Canceled ‘Paranormal Activity’ Game Lives On as Free Horror Experience ‘Playable Archive’ [Trailer]

The Paranormal Activity game may be dead, but some of its scares have survived. Brian Clarke, creator of The Mortuary Assistant, and publisher DreadXP have released Playable Archive, a free, self-contained horror experience you can download now on Steam.

As Polygon reports in its interview with Clarke, the release comes from the canceled Paranormal Activity project. We previously covered Paranormal Activity: Threshold and its first playable demo. Now, players who missed that opportunity can experience a portion of what DarkStone Digital was building.

The full game isn’t coming back. Instead, Playable Archive preserves a sampling of its gameplay systems and story as a small, found-footage-inspired nightmare, released just in time for Halloween.

The story follows a young couple renovating their first home. As they tear into the rundown property, they uncover traces of its hidden past and awaken something set in motion long before they arrived. Surviving means piecing together mysteries revealed through time.

Watch the trailer below.

“Releasing Playable Archive is really exciting, and it feels like some form of personal healing. After working for so long on something I cared so much about, it felt wrong to leave it sitting on the shelf like some cursed item,” Clarke said in the announcement provided to Dread Central.