Cancelled games. It’s a sad fact that they’re a thing. The developer might get shut down, its ambitions may outreach their available resources, they might even decide to move on to another project — whatever the cause, over the years we’ve seen a lot of horror games get canned. Some probably won’t be missed. Others certainly will. This list is dedicated to a handful of horror games that had definite potential before they were scrapped.

No, Guillermo Del Toro’s inSANE isn’t among them. I’m trying to keep an ember of hope alive for that promising horror game, despite numerous signs pointing to its seeming transition to the dreaded development limbo.

Read on for my list of six cancelled horror games that could’ve been amazing!



Sundown

Speaking of promising Lovecraftian horror games from the mind of Guillermo Del Toro (Hellboy, Pan’s Labyrinth) — first up, we have Sundown. Announced back in 2006 when the Wii was dominating the console market and the PlayStation 3 still cost $600, Sundown was planned as a collaborative effort between the director and developer Terminal Reality (Bloodrayne, The Walking Dead: Survival Instinct).

It was to be an epic — i.e. expensive, with a potential television series and/or movie tie-in — series of games set in a post-apocalyptic world infested with zombies. Apparently, it was also very similar to Left 4 Dead. Unfortunately, Del Toro had “bad experiences with the video game industry,” so he dropped out of the project.

It sounds like this game may have served as inspiration for Del Toro’s latest effort, inSANE, which also may have been cancelled (may have).

Nightmare Creatures III: Angel of Darkness

I loved the Nightmare Creatures games, and despite coming to the PlayStation in 1997, the original still holds up remarkably well today. The combat is particularly good and the series still has some of the coolest monsters I’ve seen in a game, especially from that era.

Sadly, its sequel failed to find the audience needed to make another game worth it for the now-defunct developer Kalisto Entertainment. The plan was to release a third game titled Nightmare Creatures III: Angel of Darkness that would have been set in 19th century Prague and followed a heroine who could merge with her raven to become a beast capable of battling Adam Crowley’s monsters.

Once Ubisoft took over the project they decided to start fresh, then in 2004 something went awry or someone lost interest and the game was scrapped entirely.