It’s been a years-long quest of mine to find good alien abduction horror games. There are strangely few, and I’ve never really understood why. There are, after all, roughly a few dozen Lovecraftian horror games and as many or more Resident Evil-inspired experiences newly lurking each and every year in the deep recesses of Steam. And yet, whenever extraterrestrials are involved in games, it’s usually the case where we’re killing them with futuristic weaponry in action-oriented games like Halo, Mass Effect, or Resistance.
Even when they are the main antagonists in a horror game, like Dead Space, we’re usually equipped well enough to fight back, turning them into gameplay obstacles. These games can be fun, but they leave me wanting. For a long time, I’ve sought a good horror game where we behave as ants do to humans: completely incapable of understanding their intentions and powerless to stop them.
On itch.io, one such game is going viral, and for very good reason. Incident at Grove Lake is an equally terrorizing and mesmerizing microgame built around the unshakeable worry that, in the far reaches of the cosmos, there may be horrors we can’t possibly comprehend.