Witching Hour — Seasonally Appropriate, Horrifically Accessible
Horror means a lot of things to a lot of people. Maybe it’s all about the aesthetic, buckets of blood bursting from any number of hapless (or tragic) characters. Maybe it’s the pacing, heavier on the scares, or the sense of dread, or finding some middle-ground between the two. Maybe it’s the sound design, the sudden screeching of something in the dark, or a timeless melody that has taken on a life of its own. Maybe it’s a book, or a movie, or a game. But it’s yours, your little corner of the spectrum that fills you with horror.
I have a love-hate relationship with interactive horror. The oversaturation of “BLEURGH gotcha!”-style jumpscares in the market, or the otherwise constant-onslaught of stalker-style antagonists, has felt demoralizing the last many years. You’re always in go-mode: it’s all panic, or it’s all on-edge, there’s no buildup, no sweet spot. But if you dig between all of the clones and streamer-centric screamers, there are occasional gems.
All of that to say that if you’re looking for something for the season, I invite you to my little corner of the spectrum, for Vincent Lade’s Witching Hour (2022).
Players control Rose, the eldest of two sisters, having recently moved to a remote village out in the middle of Who Knows, America with her younger sister, Emma, and her father. In true horror fashion, not all is at it seems in the village or the house. As more unsettling things happen around the family, they begin to learn more about it all, as well.
As a piece of interactive horror, Witching Hour doesn’t lean as hard into the “survival” aspect of other titles. There’s next-to-no combat until very late in the game, which lets the experience lean fully into its atmosphere: isolated, rainy, and unsettling. There are small puzzles scattered throughout Rose’s journey, requiring her to explore her surroundings for the answers (and maybe wonder why someone would lock up a library with such a strange setup). For the most part, they’re the main element of Witching Hour’s peaks and valleys: when you’re solving a puzzle, the world is more clear-cut and less scary. It’s just you and the puzzle. It’s a moment of peace, same as tame wandering between locations, or conversations with other characters. Peaceful little valleys.
Outside of the puzzles and peaceful wandering constitute the peaks. The atmosphere is weirdly oppressive: things move and shift when you’re not looking, candles suddenly light up with an unnerving spark, mannequins are scattered throughout creepy houses. In the quiet exploration, the need to progress, the game becomes a hill, upward, and upward, until it SPIKES, sometimes for the most banal thing. The slow-burn pacing is one of Witching Hour’s strongest elements: it doesn’t want to scare you all the time, it wants to choose when to scare you. And if you’re game to give yourself over to it while you play, the jumps are that much more rewarding.
Those same scares are made most powerful by the simple sound design philosophy: silence. Walking through the various areas, or the assorted houses, you may be caught by how silent everything is. No background tones, no low thrum of “you should be scared, now feel scared” music, just…silence. And then a floorboard creaks as you step on it, and your body locks up for just a moment. Or you hear a footstep not your own elsewhere in the house. Knocking. The mundane becomes terrifying, simply for how much it stands out amidst the silence. Peaks of noise, and valleys of silence.
Lastly, compared to other horror titles, is Witching Hour’s sense of momentum. Where many titles will have you evading an all-powerful foe, or trying to combat overwhelming hordes of enemies, or trying to sneak around without being caught. In those kinds of experiences, it’s easy to trip up, lose, or die, and then have to retry. The momentum is lost; you have to retry, and you already know what’s coming next. Now it’s just a matter of avoiding it to progress. In Witching Hour, there is no defeat. You just keep going. The momentum is maintained, slow-burn though it may be, through nearly the whole experience. Aside from the last pages of the last chapter, you explore, you’re scared, you jump, you recenter yourself, you continue. You don’t reexperience the same spook twice, or thrice, or more because you couldn’t get past “that one part,” and it makes for exceptional horror.
One minor caveat: the very last scenes, the only to involve combat, can be jarring and confusing, if only for the fact that now you can be killed. Unfortunately, the momentum being jostled that close to the end felt that much more jarring. Hardly a dealbreaker, but just a minor weakness to bear in mind.
Other players may complain about the animation, or the voice acting, but horror is distinct for its low-budget, passion-project delivery. We’re generally not consuming horror for the finest dialogue or acting, but for the experience of it all. This surely isn’t the latest Resident Evil or Insomnia, but its minor shortcomings hardly diminish the experience as a whole.
At the end of the day, Witching Hour is solid, low-key, spooky fun. It’s well-designed for what it is: the kind of horror that can be consumed, in its entirety, in one solid evening by the eagle-eyed, or a couple of nights by the more casual fan. It’s scary in parts, and chooses its scares intentionally. It is an experience to be had and enjoyed (as much as the genre permits), not a challenge to be overcome. It is, in this Halloween season, as seasonally-appropriate a game as one can find. You could watch security cameras or sneak around a killer’s home and scream at various (and constant) jump-scares, but if you’re in the mood for something a bit different, a bit more traditional, Witching Hour has a good few tricks up its sleeve for you.
