She saunters casually, pulse slow and steady, as she meanders through the decrepit halls of Hotel Banballow. The stagnant air, suffocating like a thick fog, stands as a constant reminder of the incendiary fate that befell the manor, alongside the owner’s son, one Jimmy Banballow. Silence hangs heavily through the vacant corridors, an unending moment punctuating the loss of one life and the taking of many others, as the latest victim inches closer to her demise. With Jimmy’s beloved baseball bat clutched stiffly in her palm, caked in an absurd coating of viscera, Eriko Christy makes her way to an eventual dead-end, a one-way confrontation with the man behind the slaughter, Gale Banballow, eternally vengeful over the death of his son. The sharp hiss of a blowtorch begins to pierce through the veil, a siren song signaling a violent end…
Until the tension is cut by another crash test dummy jumping you, hitting you with sidekicks and an oversized wrench, escapable with only the finest of frame-traps and side-steps. Her foe maimed and brutalized, Eriko walks away, a blank stare on her face as she speaks her one-word eulogy: “Cool!”

Illbleed is as sincere as horror gets. Beyond the high-concept of a killer amusement park with a $100 million cash prize, nothing cuts to the inherent silliness of horror like Illbleed. For context, the 90s and early 2000s were an era of introspection and reflection with horror, where metanarrative and critique became the standard through which the genre could express itself. The innate need to satirize and comment on the tropes that solidified the genre itself became a trope, a voice strained by overuse. Thus, sincerity in horror, the wink-and-smile that formed the backbone of the medium, was shattered. However, as film moved further from the side-show roots of 70s and 80s horror, other formats became the realm for celebration of the old-school mentality.

Cue none other than Illbleed. Acting as reflections on the genre’s messy past, the game is split into six episodic stages, each representing different subgenres. Ranging from straightforward slashers to old-school creature-features, each level hinges on classic haunted house scares, pushing you into stories that feel like grinning asides to the audience, less a condemnation or remorse for the source material, and more an acknowledgement and appreciation for the works that inspired it. The jokes aren’t at the expense of classic horror, but out of a sense of love. Laughing with, rather than at them, gives this game a unique viewpoint in gaming.

When I say this, I look at the trend in modern horror games to match the expectation of modern horror films. This is to say, horror games lean toward the self-serious, the unhumorous, all in the name of truly terrifying the player, breaking down the façade of safety fundamental to any indirect medium by way of intense threat and malice. While this manifest sentiment is not a direct failing of the medium or genre, it speaks to the same cynical sarcasm that poisoned the well of horror: a refusal of the genre’s funhouse beginnings, a tacit refusal of the tactless, the tasteless, and the puerile: a refusal of the past, with sights set purely on innovation, truly original thought. Through this lens, games and their depiction of horror barely breach the surface of what the genre is capable of.

Illbleed, on a mechanical level, is flawed, stilted, and representative of a generation of design that has been overwritten and forgotten. But in that same sense, what better way to reflect on the works of the past than by incorporating your medium’s flawed past into that retrospection? What can tie a game to horror’s fraught, tangled past better having remnants of the past be part of the game design itself?

It’s hard to categorize Illbleed as anything more than schlock, a heart kept pounding with the screams of B-movie scares and cheap haunted house tricks, but there’s an intrinsic originality in the energy of the B-movie, of the midnight movie and the genre film. Not only as a work honoring a legacy of horror before it, Illbleed an original exploration on the humor and excess that created the modern horror movie in the first place, which in its own right puts it in a unique place in gaming, especially within the console release scene of the mid-2000s.

As a game bound to bounce off of the majority of players for very valid reasons, it’s difficult to just unabashedly recommend Illbleed as a must-play, or some major strive in the medium of gaming, because… well, it’s not. My love for it stems from an intensely personal place, as my love for this game stems from my love of slasher films, monster flicks, the realms of the gory and the gruesome. To love Illbleed is to love horror, as broken and chaotic as it can be.