If you’re a fan of Warhammer 40k horror or mystery stories, you owe it to yourself to check out the ‘Fright of Your Life’ Humble Bundle. For $13 (£10.65) you’ll get eight games, including the excellent Stasis: Bone Totem, which is currently the closest a videogame gets to an Inquisitorial investigation.
To date, every Warhammer 40k game on PC or console has either focused on strategy: as in Dawn of War, Battle Sector, and Gladius; or action: as in Space Marine 2, Boltgun, and Darktide. But Warhammer 40k lore is far deeper than that, and the best Warhammer 40k books explore mysteries, horror, and the grimy underbelly of the Imperium of Man though tales of suspense and investigation.
If you want a hit of weird, chilling, grimdark mystery then I can heartily recommend Stasis: Bone Totem. I picked it up last month and played it through over the course of a week. It’s a well-written and shiver-inducing tale that feels like it could take place in the prehistory of the Warhammer 40k universe, some time before the Dark Age of Technology.
Bone Totem is a point and click adventure game that follows two deep-sea salvagers, Mac and Charlie, as they investigate a mysterious, abandoned rig. They’re haunted by the death of their daughter, and accompanied by her AI companion, a robotic teddy-bear called Moses. Naturally, things will become just awful for them.
Bone Totem is the third game in the Stasis series, but there’s no need whatsoever to play the previous games. The Stasis universe has many of the same grimdark horrors as Warhammer 40k. Biotechnology, cybernetic augmentation, indentured servitude, and human organ harvesting are all commonplace parts of Mac and Charlie’s world. So is religion. While there’s no God Emperor in Stasis, there is Cayne corporation, a combination Church and Mega-corp that maintains a cybernetic afterlife called the Nexus.
The plot of Bone: Totem sees the hapless explorers trapped underwater in a research facility, gradually unearthing things that are even more horrifying, even less comprehensible than the run-of-the-mill horrors that fill their daily lives. It’s not an official Warhammer 40k story, but it would fit perfectly into a Black Library novel.
The Fright of Your Life Humble Bundle is available until 6pm PT / 9pm EST on November 3, or 2am BST on November 4. Here are all the titles in the bundle:
- Stasis: Bone Totem
- Alan Wake Collector’s Edition
- Hidden Deep
- Tormented Souls
- Bendy and the Ink Machine
- Bendy and the Dark Revival
- Pathologic 2
- Moons of Madness
If you want an official Warhammer 40k videogame with a nuanced narrative, the Warhammer 40k Rogue Trader release date is almost here. You can check out our Rogue Trader alpha impressions for our thoughts on an early build of the game.
After more spooky recommendations for Halloween? Wargamer can recommend the best horror board games, best horror RPG games, but horror wargames, and the best horror comics.