BOO! SCP-087 (direct download link only) is a Unity-based first-person horror game that involves walking down some stairs, through a random number of floors with random horrible noises and events occurring. It’s the kind of stairway you might find in a House of Leaves. Incredibly simple and far too dark but with sound design decent enough that I just became too nervous to carry on my descent and quit. But I’m a coward and perhaps you’re not. If you don’t know what SCP stands for in this context, read on.

The game might make a little more sense if you read this page at the SCP site first.

The SCP Foundation is a site that has been giving me the heebie-jeebies for a few years now, blending the fantastical and the horrific with the deadpan. It portrays itself as a catalogue of mysterious objects and places, all of which are secured and contained for the protection of the public. With redacted passages, missing details and photos, it’s of the ‘let’s pretend it’s real even though it clearly isn’t’ school of horror and to many people it’s probably the daftest thing they’ve ever seen, but as a keen advocate of daft things, I thoroughly enjoy it.

Mostly I just admire the imagination on display, although occasionally an entry does make me glance over my shoulders repeatedly and feel as if I’m covered in spiders, which seems to be my main response to any unnerving sense of otherworldly danger. I’d be absolutely useless in a crisis, particularly an otherworldly one. If I’m not feeling terrified and uncomfortable, my other response is to fall over, curl into a ball and remain completely silent.

When I played Amnesia, I actually considered making a home for myself in a prison cell that had become a temporary hiding place from some rotten wanderer in the dark. After a couple of hours of self-imposed exile, compacted into an area best described as a ‘dank cranny’, I’d convinced myself that I could really make the space work for me because I sure as taxes wasn’t going to leave.

The thing is, I love being scared and I love that I’m so easily scared. If terror was candy, my own bedroom at night would be the biggest candystore imaginable. So, the SCP site is the second thing thing provided for everyone to explore in this post and it’s a lovely shop selling pear drops and sherbert dips.

The third inclusion is a Steam group wherein fellows of sinister aspect discuss creating more games based on the SCP entries. There are a few linked and discussions about future projects. This one experiment is a little flimsy by itself, but a kind of interactive gallery of entries could be quite impressive. If you have any favourite SCP links of your own, do drop them in below. I’m sure at least some of you have heard of it before.