The iconic horror franchise gets its first-ever video game this august
In the 1990s, when I was a teenager, a particular kind of publishing saw a widespread boom. Stephen King had reached his peak and was becoming a literary reference – above all a genre reference – on an international level. It came out in 1986, the TV miniseries in 1990, and in Italy that whole iconic imagery began to take hold, the imagery that made him so deeply pop.
Creepshow was born as an anthology film in 1982, out of the shared passion that Stephen King and George Romero had for the horror comics of EC Comics in the 1950s – the originals by William Gaines: Tales from the Crypt, Vault of Horror, The Haunt of Fear. I discovered it years later, after I had already given my heart to King, and even though it was a product a bit too tongue-in-cheek for someone like me – a seeker of real dread and more visceral horror – I immediately appreciated the unmistakable homage to a certain kind of horror representation: the B-movie kind.
For King, B-movies are like the B-side of a record: that’s where you find the most experimental, most free-spirited tracks – and often the best hidden gems on the album.
So when I heard about the upcoming August release of the Creepshow video game, I got genuinely excited. I’m here not only to talk about this interesting new take on the franchise in game form, but also to dust off a certain nostalgic imagery – for anyone who, like me, fell for the charm of a particular kind of pop culture from those years.
Where Creepshow Comes From
In the 1950s, EC Comics – William Gaines’s publishing house – put out a series of horror comics that quickly became a cultural phenomenon, and then a social one. Tales from the Crypt, Vault of HorrorThe Haunt of Fear: short stories, grotesquely moralistic, introduced by monstrous narrators. Characters are greedy, vicious, petty – and their fates proportionally atrocious. No redemption. Only punishment, served with black irony and explicit illustrations. Parent associations did everything to shut them down. They succeeded, by the mid-1950s. But the seed was already planted.
Stephen King and George Romero were among the kids who read those comics in secret. Decades later, when they decided to work together, the homage was the most natural form the project could take. King wrote the stories, Romero directed them: in 1982, Creepshow arrived – an anthology film in five episodes that consciously replicated the structure, tone, and aesthetic of those banned comics. Saturated, unnatural colors; framings that mimic comic-book panels; the Creep who introduces each story. The film refuses to take itself seriously – and that is precisely its strength. Campy horror, the kind that does not apologize for its taste for the grotesque, has a freedom that more “serious” horror never quite allows itself. It presents itself to the world without pretense – or rather with only one, which is less a pretense than a wish: to entertain.
Also in 1982, a comic book of the same name came out: script by King, art by Bernie Wrightson – a cult illustrator already celebrated for a Frankenstein that remains among the most impressive graphic works in the genre. The comic was designed to accompany the film, but within the fictional narrative it works the other way around: it’s the comic the boy in the prologue is reading in secret, the comic his father tears from his hands. The real product was born after the film, but within the story it’s the film that grows out of the comic. A deliberately playful short-circuit, perfectly in keeping with the spirit of the franchise.
Two film sequels followed – the second with King and Romero still involved, the third with no creative authorship worth mentioning – and then a long silence, broken in 2019 when Shudder commissioned Greg Nicotero to develop an anthology series that picked up the original format. Nicotero, already known for his special effects work on productions like The Walking Dead, built a four-season show in which each episode contains two self-contained stories, introduced by a silent, puppeteering Creep. The series never reaches the heights of the film – few serialized anthologies manage to stay consistent – but it preserves the pulp aesthetic and the grotesque tone that make the franchise recognizable across decades. Skybound Entertainment, Robert Kirkman’s publishing house, launched in parallel a comics series inspired by the show, with original stories by different creators for each issue.
What runs through all of it – the EC Comics, the 1982 film, the Shudder series, the Skybound comics – is always the same thing: a horror puppet-show aesthetic, where the moral exists but never takes itself too seriously, where the blood is plentiful but the grin is even more so, where each story is a small contract between creator and audience: you already know it’s going to end badly – sit down and enjoy the ride.
That is exactly the pact that DreadXP and PHL Collective’s video game now steps up to honor.
The Game: Inside a Creepshow Episode
Announced for the first time in 2022 and then swallowed by silence for three years, Creepshow arrives on PC via Steam in August 2026. It’s the first official video game adaptation of the franchise – a fact worth underlining on its own: forty-four years of films, comics, and television, and the video game medium had never been explored.
Developer: PHL Collective, a studio with a long history in licensed games. Creative direction: Brian Clarke, founder of DarkStone Digital and creator of The Mortuary Assistant – a horror game from 2022 that built its reputation on a meticulous approach to atmosphere and on the ability to turn ordinary situations into something genuinely unsettling. Clarke is an interesting figure to mention: thirteen years in AAA studios like EA Mythic and Disney Interactive, then the choice to leave it all behind and make games alone, out of his own basement – exactly as befits a certain kind of artisanal horror. For Creepshow he returns to a broader context, bringing with him the sensitivity for detail and slow-burning tension that defined his earlier work. The publisher is DreadXP, an indie label specializing in horror with an already established history alongside Clarke, dating back to The Mortuary Assistant itself.
The game is a narrative point-and-click adventure – a genre choice that is anything but accidental. The point-and-click format lends itself best to stories told at a controlled pace, where interaction marks the beats of tension rather than resolving it through action. It is also, historically, the format of the most atmospheric horror games: the ones that prioritize building a sense of unease over the immediacy of a jump scare.
The structure mirrors the franchise: an anthology. There is a framing story – Danny and his friends dealing with the disappearance of Danny’s father, a day at the mall that takes a turn for the much, much worse – and two standalone tales that branch out from it. The connector between the stories is The Reader, a mysterious fortune-teller who functions as a diegetic narrator: the game’s equivalent of the Creep, of those grotesque hosts who introduced each episode in the EC Comics and later in Romero’s film. The contract with the audience – or in this case, the player – is the same as always: you know it’s going to end badly – sit down and enjoy the ride.
On the aesthetic level, the game openly declares its loyalty to the franchise: visuals inspired by pulp comics, black humor, controlled gore. Clear 1980s vibes in the music as well – a set of elements that says a great deal about where the game intends to position itself.
This is not refined psychological horror. It comes closer to staging an interactive horror puppet show, where the pleasure lies in recognizing the mechanisms as they pull you in.
Waiting for August
No exact release date yet – only the August 2026 window. I’m very impatient to play it, both out of personal nostalgia for a certain style and out of genuine curiosity to see firsthand what PHL Collective has managed to pull off. Judging by this very first impression, I’m fairly confident they’ve managed to capture the right mood.
We’re talking about a serious level of craft and a peculiar aesthetic and cultural sensibility – the kind that, together, can produce an experience. What could possibly go wrong?
In On Writing, King writes that creating is like water of life: it’s free, and those who produce it should simply invite others to drink. He’s talking about writing specifically, but he means something broader – creation itself, the act of shaping an idea and putting it into the world for someone else to inhabit. It’s the thought that returns every time we find ourselves in front of an indie project that has chosen to believe in itself all the way through. Give us something to drink. We’re here, and we’re thirsty.
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