(Image credit: Chop Chop Games)

Halloween is the time to linger in the dark a little longer, and John Kenn Mortensen is the artist to guide you. His illustrations teem with grotesque creatures, scraggly line work, and unsettling oddballs: the kind of thing you glimpse out of the corner of your eye, then need to stare at and see more of.

“In the dark there are secrets and things to be explored,” he says as he explains his approach to the art and creature design you'll find in FLASK. “I see my work as a dark room, with a door slightly ajar at the end, where a little light comes in.”

That ajar door has made Mortensen a go-to name for the macabre. Now he’s opening it onto video games with FLASK, a dark fantasy roguelike deckbuilder from Chop Chop Games.

Inspired by Jim Henson’s 1986 cult classic Labyrinth and the thrash metal of Slayer, FLASK mixes gruesome fantasy, medieval imagery and black humour.…