14 Years Later, One of Gaming’s Scariest Ghost Stories Is Still Worth Playing

You can see yourself in a good ghost story, or at least part of yourself. It might be a hidden part that you fear, a reflection you don't want to see, or even a noble trait that proves to be your undoing. That recognizable element of humanity is what separates the classics like M.R.

James' stories or Shirley Jackson's more macabre tales from the likes of Stephen King. The House in Fata Morgana sits resolutely in the former category and ranks among the top eschelon of ghost literature. "But it's a video game!" you may be protesting.

Which is technically true, but The House in Fata Morgana is a visual novel: a book's worth of words paired with music and exquisite artwork. (That makes it an excellent horror game for wimps, too.) The genre has an occasionally earned reputation for padding out lengths with scenes of seemingly minor plot significance, like the excellent-but-oh-so-slow Higurashi: When They Cry. Those moments end up relevant later, providing depth through accumulated detail, though even with that eventual satisfaction,these visual novels often feel as if they drag on for longer than they need to. Not so with Fata Morgana.

It opens on a dark and stormy night. You seek shelter in an imposing mansion, intimidating as much for its size as for the absence of any life shining from its windows. You have nothing, not even a name, but a strange maid — the only soul in the home, or so it seems — invites you in and aids you.

As soon as you step foot into the manor, it all kicks off. The maid who takes you in offers to show you around the house and its history once you've recovered a bit from your ailment. No, not the story of its architecture or the dates of every refurbishment.

Each chamber she leads you to houses a chapter of the mansion's strange and unsettling past. There's the Jacobean era, defined by obscene jealousy, the kind that leads to hideous murder. One hundred years later, a serial killer makes his lair in the manor and falls in love with a young woman whose naive optimism can't alter the twisted trajectory of his future.