Legends World

Here's an interesting freeware game that mixes both survival horror and an open ended format that let's you "decide how scary" the game is. It's called The House and it was made by Blazefire Productions.

http://www.moddb.com/games/the-house/downloads

Played a bit of it and it can be quite scary at times especially when you find yourself up against ghosts or zombies.

It's also pretty interesting to note that the game predated Resident Evil 5 in its use of real time to really add to the suspense and danger your character is in/ For example: if you decide to read a document, the game doesn't pause the action so you can read at your leisure. You'd better be a fast reader or something scary might attack you while you're up to page 5.

While it's not a traditional point and click adventure, nor is it an RPG, the game uses a top down view so as you can enjoy some kind of advantage in knowing where some horrifying creature is coming from.

Looks like my kind of game.

Survival horror fans are no doubt going to enjoy this. Took me a while just to find this game again because it's hard to actually pinpoint games that use so common a term as "The House." Not even adding terms like "survival horror" or "freeware horror" did little to aid in my search.

Hopefully when guys hankering for horror themed games go up onto Adventure Legends after this game has been added they'll finally be able to enjoy this game.

As for the story, it's seems to be in the same vein as Edgar Allan Poe's Fall of the House of Usher in which the evil acts of its former owners caused the house to become cursed with evil.

Your character, being the adventuring sort, decides to investigate the house to investigate the validity of the claims that the house is really haunted.