Horror games can be a fun experience if they are done correctly. What scares gamers is incredibly subjective, so it’s hard to find one game that is universally considered sufficiently terrifying. That being said, we are here to tell you if The 9th Charnel is a scary game.
How Scary is The 9th Charnel?
In my own estimates (as I said, it’s very subjective), The 9th Charnel is a decently scary game.
My own description (and I think a pretty common one) is that this game is Resident Evil meets Outlast. While you don’t have the limitations of the camera and batteries to make this fully Outlast, the atmosphere matches it incredibly well. You’re all alone in a spooky village-like area and have to move around while being stalked.
While some of the execution in The 9th Charnel may not quite measure up, it is impressive for what is presented as a solo-developer endeavor, and I still find myself on edge while playing it. There are some small visual things (like a tree full of hanged corpses) that definitely add to the extremely haunting atmosphere, and I loved that.
I’ll own up that I jumped at the first monster segment and then quickly died, only to jump at the exact same segment because I didn’t know where the monster had come from, as it had happened behind me before. I know jump scares are cheap in the world of horror, but it was more than I expected this game to achieve.
As long as you don’t go in expecting some sort of AAA masterpiece horror game, I think The 9th Charnel has enough going for it to at least entertain you if you’re looking for a mid-range game with solid atmosphere.