The Nightmare in Hallow Falls Brings Silent Hill Inspired Psychological Horror to Dreams

When I saw the first presentation for Dreams at E3 2015, my first thought was, “I wonder how people are going to take this whimsical creativity engine and make it spooky.” Luckily, developers Media Molecule have a very hands-off approach to their community’s creations. You’d think that the creators of Little Big Planet would know first-hand that if you give people any kind of assets, they are going to make levels of dongs out of them. Or just recreations of Mario. Or Mario levels made out of dongs.

Fortunately, I’m not here to dive into all the dong-levels. I’m here to talk about spooky shit. The real potential of Dreams was as a tool for aspiring developers. There’s a huge barrier to entry for making games. You have to learn the engine, make assets (or buy them, which can be pricey), and after all that you still have to sell your game. Having an established platform with an easily accessible toolkit would open the door to millions of hopefuls that might otherwise be scared off. And if there’s one thing that the indie horror scene has proven, you don’t need a million dollars and a team of 100 to make something scary.

One developer that proves this point is rhroc91. I have no idea who they are, or why they didn’t go for a more pronounceable name. I only learned about them because of a post on r/HorrorGaming, which led me to the trailer above. Their newest Dreams title, The Nightmare in Hallow Falls, is clearly a Silent Hill inspired fan-project. The game is tagged with Silent Hill, they posted it in r/SilentHill, and their previous games are all explicit Silent Hill fan games. It doesn’t get more indie than this. And that’s the perfect kind of person to make this kind of passion project.

So if you have Dreams and want to check it out, you can find rhroc91’s creator page by clicking here. Like all Dreams games, The Nightmare in Hallow Falls is free. But you will need Dreams, which you can get here for $40.