These Filipino horror games come just in time for Halloween

MANILA, Philippines – Though Christmas decorations already light up the streets and malls play merry songs, another festive holiday is just around the corner: All Hallow’s Eve or Halloween, a holiday that, even if not as popular as Christmas for Filipinos, is still pretty much celebrated with costume parties and trick and treats within different neighborhoods across the country.

Besides the usual parties and knocking on doors for candies, a few Filipinos found another way to celebrate the spooky season: developing thrilling games that will surely have you at the edge of your seats.

Forgoing the usual Filipino folklore and scary stories of the Tikbalang or the Manananggal, developers of the games “Ligaw” and “St. Castro Plaza: Night Shift” decided on featuring real-life scary experiences of delivery riders and people working the night shift.

“We're all Filipinos, so we wanted to make a game that reflects our culture. While the Philippines has many scary stories involving creatures like tikbalang and tiktik, we wanted to do something different. We didn't use those supernatural beings as bad guys. Instead, we created a psychological horror story based on real-life experiences. It's about things or feeling threatened when nothing is really happening. This is something many delivery riders in the Philippines can relate to, especially during the pandemic.” John Rhys Pereyra of Raven Studios in told Philstar.com.

Raven Studios is the developer of “Ligaw”, a Filipino-horror game that lets players take on the role of a delivery rider as a client asks you to go inside their house to deliver a package. This while trying to make sense of strange images and weird noises while walking the games very Filipino depiction settings.

The game started as a thesis capstone project for Pereyra and his teammates John Kevin Fajemolin, Romel Nadong and Edrich Nambio for their degree in Entertainment & Multimedia Computing.

Similarly, the developers of horror-game St. Castro Plaza: Night Shift was also a school project, and the idea came from that experience of juggling school and work.

“We started with various ideas early in the development. Coincidentally, one of our team members was