8 Horror Video Games That Took Things Too Far

The Shadowman series is an oddly fascinating one. The original game landed with all the impact of a loose bowel movement when it came to sales and reviews because while being hyped up to the nines for months and having an aesthetic and narrative that was genuinely original, the actual gameplay truly missed the mark being janky and feeling extremely dated.

However this did little to stop this game from attaining cult-like status amongst those who saw beyond the technical limitations of the title, and there was enough groundswell for Acclaim to begin working on a sequel which again, unfortunately, ended up failing to set the world alight when it came to reviews.

Yet this didn't stop the sequel from garnering a tonne of heat for its insensitive approach to marketing. Acclaim decided that the best course of action in order to sell a game based on an undead bounty hunter of sorts was to propose pinning adverts for the game on real-life tombstones in cemeteries across America. The plan was to pay the families of the deceased for this headstone ad space, but needless to say, the plan failed in a catastrophic lambasting by the mainstream media.

So in this instance, it's not the game itself that took things too far, but the publisher that was too busy chasing that dollar in order to see how tasteless this move was.