Fellow readers, writers, and players, one and all, we’ve made it. We’ve finally made it to the best month of the year. It’s that month when we finally know that summer is behind us, and a chill starts to set in. That month when the orange sun peers through autumn leaves as a restless fog rolls in. That month that culminates in the spookiest day of the entire year. We’ve reached the month of…Spooktober!

Or more commonly known as October, but you already knew that. But for the purposes of this post, we’re talking about Spooktober, if you read the title.

Anyway! Yes, it’s time for Spooktober, a favorite blogging event during which we celebrate all things scary, creepy, eerie, and likewise in video games. In developing a new theme for this year’s rounds of Spooktober posts, we decided to look beyond the realm of strictly horror games to cover a topic that we hadn’t touched on before, one that encompasses games generally and allows for a little “outside the box” thinking. Our Spooktober theme this year is “The Horror that Surrounds.”

This new Spooktober theme focuses on creepy environments, levels, and stories/backstories in non-horror video games. When one goes into a horror game, there’s an expectation that most of its elements are going to befit a horror game. The setting is going to be creepy; enemies are going to be scary/gory/otherworldly in some manner; the story is going to contain tragic elements; and maybe a few jump scares are thrown in for good measure. With “The Horror that Surrounds” in mind, we’re going to highlight places and stories in a variety of games that aren’t outwardly scary (subjectively speaking, depending on one’s fears and phobias), but that nonetheless instill dread, anxiety, trepidation, and melancholy. Because sometimes, the scariest things we encounter in games are the things that we don’t see.

Join us throughout October as we feature Spooktober: The Horror that Surrounds!