For almost a long as video games have been a thing, people have been producing horror titles to disturb, excite, and unsettle players.
From the simple text-based thrills of early computer adventure games like Mystery House through to the endearingly cheesy FMV delights of Night Trap and The 7th Guest and tense survival horrors like Resident Evil, and Silent Hill, the genre has constantly been evolving and changing since the medium first began, offering fans no shortage of ways to give themselves a fright.
And it is this long and multi-faceted history that serves as the exciting basis for a brand new documentary series, from the creative minds behind FPS: First Person Shooter.
Terrorbytes first crossed our radar back in February 2024 during its pre-sale period and piqued our attention thanks to its impressive list of talking heads, which includes everyone from the filmmaker John Carpenter to legendary game developers such as Hifumi Kouno (Clock Tower), Ken & Roberta Williams (Mystery House, Phantasmagoria), Jane Jensen (Gabriel Knight: Sins of the Fathers, The Beast Within: A Gabriel Knight Mystery), Akira Yamaoka (Silent Hill), Denis Dyack (Eternal Darkness: Sanity's Requiem) and Yoshiro Kimura (Rule Of Rose).
So, of course, as soon as I was able to check out the entire series, I jumped at the opportunity to give it a watch, interested in seeing whether it could possibly live up to my expectations.
What I ended up finding was an engaging and entertaining overview of the horror genre that will no doubt serve as an excellent introduction for newcomers, while also packing in plenty of fun anecdotes and details for more knowledgeable fans to chew on. The only downsides I could find, in fact, were the high price of admission (the digital download costing $27.99, while the standard Blu-Ray is priced at $79.99) and a couple of later episodes that seem to be a bit less focused than their counterparts elsewhere.
Unlike the team's previous effort, FPS, which was presented as one solid four-hour long block, Terrorbytes thankfully goes for a much more easily digestible approach, being divided up into five one-hour episodes, with each of these being dedicated to a different theme that aims to give you an insight into a particular aspect of the genre. The first episode, for instance, focuses on the world of survival horror, while episode two moves onto discussing licensed games. Episode three then moves on to tackle FMV titles, and the remaining two episodes cover the world of indie horror, and "cursed" and controversial projects.
Out of all of these, I found the first three episodes to be the strongest and most polished of the five, covering all the games and talking points you might expect, while offering up some interesting analysis of the different kinds of trends that appeared and disappeared over time. The latter two, meanwhile, were a little less engaging, which I ended up attributing mostly to both the enormity and complexity of the topics that they are trying to distill down into a clear and coherent story.
Indie horror, for instance, is such an intimidatingly large subgenre of gaming and doesn't necessarily have a widely-accepted "canon" of important or influential titles that is readily available to draw upon. This means that the documentary's creators had to make a lot of decisions in what games they included and what they left out. This makes this episode feel like one of the least objective of the bunch, with the selection of titles coming across as much less definitive than those that appear elsewhere in the other episodes.
I feel like the only way around this for the filmmakers would have been to dedicate more than one episode to the topic (something I'm secretly hoping they do if they ever decided to do a Terrorbytes 2), in order to give them room to cover more ground and ensure a wider spread of titles are covered.
Meanwhile, the cursed and controversial section attempts to cover several topics including video game's relationship to real world tragedies, video game controversies, and urban myths, which ultimately ends up feeling like too much for a single episode to cover.
Despite that, I enjoyed a Terrorbytes a lot and feel like it has a lot to offers fans of horror gaming and video games in general. In particular, I found it really refreshing to see some of the industry figures included not just being asked to talk about their own games, but being encouraged to comment on other titles too, that we typically don't get to hear them discuss — such as Hifumi Kouno discussing Outlast or Will Byles (Until Dawn) commenting on Phantasmagoria.
If the price doesn't turn you away, there's really nothing else like this available, and we're really hoping that another series is on the cards.
Terrorbytes is available to order now from the official Terrorbytes.com website.