Scratches is a point and click horror/mystery game that was originally released on PC in 2006. In the game, you play as Michael Arthate, a writer who acquired a Victorian mansion after his first novel reached some success. He hopes to finish his next novel in the bedroom overlooking the beautiful landscape, but upon arriving he is too distracted by digging through the previous owner’s belongings to get any work done. The previous owner, James T. Blackwood, was a collector of African tribal pieces and a prominent figure in the town of Rothbury. Arthate discovers that the Blackwood family had a dark secret involving several deaths, murder, and possibly madness, a case that still feels relatively unfinished and unsatisfying to Arthate, despite the finality of it with local authorities.
The game is very atmospheric and plays with the elements of gothic horror with a big, dark house, creepy books on African tribes, and letters to peruse that contain information about cannibalism and curses. The story itself is interesting, but after completing the game, there are still questions to be answered. In the Director’s Cut, you can play the final chapter titled The Last Visit (you return to the vandalized house as a journalist to answer some of the questions left over from before), but that seems to stir up more questions, even with the minimal exploring you are able to do. While the game hints at what has just happened at the end, you are left to your own devices to come to a conclusion.
On average, Scratches and The Last Visit take about eight hours to complete together. Exploring the house is fun and the tension holds throughout the game until the very end with minimal jump scares. There are two dream sequences that seem like filler and pretty cheap to find the things you had just done were not real, so you have to repeat tasks. There are several other tasks that you absolutely must do that don’t add to the story and you can’t get around with an alternate or partial part (a key is stuck in a door, so you do the newspaper trick despite having the key that fits, and you don’t retrieve the other key). Aside from those aspects, the game is pretty enjoyable and can still leave you jumpy, especially as a game that is now 10-years-old. The designer, Augustín Cordes, has been working on a first person horror game with Senscape, titled Asylum, that is expected to be released in 2016.
