Forbidden Solitaire and 2 other creepy indie horror games

Some people would say the worst horror of all isn't visceral but psychological, and these three indie games definitely play in that creeping dread territory. Dead Letter Department, Desktop Explorer and Forbidden Solitaire each find something unsettling in an ordinary setup: a night shift data entry job, an inherited computer and a game of solitaire.

Dead Letter Department turns a night shift data entry job into slow terror

Dead Letter Department is about working the night shift in an innocuous seeming data entry job. You log letters that couldn't reach their destination for one reason or another. Slowly realizing why some of this mail couldn't ever be delivered, or perhaps shouldn't ever be delivered, is a lot of fun.

The work involves inspecting images of the dead letters, typing up all the text you can make out, and trying to decipher the text you can't as best you can. There is a "unique sense of prickling terror" in some of these discoveries that's hard to describe without spoiling the game.

The game definitely plays with the idea of you being stuck in your chair until the shift ends. If you play it all in one go, you'll be sitting in that chair for two hours, role playing the job at your computer. So turn the lights low and get ready for your shift at the Dead Letter Department.

Desktop Explorer gives the fake OS genre a twist with an uncle's old PC

Desktop Explorer is another entry in the burgeoning fake OS genre. These are games where you poke around a desktop, usually modeled on Windows. You rifle through folders, check out metadata, try to figure out passwords and so forth.

This one comes with a twist. You inherited the PC from your uncle, and it turns out he might have been into some pretty weird stuff. He was going down a rabbit hole of old user accounts, and let's just say that rabbit hole goes much deeper than expected.

It's a game best experienced with no prior knowledge at all. Still, the Steam page notes warnings for traumas of various kinds, grief and mild gore, so you know what you're getting yourself into.

Forbidden Solitaire shows how creepy a card game can be

Forbidden Solitaire is another game that plays with the potential creepiness of gnarly old digital media and abandonware. Its developers describe it as a card game "unearthed from a cryptic 1995 CD ROM that should have never existed."

You might be wondering how creepy solitaire could be. The answer is pretty creepy. This is about more than the cards. It has lots of grimy, blurry FMV, both in the game's stagy cutscenes and in extra clips, such as protests that supposedly happened when Forbidden Solitaire was originally released in this game world.

There's also some Inscryption style body horror here, like stamping gems into your flesh to power up, and a shopkeeper that's a disembodied eye staring from the wall. It's a creepy card game indeed.