horror game that needed to be made so that more recent homages like Crow Country and Hollowbody could figure out what worked. This next game did not work at all.

 

Amy

Oh man. What a mess. Quite surprising from the guy behind Flashback too.

Amy, released in 2012 for PlayStation 3, Xbox 360, and PC, was billed as a throwback to slower, more deliberate survival horror at a time when the genre was drifting toward action. This was the same year as Resident Evil 6 and horror fans were worried. Amy did not help that.

You play as Lana, trying to escape a city ravaged by an outbreak while escorting a mysterious child named Amy. Lana is infected, and staying close to Amy suppresses the virus, turning her into both a lifeline and a constant burden.

It’s an idea that could have worked, and a similar dynamic would work the following year with…The Last of Us. The infection system gives the game a tense undercurrent. But the execution falls apart almost immediately. The controls are stiff, Amy’s AI is unreliable, and what should feel like tense escort sequences instead play out as maddening trial and error. Even basic combat and navigation are clumsy, and you’re left just kinda thinking you should tape the annoying girl to your forehead.

Critics tore it to pieces. The general feeling was that even Amy Winehouse was more functional.

 

Song of Horror

“Hey, I miss the episodic video game boom!” Said nobody. Okay maybe except them. 

Song of Horror began as an episodic indie project in 2019 before getting a full release on PC and later consoles. It wears its influences openly, with fixed camera angles, deliberate pacing, puzzle-heavy exploration, and a brooding, supernatural mystery. The story centres on the disappearance of a famous author, drawing a rotating cast of characters into a cursed house and, eventually, into deeper layers of haunted locations.

What makes it stand out is its central gimmick: the Presence. Instead of scripted encounters, an adaptive AI stalks you through the environments, with doors slamming, whispers creeping through the hall, or full-blown chases breaking out seemingly at random. Coupled with the game’s permadeath system, it creates a sense of tension that feels fresh without betraying the old-school style.  Once a character dies, they’re gone.

It isn’t flawless, and a lot of that comes down to how it’s laid out. The episodic structure means the pacing can feel stretched. Also, the puzzles are so bizarre in a way that makes you feel like the developers did the Limitless drug. And a bit of PCP. But Song of Horror actually manages to keep up a pretty eerie atmosphere and can be pretty spooky at points.

Reception was decent rather than glowing. It didn’t make waves in sales, but it did enough to cement a small cult following. It might have done better had it dropped today and also dropped the episodic stuff, but it’s still a song worth listening to.

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