Two years ago, on Point’n’Think, we published an article that took you on a journey around the world… through the lens of folk horror. Many horror games draw on historical events or legends specific to each country to tell a story and instill fear by drawing on (mis)known figures. Sometimes, they draw on the imagery of fairy tales and folklore, or even invoke a nation’s historical torments, to bring to life the monsters that populate their worlds. You can find the definition of folk horror in the first part of these articles.
When exploring this horror folklore in video games, it was easy to see that it is primarily presented from a Western perspective. The video game worlds that most readily come to mind when we think of folk horror tend to be British, American, or Japanese. This bias stems from our own culture, but also from the video game industry, which has historically prioritized American, Japanese, and European titles. That doesn’t stop us from finding profound richness in these titles that celebrate folk horror—and, at the same time, from discovering the cultures and legends of different countries. But one desire emerged: to discover other stories, other civilizations, and other visions of the world and of horror, through video games!
This second part of our series on folklore around the world will focus on games from countries we’ve already discussed (Japan, North America, Scotland), as well as regions we haven’t always had the chance to explore: the Czech Republic, Poland, Sweden, and Norway, before taking a detour to Russia.
Back to familiar territory: historical traumas, cults, and deep-rooted traditions
First of all, many other video games featuring folk horror have emerged since the first part of this article, or had not been mentioned. And some, of course, cover ground we’ve already explored! It would be a shame not to discuss them, however, as they offer a fresh look at folk horror and the ways in which it is portrayed.
Silent Hill f (NeoBards Entertainment and Capcom, 2025) is the latest original installment in the franchise of the same name. Its heroine, Hinako, is a sixteen-year-old high school student living in a rural village in 1960s Japan. This is a unique title because it is set in Japan rather than the United States, allowing for a fresh take on the series and its atmosphere. Far from a typical modern American city, Hinako’s village is isolated, crisscrossed by forests, dirt roads, and farm fields. The same fog prevails here as in all the Silent Hill games, made all the more eerie by the village’s lush, colorful vegetation. This mist conceals both the monsters and the villagers’ lies. The villagers are torn between modernity and tradition, haunted by conflicts and dilemmas that are as personal as they are communal. Some villagers continue to pray to traditional deities and use so-called magical home remedies to heal themselves, while others choose a new sanctuary and treat themselves with pills. Doctors are not always believed, making the village a place where science and superstition clash, whether on an individual or group level.
Community spirit and its hypocrisy, as is often the case in folk horror, is a key motif in the plot of Silent Hill f. It is because of pressure from the community and her family—bound by traditions they refuse to modernize—that Hinako experiences a living nightmare within her village. Her reason and her sense of freedom clash with the dogmatism of a community that lives in the past and in its conservatism. Indeed, the game’s setting prioritizes family honor over personal happiness, with gendered codes governing the community through inter-family marriages and the roles assigned to women and men, oscillating between submission and authority. Furthermore, while—as in every game in the series—the monsters of Silent Hill f are a psychological reflection of the heroine’s torments, the title draws on other elements from Japanese folklore, such as the use of omamori (Japanese amulets conferring powers), local legends (that of a fox demon lurking in the area), Shinto shrines (sometimes haunted by a deity that has turned malevolent), or, on a more cultural note, the symbolism of Japanese Noh theater masks and traditional Japanese songs.
Pacific Drive (Ironwoods Studio & Kepler Interactive, 2024) is a supernatural adventure game where your car is your main ally and tool for exploring the Zone, which is overrun with anomalies and strange occurrences. Up to this point, there’s nothing particularly unusual about this setting in the American Northwest—it’s more on the supernatural side. But in October 2025, a DLC is released: Whispers in the Woods. Already building on the intense isolation deep in the forest, amidst creatures and paranormal phenomena, Pacific Drive takes it a step further by introducing a cult that worships the area’s many anomalies. This plunges the player into an atmosphere that’s a bit more horrifying this time around, adding rituals and strange symbols to the mix.
South of Midnight is produced by Compulsion Games and was released in 2025. It takes place in a fictional American South, but one that can easily be linked to the Deep South of the United States (Louisiana, Southern California, Alabama, Georgia, Mississippi…), with swampy environments reminiscent of the bayous. The game highlights the folklore of these different regions, first and foremost through its bestiary: players can face off against the Rougarou (a lycanthropic creature from Louisiana), Two-Toed Tom (a giant alligator from Alabama and Florida), and many others. Much like the monsters in Bramble: The Mountain King, these creatures are both drawn from local legends and manifestations of historical traumas. Thus, Hazel, the heroine of South of Midnight, faces the boss Altamaha-ha, a river creature who is in truth a former slave, transformed by the swamp as she searched for the baby she lost there while fleeing her former masters. This is not the only example of a former human turned monster throughout the game. South of Midnight, in addition to featuring particularly lush and wild landscapes, offers a powerful folkloric tapestry where every creature and legend resonates with the history of the Deep South, summoning the ghosts (still very much present) of colonialism, racism, and social deprivation.
In the game Daemonology (2024) by indie developer Katanalevy, we’re heading to 17th-century Scotland this time. And the title evokes another facet of folk horror, with the image of the witch. Daemonology puts us in the shoes of a witch hunter, tasked with interrogating the villagers and finding the witch—or the wizard—among all the inhabitants of a village. Is there really a witch in this place? It doesn’t matter: a culprit must be identified within five days, and so be it if torture must be used to achieve it. This short indie game has a disturbing, nightmarish atmosphere, using black-and-white stop-motion animation and hand-drawn pixel art. Above all, it highlights the cruelty and institutionalization of the witch hunt, as you interrogate villagers—some of whom are clearly accused of witchcraft by others, sometimes wrongly. The torture methods themselves are historical. Daemonology draws on history to examine human justice in all its darkness, in this stubborn determination to find a culprit at any cost, driven by the paranoia and panic of the witch hunt. Like South of Midnight, the game draws on its country’s history to expose true events.
Eastern Europe and Scandinavia: Revisited Legends and Cathartic Stories
Let’s continue our exploration of folk horror, this time turning our attention to the countries of Eastern and Northern Europe. Some of these were already covered in the first article, such as Resident Evil: Village, which revisited the myths of werewolves, vampires, and ghosts.
Let’s head to the Czech Republic with Someday You’ll Return, a game released in 2023 and produced by a three-person studio: CBE Software. While the game has the typical flaws of a debut title (bugs that led to a director’s cut edition, and a poorly balanced mix of adventure, horror, and crafting), it breaks from the usual folk horror landscape by setting itself in a Moravian forest. A father sets out to find his daughter, who has gone missing in the woods: a concept reminiscent of The Blair Witch Project. Except that here, this European forest—with its familiar trail markers and informational signs that even link to the real websites of the natural sites you encounter—anchors the plot in a disconcerting sense of familiarity. As beautiful as the forest may be, you can sense that a darkness lurks within, just waiting to devour you. The game draws inspiration from local legends with its own monsters, while retaining a Czech “flavor,” notably through road signs in that language. It also draws on religious and folkloric symbolism for its visuals, as we encounter religious symbols here and there, though overgrown with vegetation. This is a way of giving form to the fear of the hero, accustomed to the city and its smooth urbanity, of the dangers and mysteries that nature can reveal. Here, folk horror is primarily a matter of aesthetics and symbolism, although one could also argue that the hero’s journey in *Someday You’ll Return*—through an isolated and dangerous forest—allows him to overcome his inner conflicts through rituals that are both pagan and cathartic.
We should also mention Deer Dream Studio’s 2020 game Cooking Companions, which stands out as something of an anomaly. It is a visual novel with extremely colorful graphics, in which a group of young people takes refuge in a house as floods engulf the city—a setting heavily inspired by Polish culture. Food rations are starting to run low… Setting aside the theme of isolation, Cooking Companions draws primarily from folk horror with its reinterpretation of the supernatural figure of Baba Yaga, the Slavic witch whose traits include hunting and cannibalism.
This is likely the oldest game in this selection: Year Walk, released in 2014 and produced by the Swedish studio Simogo. The game is based on Årsgång, an ancient method of divination that involves walking toward a church and confronting the various folkloric creatures that appear along the way. Only then will glimpses of the future reveal themselves to the walker. Simon Flesser’s art direction immediately transports us to a fairy-tale-like 19th century, which quickly reveals itself to be dark and macabre, creating an atmosphere steeped in mysticism. The pagan aspect of the plot stems not only from the year walk tradition, which involves divination, but also from the folkloric and horrific figures that appear to the story’s protagonist. He thus has the opportunity to encounter a hulder (a seductive woodland creature); a brook horse (an aquatic horse that lures children to drown them); or even the church grim, a humanoid figure with a sheep’s head that conceals a truth the hero has little desire to see. Year Walk is thus deeply inspired by creatures from Scandinavian folklore, while incorporating a very old tradition into its gameplay, all within an atmosphere that is as dark as it is unsettling. Furthermore, the game even includes a short guide that allows players to learn more about the Swedish folklore featured.
Year Walk isn’t the only Swedish game to feature an unsettling atmosphere. Unforgiving: A Northern Hymn (Angry Demon Studios, 2017) follows a young woman lost in the woods with her brother. Nature plays a key role here as well, with sound design featuring creaks, screams, and strange noises that help amplify the player’s sense of dread. The forest isn’t the only danger: it’s populated by folklore creatures, such as the Näcken (or Nixie), a shape-shifting water spirit, or the Skogsrå, a woodland nymph who appears beautiful but has a rotting body. By depicting the heroine’s isolation in an eerie forest and visiting a village whose ruins were caused by Swedish folklore creatures, Unforgiving evokes unease, fear, and mental instability. As in other folk horror tales, this supernatural nightmare resembles a rite of passage for its heroine, marked by rituals and consequences she only discovers at the very end.
Some games draw heavily on the aesthetics of folk horror without being entirely part of the genre. This is the case with Draugen, developed by Red Thread Games and released in 2019, which taps into the dark and morally ambiguous essence of Scandinavian folklore without directly incorporating its traditional elements. Draugen draws on folk horror primarily through its setting, in the landscapes of a Norway as romantic and resplendent as its characters are troubled and untrustworthy. Edward Harden, an American naturalist, travels to the small village of Graavik to find his missing sister. But he quickly realizes that the village and its mine seem to have been abandoned overnight, and that it was the scene of violent family feuds and possible murders. The dark, lingering legacy of the place—its tragedies and its wild isolation—gradually seeps into the narrator’s mind, leading to an increasingly tragic turn in the plot. Draugen explores folk horror through the way in which the setting, nature, and a community’s past torments corrode the mind of a newcomer, especially when that person is typically pragmatic and rational. He perfectly embodies the figure of the newcomer—with his urban, intellectual mindset—who finds himself confronted with a more rural, unpolished village, giving rise to tensions and conflicts between what he took for granted and what this new environment is shaking up within him: factual certainties, personal faith, and beliefs.
Russia: Between Mythical Creature and Isolation
Once again employing a monochromatic palette to make its world even more sinister, the game The One Eyed Likho (Morteshka, 2025) draws inspiration from the Slavic legend of the same name. It’s no surprise to find this studio at the helm of yet another universe drawing from folk horror, since it’s also behind Black Book, mentioned in the first article dedicated to folklore around the world. Clearly exhausted by this first title, which took years to complete, the six artists at Morteshka decided to turn their attention to a shorter game: The One Eyed Likho. A blacksmith decides to set out in search of misfortune, clearly weary of the overly happy and peaceful life he leads. But One Eyed Likho is the very symbol of misfortune in Slavic legend, depicted as an old woman with a single eye. The hero will navigate the usual tropes of folk horror (a gloomy, dark atmosphere with black-and-white art direction, a menacing forest, ominous apparitions…) in search of this Likho. An original aspect of the game lies in collecting various pages that depict the creature according to the folklore of different countries, showing how the same supernatural legend manifests itself across the world.
A blend of 2D visual novel, created almost entirely by a single developer with a background in illustration (The Growing Stones, 2024), The Mildew Children draws inspiration from Slavic and Russian folk horror in general, while creating its own unique universe and retaining Russian voice acting. In an isolated village live only children, none of whom can live past the age of 19. They must then undergo an initiation ritual and leave, to be reincarnated into other young people in the village. These children also practice witchcraft and follow various pagan rites—often deadly—so ancient that they themselves cannot trace their origins. Here we see the image of an isolated community, clinging to its ancient customs, which are followed without question, even when dire consequences unfold before our eyes.
And so concludes this second part devoted to folklore around the world, covering both countries we’ve already explored through video games and others we’ve newly discovered. Eastern European and Scandinavian countries tend to ground their folk horror in coming-of-age stories where isolation in the face of nature acts as a catharsis. The characters, cornered and often solitary, sometimes face supernatural creatures, but above all they confront themselves in a wild setting (Draugen, Unforgiving, Someday You’ll Return). The protagonists leave behind their reason and urbanity to confront harsher truths, forced to question themselves. But these countries also emphasize the reimagining of folktales and legends (Cooking Companions, Year Walk). Geographically close to them, Slavic and Russian games such as One Eyed Likho and The Mildew Children share this penchant for rewriting myths, but also for the prominence given to a nature as dark as it is dangerous, which isolates the individual and sometimes drives communities to the worst acts in order to survive.
The third part of folklore around the world will focus on games inspired by Hispanic, Francophone, and Asian cultures. It will also be an opportunity to explore titles where folk horror and religion intertwine, navigating the blurred line between religious or personal faith and monstrosity.