Urban legends have always enthralled me.
There's something about tales passed down through the years, shared in hushed tones among friends, or hidden in online threads that just feels more unsettling than any Hollywood horror.
One thing I've learned is that Asian urban legends are on an entirely different plane, and there's no convincing me otherwise.
Western horror tends to be about slasher killers, haunted houses, and demonic possessions. But here in Asia, the horror is multi-dimensional, steeped in tradition, family, and the idea that no matter what you do, some things cannot be escaped. Some things aren't meant to be solved. Some spirits aren't meant to be disturbed. That's the kind of dread that lasts.
And that's precisely what I got when I played Tai Ương (The Scourge) and Thần Trùng (The Death). It felt like peeling back layers of reality in both games, except instead of revealing answers, they only led to more questions. Every clue, every detail, was a link in a larger chain.
The Scourge opens with the protagonist, a young man who recently lost his family, trying to uncover the truth behind his parents' and sister's deaths. But it's not as easy as just solving it. The answers are buried in his dreams, forcing him into a loop of lucid dreaming where reality and nightmare blur together. That concept alone was enough to keep me interested.
I've learned enough about Vietnamese folklore (and broader Asian beliefs) to know that dreams aren't just random thoughts while you sleep. In many beliefs, they're a way for the dead to communicate, warn, or even drag you into their world.
One of the first mechanics the game taught me was checking all the clocks in my house before going back to sleep. If the clocks weren't synchronized, things would go wrong. This freaked me out more than I expected because this is a real Vietnamese superstition. Time being out of sync is believed to be an omen, a sign that the dead are messing with your reality.
Sure enough, the first time I didn't check properly, the dream took a turn for the worse. My apartment wasn't the same. There was an extra door. The lighting felt wrong. And then, I heard her. A little girl counting. At first, I didn't know what was happening. I walked closer, trying to see what she was doing. She was playing hide and seek. And when she got to 100?
"Found you."
In Vietnamese folklore, there is a belief known as Ma trốn tìm, which translates to Ghost Hide-and-Seek. It's the superstition that playing hide-and-seek at night can attract spirits, and if a ghost joins the game and finds you first, you might never be found again.
The game didn't give me a chance to process. The second she finished counting, the screen glitched, my controls locked up, and the world twisted around me. Suddenly, I wasn't in my apartment anymore—I was in a long, endless hallway filled with doors. Some were locked. Some had whispers behind them. One had my own name scratched onto it.
A theme that kept coming up in The Scourge was debt. Not just financial debt, but karmic debt: the idea that your family's sins don't just disappear when they die.
One document described a loan taken in gold. Another spoke of a ritual meant to erase debt—but instead of money, it required a blood sacrifice. A live chicken's blood drained into a bowl. A plate of sticky rice as an offering. The personal belongings of the deceased were burned to close the debt.
If the ritual wasn't done correctly, the debt didn't disappear. It was transferred. To the next family member. And the next. Until there was no one left to pay.
That's the moment I realized I wasn't just being haunted; I was being collected.
While The Scourge was about a debt that never ended, The Death was about a death that refused to be forgotten.
I started standing in the rain, holding an umbrella that barely kept the cold away. My apartment was ahead, dimly lit, but the street was empty. There was a deathly silence—no people, no distant traffic, just the occasional drip of water hitting the pavement. It already felt wrong.
I stepped into the building, and that's when the ritual began. The game slowly turned my normal, everyday life into something horribly unfamiliar. At first, it was small. A chair would move when I wasn't looking. A door would be locked, then suddenly open on its own. The lights flickered, but never all at once—just enough to make me question if I had imagined it.
Then, I found a small offering plate on my doorstep—a bowl of rice, three incense sticks, and… a coin. I recognized the ritual immediately. It was an offering for the dead. Except, I was the only one living in this apartment. Then I saw her. A woman in white was standing at the end of the hallway, her back turned. I knew what that meant.
A woman in white often symbolizes a ghost who died tragically and can't pass on. If she turns to look at you? It means she's taken an interest. I froze. The game didn't let me move. The whispers grew louder. Then, the screen went black.
When it came back, I wasn't in my apartment anymore. I was in a funeral home. And the casket? Had my name on it. The deeper I got, the more I realized that this wasn't just a haunted building. As it turns out, the previous tenants of the apartment were all dead. It was a trap for souls who hadn't been properly sent off. The rituals had been rushed.
The ghosts still hovered nearby, and I had no way of knowing who—or what—was watching me. In Vietnamese culture, there's a terrifying belief called Trùng tang (Death Demon). This is when multiple people in a family die in quick succession. It means one of them was taken at the wrong time. Their soul gets stuck, and instead of moving on, they start pulling others into the afterlife with them.
Throughout the game, I kept finding crumpled money notes. At first, I thought they were just collectibles. But then I realized they were joss paper. In Vietnamese funerals, joss paper is burned to send money to the dead. But if you find it lying around? It means the dead haven't received it yet.
All along, I was in a place where the dead were still waiting to be paid.
I can talk about it forever, but it’s still not the same as actually playing these games. You might think that’s all there is, that the worst has been revealed, that the horror has reached its peak. That’s just what I’ve decided to put out there. The rest of the horrors are yours to uncover.
As someone who has always loved horror—but never been a fan of cheap jumpscares—this kind of horror made me love the genre in a new way. It's not just about fear. It's about understanding the weight of belief, the stories passed down, and the things we can't explain.
It makes sure you don't just fear the unknown—you start to understand why it was never meant to be known in the first place.