A Surreal RPG That’s Too Spooky For Me

With Halloween just days away, now is a great time to get in the mood with some spooky video games. So here’s a free action RPG that harkens back to the spookiest gaming machine — The ZX Spectrum.

The Midnight Station is such a strange amalgamation of ideas. In it you play as a sentient mask made from the collective souls of humanity after we all perished in a fiery apocalypse. Your goal (I think), is to escape the inter-dimensional Lovecraftian nexus called The Architecture.

Parsing out the plot is a bit difficult, since the game is fairly lore-heavy up front. Like the PC games of yesteryear, you’re thrown head-first into the thick of it with just a manual and asked to figure out the universe. It’s like the ghost of an RPG we never got — a strange amalgam of Shin Megami Tensai and the Moonside section of Earthbound shoved into a dusty floppy disk. Oh, and an Ant Colony and Chaos Theory are both equipable items.

You can pick it up here for Windows courtesy of the folks at Studio Anjin (and throw them some cash, if you like it). The soundtrack is also worth checking out. Have fun and try not to get killed by sentient garden clippers.