Acting as a prequel to Camp Sunshine, Fossil Games have announced the 8-bit blood-soaked Horror RPG Sunshine Manor.

You play as Ada, dared to spend the night in the haunted Sunshine Manor where Ada encounters ghosts, demons, blood-soaked horror and more. Unlike the previous game, Fossil Games will be supporting Linux directly this time and they've just released a free version with Sunshine Manor Prologue so you can try it right now to get a feel for it.

The game takes inspiration from movies such as From Beyond, Friday the 13th, and The Nightmare on Elm Street, while mixing gameplay mechanics from games such as the beloved – and long-running - The Legend of Zelda, Resident Evil and Silent Hill series. Check out their Kickstarter trailer below:

Watch video on YouTube.com

What it will feature:

• A brand new engine written just for Sunshine Manor.
• Discover and explore the ever-changing haunted Sunshine Manor.
• Transport yourself to the Demon Realm and banish Demons!
• Beautiful hand-drawn 8-bit graphics.
• A deadly game of Cat & Mouse where the Demon can be anywhere.
• An 80s Soundtrack written just for Sunshine Manor.
• Harness Ada's Psychic Powers.
• A fantastic story-driven narrative.
• Free the trapped Ghosts and enter the Demon Realm
• Lots of scares, spooky scenes and nods to famous franchises.
• Devious puzzles to tax your brain box.

The kickstarter has a goal of £20,000 and of that they've already managed to gather £7,643 in around a day so it looks like it's quite popular. It does sound like a lot of fun, with an unusual protagonist who certainly isn't a damsel in distress with their psychic powers that can be used to fight off demons.

You can help fund it on Kickstarter , follow the game on Steam and try the free Prologue right now.

Black Tabby Games recently released the first episode of Scarlet Hollow, a horror visual novel and choice-driven adventure game set in the mountains of Appalachia. After the initial release, they put up a Linux version too!

It's made by the award-winning graphic novelist Abby Howard whose previously works include the comics of 2013: The Last Halloween, Junior Scientist Power Hour and The Last Halloween - all of which had very successful Kickstarter campaigns. Scarlet Hollow will have hand-drawn backgrounds mixed with animated sprites together with a "complex relationship system to bring to life an immersive world of charming (and terrifying) characters".

Watch video on YouTube.com

Your choices are supposed to matter here and while I haven't seen exactly how far that goes, the character build options you get to pick were interesting in how it affected conversations and actions. With my own play-through I picked the Powerful Build option, which definitely made for some amusement. I was also able to partially intimidate an annoying person on the bus thanks to it, who ended up giving me a bag of…dripping peanuts? Well, Protein is Protein. Oh there's an old smelly takeaway in the fringe? Well Protein is Protein - gotta stay buff. Wait isn't this a horror? Some of the writing made me laugh but I don't want to spoil too much more.

Looks like it's going to be a fun series if this first episode is anything to go by. Great music, some wonderful artwork and with a really good atmosphere too. I don't often manage to get sucked in with visual novels but this is great. Seems users on Steam agree with is getting a Very Positive rating so soon after release.

You can play the full first episode free on Steam , with a Kickstarter campaign launching October 1 for the rest. We'll follow along and let you know how it goes.

The latest horror experience from Frictional Games with Amnesia: Rebirth now has an official release date of October 20 with Linux support.

Just when you were planning for a quiet and casual 2020 Halloween right? Well, think again. Time to get your spare pants at the ready. Amnesia: Rebirth is a sequel to Amnesia: The Dark Descent released back in 2010 so it's releasing not too far off the 10th anniversary.

In the new trailer to go along with the announcement, we get a short look into the twisted story behind Amnesia: Rebirth. The protagonist, Tasi Trianon, finds herself in the desolate landscape of the Algerian desert, battling against her fears and pain as she seeks out answers. She must do everything and anything to survive. She is Tasi.

Watch video on YouTube.com

"Amnesia is not just another haunted house spook-fest, but an emotionally harrowing journey", explains Thomas Grip, creative director at Frictional Games. "We aim to go beyond simple jump-scares and to affect players on a deeper level. While Rebirth will contain the terrifying encounters and sights you expect from an Amnesia game, it has a lot more focus on narrative than previous entries in the series. We want the player to form a strong bond with Tasi and intimately share her tribulations. This will not be your run-of-the-mill horror experience."

This was originally meant to be released in 2017 and then 2018 and then that didn't happen as the project continued to grow. Starting off small, they said how they didn't want their own sequel to The Dark Descent to be just a side project and ensure they expanded on it properly. With many new horror games on the market since the original, they needed to ensure it wouldn't be lost in the crowd and actually stand out. Rebirth will see you travel through "a wide variety of uncanny environments, from scorched deserts and dark caves to forgotten ruins and alien landscapes" and it sure sounds like it's going to be good.

You can pre-order now on GOG and Steam .

Pulsatrix Studios are working on FOBIA - St. Dinfna Hotel, an upcoming psychological horror and it appears a number of readers are excited about this one. We've had quite a few emails and notifications about it, as they recently put up a demo with Linux support on Steam.

Fobia is a first-person experience that focuses on mixing together environmental exploration, a little survival and some puzzle solving. You assume the role of a young journalist named Roberto, investigating supernatural events to get a bit of a career boost which leads you to the Santa Dinfna Hotel.

You can see the original trailer below. It's in brazilian but YouTube's captions do a good enough job for me:

Watch video on YouTube.com

For some actual Linux gameplay, you can check out this video from Xpander.

It appears they're also running a crowdfunding campaign on a platform called catarse, which interestingly is open source . Not as known as the likes of Kickstarter and IndieGoGo but nice to see some free and open source funding platforms. The FOBIA has another 42 days to hit R$50,000 (Brazilian real).

Follow it and try the demo on Steam , funding campaign here .

The upcoming pixel-art survival horror adventure Lamentum is coming along in development, although it's going to see a delay with it now releasing in 2021.

After getting successfully funded on Kickstarter back in the Summer of 2019, Lamentum looked like a promising upcoming indie game with a great atmosphere. We've followed along since then and a recent Kickstarter update noted some major changes. Developer Obscure Tales mentioned the delay reason being the "current situation" complicating things, which presumably they mean the COVID19 pandemic. So it should now release in Q1 2021, a while away but hopeful the result is a game that is not rushed.

Not all bad news, they have teamed up with publisher Another Indie who will help with with translations, QA and more. Another Indie has worked with numerous other developers on titles like the popular Yuppie Psycho.

They also showed off a new trailer:

Watch video on YouTube.com

We spoke to the developer, who confirmed again their continued intention to have it available for Linux too.

If you wish to keep up with it you can wishlist Lamentum on Steam .

Goner from Canary Islands based developer Loco Players is going to provide quite a frightening looking survival horror, with plenty of dinosaurs roaming the lands.

They're clearly not making another ARK: Survival Evolved either, as this seems to have much more of a focus on the story of your survival with plenty of primal fear involved. In Goner, you take on the role of Anthony Sunder, who is on a journey to find their missing mother and her expedition crew. This search leads you to the location of a ghost island inhabited by hostile members of a lost civilization and feral fauna you thought extinct.

Watch video on YouTube.com

"There's many dinosaur games but there has been no single player, story driven survival-horror game since Dino Crisis was released 20 years ago, and that one was not from the first-person perspective", says Yeray Schwartz, CEO at Loco Players.

Feature Highlight:

• Self-manage your hunger, thirst, fatigue, temperature and health.
• Hunt, collect, cook, drink, rest or craft.
• Save your progress using a specific consumable in a safe room.
• Limited inventory capacity.
• Day and night cycles with sun and moon phases + weather system.
• Complex AI and behaviors.
• Camouflage your smell with mud or water.
• Two Game Modes: Survival and Story.
• Custom your appearance and defenses with self-made armor or clothes, building and setting traps.
• The island will be fill with natural dangers such as toxic gases, poisonous flora and fauna, lava or quicksand.

It's crowdfunding on Kickstarter , and with 22 days still to go it's already fully funded passed the initial €24,600 goal. I spoke with Loco Players personally, where they confirmed their plan was to have a simultaneous Linux and Windows launch and they've now updated their Kickstarter FAQ to clearly mention release target platforms.

More retro original PlayStation-style horror experiences? Say no more, sign me up. Cursed Letters is another coming to Linux PC later in 2020. In development by Letters Team and Flow Studios with a focus on providing a distubing horror experience that bring together PSX (original PlayStation) style with some modern mechanics.

Check out their first teaser:

Watch video on YouTube.com

Feature Highlight:

• Impersonation - Mobility, vision, all your senses will be at stake. Getting caught means suffering, and exchange in order to stay alive.
• Survival - Leaning, Hiding, Running, Throwing... Resort to everything you can.
• Explore - Understand the rooms around you, navigate through them, and find a way out...
• Death - Prepare yourself against an enemy that will leave traps, search every room you go, and listen closely to the sounds you make. Just to finally catch up to you.
• Brutality - You will always feel unprepared for the challenges you will face, you must search every room, improvise on your options to simply stay alive.
• PSX Aesthetics - A horror experience heavily inspired by PSX games.
• Puzzles - Heavily inspired by 80's horror movies.
• Fail Fast - There is no failure except in no longer trying.

I'm really not sure who kickstarted this surge of classic styled horror games but I'm all for it. Just like the upcoming release of Alisa , I'm interested to see how this does at release because this style has a lot of charm to it and an atmosphere that so many "realistic" games can't match.

You can follow Cursed Letters on Steam .

Arriving next month for the Steam Games Festival, the upcoming supernatural horror adventure ASYLUM will give us a peak behind the door with a 2-hour long demo.

The Steam Games Festival will be live from June 9 - June 15, with many developers getting involved to show off their games and ASYLUM is one of the most exciting looking. Agustín Cordes, founder of the development team at Senscape confirmed this on Twitter, and that a Linux demo will also be available too.

Watch video on YouTube.com

The full version should hopefully still make it out this year, after a ten-year long development cycle that has been full of ups and downs. It went through a crowdfunding campaign in 2013 but as things went on their funding got quite low, thankfully Epic Games helped out as late last year they announced they were approved for an Epic MegaGrant.

Once the demo is out for the Steam festival, we will be taking a look.

You can follow ASYLUM on Steam .

Amnesia: Rebirth is the newly announced title from the horror masters at Frictional Games, after teasing it for a few months we finally know what it is.

"In Amnesia: Rebirth, you are Tasi Trianon, waking up deep in the desert of Algeria. Days have passed. Where have you been? What did you do? Where are the others? Retrace your journey, pull together the fragments of your shattered past; it is your only chance to survive the pitiless horror that threatens to devour you."

Some actually expected it would be a return to Amnesia and the whole "I am Tasi, I am still Tasi" teaser sort-of hinted at this. This is actually set in the same world as Amnesia: The Dark Descent, Frictional say this will be another "evolutionary leap" for them and it will challenge players to remain calm in the face of some unimaginable terror. See the announcement trailer below:

Watch video on YouTube.com

Feature Highlight:

• First-person narrative horror experience
• Explore environments and uncover their histories.
• Overcome puzzles that stand in your way.
• Carefully manage your limited resources, both physical and mental.
• Encounter horrific creatures and use your wits and understanding of the world to escape them.

They will continue their Linux support too, as expected and they say it will work across any "Major" 64bit Linux distribution from 2018 onwards. So ensure you're up to date.

You can wishlist and follow Amnesia: Rebirth on Steam .