Another year, another countdown, another birthday.  And I’m boxing it all up, tying a nice little bow around it, and turning the ripe old age of 32 with a celebration of 32 BRILLIANT examples of FANTASTIC video game box art.  Join me, won’t you?

Project Zero 2: Crimson Butterfly (2003) – For a game series that I think has been the most consistent in delivering effective and lingering horror, it’s a damn shame that the box art has largely never really lived up to just how amazingly terrifying the games contained within are.  But boy when it got it right, it got it bloody-well right. The image of the Twin-shrine maidens from Project Zero II is one of the most iconic and for mine terrifying in the genre.  Deeply disturbing, but oddly beautiful,  the box perfectly captures the duality of horror and tragedy of what I think it the best in the series.  It may rely on that old J-Horror trope of “girls with long black hair in their face”, but what an effective image that is, and one glimpse of the almost ethereal girls tied by a single red rope awaiting their untimely fates is enough to send me right back to the vivid horrors of Minakami Village

Miss previous entries in the countdown?