I recently asked on Twitter for some followers to recommend some good indie horror games to try out, and one of the suggestions was The Cursed Forest, a horror game developed using CryEngine 3 and released back in January 2014. I’d actually heard of this game already, having seen it on a few indie gaming sites, but it looked really cool and, for whatever reason, I never bothered getting into it. So I finally give it a whirl.

The game’s plot basically has you stranded in a cursed forest after getting lost while driving, and, as you soon discover, you’re being watched by a strange, evil entity. Exploring the forested environment yields clues to what happened in this area back in 1967 (things are in surprisingly decent shape for a place no one has lived in for 47 years, but I digress) – events which have brought an evil spirit into being that needs to be quelled. The solution, in the style of Slender Man, is to collect the bony remains of a deceased girl’s body and some objects needed to perform an exorcism ritual in order to bring about the dismissal of this evil spirit.

The game looks lovely in its rendering, and the developer did a good job of putting some surprising jump scares in there. The forested area is well-crafted and gives a good sense of loneliness and dread, and so I find this game quite fitting for something to play this time of year.

The game is a little buggy and seems slightly memory leaky, but that’s okay considering it’s completely free. If you’re interested, you can download it right here.