For those who enjoy hybrid hidden object/adventure games PuppetShow: Mystery of Joyville is casual gameplay done right. If you want to kick off the Halloween season right, then sit back, relax, and make your way through Joyville before evil completely envelops the town. Just one word of advice: you might want to play with the lights on.

More door locks to figure out? Check. More machinery to fiddle with, hoping to not blow up the place? Check. Annoying cell phone still telling you what to do? Check. Yet another really ticked off creature from beyond ready to rip you to shreds? Uh, why in the world did we leave that lovely, peaceful green vat again?

Ben Leffler continues his popular horror point-and-click series in Exmortis 3, when your time for revenge may come too late to do mankind any good. Introducing new abilities, new locations, and dripping with atmosphere, Exmortis 3 is exceptionally well made, but may be over too soon for some players.

Deeper, darker, and lots more bloodridden (thus living up to its title?), with Episode 2 the plot sickens. Will all the episodes eventually be strung together to make a cohesive narrative? Will the next episode be longer and more involved? Will you ever get out of this creepy lab? Only Psionic knows and he's not telling...

For most of us, waking up in a coffin isn't a great start to our day. The Dead Case is a ghoulish point-and-click mystery that puts you in the spectral shoes of a newly deceased soul, trying to find out how you got that way... and why so many others in town seem to have your exact same problem.

Pastel Games has just released a new point-and-click game, Morbid, designed and illustrated by Maciej Palka with programming, animation and puzzle support from Mateusz Skutnik. Although the artwork contained within is well-conceived and the atmosphere is enticingly moody, we weren't as impressed with the gameplay. Hard-to-find hotspots turn this game into a disappointing exercise in frustration. But give it a play and decide for yourself.

You wake, cold and alone, in a room lit only by a single, faint candle... that gleams off of the links of the chain connecting your leg to the wall. Uh-oh. From there, believe it or not, things only get worse. You are trapped in a house of horrors, and must solve puzzles and face supernatural terror in order to regain your freedom. Of course, there's also the matter of your murderous captor... where could he be? You might just find out.

Dracula 3: The Path of the Dragon exists within that journey from the reality of Vlad the Impaler, the madman the Count was based upon, to the myth of the best-known vampire, Dracula. It's a long, deep and satisfying adventure game laden with volumes of text, and a pleasantly eerie setting that's brilliantly illustrated.

The Malstrums Mansion is a retro point-and-click game with a surprisingly tense atmosphere, in the style of old Apple Macintosh adventures like Shadowgate. The heavily pixilated black and white graphics are chunky but lovingly crafted. If you love games that give you the creeps, or if you just like to relive the early years of gaming, this is a title you simply can't afford to pass up.

How close are you with your family? What if you received a letter from an uncle one night, asking for your help in investigating rumours of an ancient culture deep in the wilderness? Would you pack your bags and head out to help? You might. But the blood on the ground when you arrived might give you serious pause. How bad could things be, right? As befits the first chapter in a series of adventures, you're going to end this one with more questions than you started with, and maybe, just maybe, a prickling feeling of unease at the back of your neck.

In Crypt Keeper, you find yourself plunked down in the middle of a truly spooktastic graveyard. How and why did you get there? Not important. It's the middle of the night, and there are creepy noises and big ominous tombstones and omigosh you need to get out right now!

Ghostscape, a new escape game by Psionic, is just chock full of supernatural goodness. You play a veteran investigator of the occult who, upon hearing rumors of a haunted house, cannot stay away...and what a paranormal gold mine it turns out to be! Chairs and cups move as if grasped by some invisible hand, mysterious diary entries litter the floor, grotesque paintings adorn every room. And then, of course, there are the ghosts.

It is a classic horror scenario: the car broken down in the middle of the road, the swirling snow and biting cold, the beckoning light visible just over the hill. A house! Oh, thank goodness. But what's this? The lights are on, cheery fireplaces crackle in every room, yet no one is there. You call out a hello, but your voice echoes unanswered through the hall. How strange.

Monster Basement 2 is every bit as entertaining and well-made as the original; like the first game, it is extraordinary for its thought-provoking plot and tense, eerie ambiance. Patrick Majewski, from Godlimations, has spared nothing in bringing his tale of monster-against-man-against-monster to life.

Orphan Feast is a hilariously macabre action platformer with great design and story, created by Robox Studios for Adult Swim. You are the gruesome Creaky Tom who has been given the odious task by Oliver Twisted to snatch up children so they can be ground up into pies for greed and "culinary perversion." Probably not a game to play with the little ones. ;)

Monster Basement is a chilling room escape game that injects mood and atmosphere into what is often an almost apathetic genre. The motivation to leave is made all too clear; this room with its vampire flies, blood stained meat hooks, and grotesque abominations sitting in fluid filled beakers, scares the jebus out of you, and as you slowly work through a way to leave this terrible place, things aren't likely to get better either.

In Larva Mortus, you play a 19th Century ghost hunter (or rather, an "agent of exorcism"). Plow through monsters and demons with your trusty broadsword and an assortment of weapons, such as shotguns and flame throwers, to rid the land of supernatural evil forces.

An adventure game designed by Ben Leffler (of Exmortis series fame) to promote the upcoming Mars Volta release, The Bedlam In Goliath. The story is based on the experience of the band's sick guitarist, Omar Rodriguez-Lopez, who goes to Jerusalem for vacation and walks into a curiosity shop. Of course, when you walk into a curio shop in Jerusalem you're bound to leave with a demonically enchanted artifact, right?

Much interactive fiction requires a time commitment of an hour or two, and sometimes quite a bit more. Not so with the text adventure entries in the Commonplace Book project, in which each entrant took a line from a notebook by H. P. Lovecraft and spun it out into a game. This was an international competition, drawing entries in English, French, and Spanish, as well as a couple of graphical point-and-click adventures.

In this creepy point-and-click adventure, you take the character of Emily Mason, a real estate agent with a mission to find out why a particular house has been put on the market for an unfeasibly low price. It features sepia-toned location photographs and requires you to explore the house and its environs to discover an unsavoury secret. There are some brief moments of minor gore, so this game will not suit everybody.

Purgatorium is a short and creepy point-and-click escape-the-room game with some rather horrific graphic visuals nestled inside. If you have played either of Ben's other horror-genre interactive narratives, Exmortis and Exmortis 2, then you may already know what to expect. Created especially for Casual Gameplay.

Nightmare Escape is a horror-themed, room escape game created by Robert Mac Nelly. It combines a macabre and bloody setting with some tricky riddles that will scare you and puzzle you at the same time. Be observant, know your surroundings, and think literally to find the answers.

Flash developer and blogger LUT! has a few unique point-and-click adventure games just begging for your attention. They're short, moderately difficult, and one oozes style while the other tries to scare the ActionScript out of you.

From Ben Leffler of Australia comes this dark and foreboding tale of the macabre that will surely send chills down your spine. One part Flash point-and-click adventure and one part interactive narrative, Exmortis 2 is the sequel to the 2004 game of the same name. It continues the story one year after the events of the first tale came to fruition.

Deanimator is an elegantly simple, gorgeous and gruesome shooter that was inspired by one of H. P. Lovecraft's short stories, Herbert West: Reanimator, which is the gruesome tale of an eccentric young doctor with a penchant for experiments that involve reanimating the dead. If you have the stomach for survival horror, don't miss this one.

A recent addition to David Thorburn's Teagames.com website, Zombie Romp is a 2D side-scrolling melee shooter the likes of which are beyond this world. The object of this simple shooter is to stay alive by shooting zillions of zombies and battling a battalion of bats.

The Stone of Anamara is a creepy point-and-click adventure game, created by Gabriel Rodriguez, that spans multiple chapters. In this first chapter, you uncover the story behind the asylum doctor, Alexander Graves, and the mysterious illness of one of his patients.

Built in 1970, and deserted some time after that, no one has entered the house since the entire family committed suicide due to reasons unknown. Point-and-click your way through The House to unfold the mystery of what really happened to that fateful fictitious family. Best viewed alone, late at night, in the dark, and with the sound turned up. Not for the faint of heart.

NFH Propaganda is a creepy point-and-click adventure game created using a combination of Flash and a series of HTML pages. The result is highly reminiscent of the 99 Rooms, and as equally artistic: just replace all the graffiti with ghoulish animation and weirdness.

La Pièce is a point-and-click Flash game that is unusually common, strangely familiar, and yet offers a unique experience than other 'escape the room' type games.

Also from the Sony Pictures website, this Flash game was created to promote one of this summer's movie releases: The Cave. Featuring sights and sounds from the movie, the game did a good job of scaring the living daylights out of me. While at first it looks to be an innocent point-and-click adventure, a game with a more ambitious goal seems to tak...

I must have missed this back in 2002 at the theatres, and yet it makes for a spine-tingling, interactive narrative Flash piece now. Ghost Ship was a movie released in October of that year, and it was even made into a Flash game to promote the film. For those of you who love point-and-click adventures, and especially those who didn't care for how T...

And what would Halloween be without a little gore? Five Finger Fillet, from the now defunct 13th Street website of Universal Studios, is a Shockwave game to test your reflexes and your stomach. Be careful or you'll lose a finger. =p

A very creepy, very scary Flash adventure game from Ben Leffler of Australia. Exmortis begins with you waking up in the woods with a lump on your head and unable to recall how you got there. All you recall are the dreams. Regaining focus, you see a house up ahead and decide that shelter there is better than freezing to death in the woods. Think of the house at the end of Blair Witch and you'll be right at home.

From Sony Pictures comes this Flash point-and-click adventure to promote their new low-budget horror film starring Sarah Michelle Gellar of Buffy the Vampire Slayer fame. This mini-adventure is quite scary and will likely send chills down your spine, so turn down the lights and turn up the volume for maximum effect.

Viridian Room is a place you wish to escape from, but have you the soul to withstand the challenge? Muha-ha-ha-ha-ha! This point-and-click puzzle game was one of the very first escape-the-room type Flash Web games. Nicely done with eerie sound effects.