The Swedish studio Frictional have become well known for producing the sort of games that make excitable YouTube vloggers squeal in fright and refuse to play with the lights off. After scaring the bejeezus out of everyone with their Penumbra series of PC titles they broke through with Amnesia: The Dark Descent, a first-person survival horror title where standing in the dark conceals you from all manner of horrific ghoulies but saps your sanity and is, well, really scary, and staying in the light is reassuring but makes you easier to spot by said horrific ghoulies. Those games have received critical acclaim and plenty of sleepless nights, both of which we're sure Frictional count as a win. We're super excited for their next new title, SOMA, which will shift the survival horror mechanics to a sci-fi setting, which looks to have a 2001-eseque AI-gone-wrong plot. To tide you over in the mean time, you could try playing their first game - nope, not Penumbra: Overture, but a little-known curio called Fiend. Which is not listed anywhere on their website, but can still be found via this link. Downloading Fiend is totally free and legal, and semi-recommended, at best. It's a totally different, lower-budget proposition - we're pretty sure the top-down, 2D world was built in Game Maker - and the controls are a little shonky, but you can see they're trying to build the same atmosphere and sense of dread as they get to in their later, proper games. It's a bit like taking a look at Martin Scorsese's schoolbooks and finding they're full of misspellings and bad drawings, but there's still plenty of Catholic guilt in there.
Tom Baker is the Comics Editor at WhatCulture! He's heard all the Doctor Who jokes, but not many about Randall and Hopkirk. He also blogs at http://communibearsilostate.wordpress.com/
