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A new trailer for Tangiers has gone up, and it looks like it's finally got a release date for late November this year. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8s3F2P-OMLQ It's been a while since there's been any news, so just to get everyone up to speed, Tangiers is a stealth game set in a malleable world influenced by the surrealists, William Burroughs, J. G. Ballard, among others. You've got to sneak around and kill some guys, and the world will radically alter itself as you go about your business. Apparently one of the key mechanics involves stealing dialogue from NPCs and fashioning it into traps and diversions. (Yeah, it's not quite "horror", but we don't have a thread for literary-"weird"/avant-garde games, so here it goes.)
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Jul 31, 2015 00:08
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woodenchicken posted:Height of that trope is Cryostasis's Guy with a prison cell for a head. I thought it was a little too much. It was the slow escalation in enemy design I liked. You started off with frostbite zombies who, aside from one dude who was pretty chill about not having a lower jaw and could maybe see you through time , were pretty normal, then frostbite zombies with rifles, then you stumble across an ice-spider-man in a cargo elevator and then we start seeing guys with bits of ship stuck to them and bird-fly people and by the end of the game it's just the concepts of "heat" and "cold" battling with you in the middle. I am so happy I got a physical copy of that game. Haven't seen anyone selling it online in years.
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Jul 14, 2016 23:24
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Off the top of my head, there's Cryostasis (if you can find it) and maybe Prey, which should be coming out next year.
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Aug 14, 2016 07:08
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Accordion Man posted:FEAR 1 should have been like half as long as it was. I don't know about that; I liked FEAR 2, but nowadays I feel like the game is too hectic and busy for its own good. There's quite a bit of dead time interspersed between the firefights in FEAR 1, so there's always some time to catch your breath, relax a little, and then get caught by a spook. I'd also say that FEAR 1's audio diaries have the best presentation I've yet seen in a game. Most of the time when you get an audio diary in a game, it's some guy who read his diary entry for the day, appended it with a keypad code, then dropped his tape recorder about twenty miles from his house. In FEAR 1 they're all regular voice mail messages, and they're very naturalistic; at the beginning of the game in the water treatment plant, they're just the plant workers calling each other and saying things like "hey dude, I heard some explosions. You guys okay over there?" Once you get to the Armacham building, all the voicemails are two days' worth of conversations between various employees trying to manage the catastrophe you got sucked into. It all sounded like stuff people would be calling each other about in this sort of situation.
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Aug 16, 2016 00:24
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woodenchicken posted:Ouch. I hope they still got money left to run the studio another year. My understanding was that they'd gotten enough money during their initial campaign and afterwards that they could expand the scope of both the town and the steppe. In their press release, they even say that the game is currently more of a "reimagining" of the original now than an straight remake, so I suppose a delay like this isn't surprising.
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Aug 24, 2016 03:16
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Youtube spat a trailer at me for an indie project called Echo, which just hit Steam Greenlight a little while back. It's not "horror" horror, but the basic premise of wandering around through the alien palace from the end of 2001: A Space Odyssey while trying to not be murdered by yourself seems pretty horrific to me. There's a trailer showing off the basics of the gameplay. Interesting concept, but I'm not sure how long you could string it out. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i51x6-8GqkA
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Sep 5, 2016 21:51
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This talk of aborted horror game projects reminds me of Korsakovia, a HL2 mod The Chinese Room did between the original mod version of Dear Esther and the standalone remake. The basic idea was idea was that you were playing as Christopher, a man with a whole mess of mental disorders, chief among them Korsakoff's Syndrome, a condition that fosters amnesia and false memories. You spent the game wandering around Christopher's delusional apocalypse scenario, platforming and whacking dust clouds with a crowbar. While all this is going on, the action is narrated by snippets of counseling sessions between Christopher and his psychiatrist, who was assigned to him after Christopher was institutionalized after severely harming himself. None of this is made secret; indeed the best thing about the mod is the uneasy disconnected feeling that arises as you realize that what you're playing is not "real" in the context of the story, and you have no reliable way of understanding what exactly is happening to Christopher, particularly after the psychiatrist is also incorporated into Christopher's delusions. (The writing is also incredible. I don't really like The Chinese Room's work all that much, but Dan Pinchbeck has a way of channeling the broken prose of the mentally ill I've seen few healthy writers master.) Unfortunately, the mod is horrifically buggy, to the point that The Chinese Room abandoned it entirely. I struggled through endless crashes until the whole thing simply refused to work one day. I think the only way to actually get through the game reliably is to just load the maps in Source SDK. On top of that, it's a mod built around platforming in the Source Engine, which goes about as well as you'd expect.
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Oct 18, 2016 04:35
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dregan posted:Hey, Routine is apparently still a thing, and has a release Unfortunately, Tangiers has gone AWOL again. The guy making it said it would be coming out in the fall back in May, but he's abandoned his Twitter at the beginning of September and the Kickstarter page hasn't been touched in months. You know, the delays I can handle. I just wish someone would tell me something.
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Nov 2, 2016 00:46
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Skyscraper posted:I forgot that game existed! I missed out on the kickstarter. Did the twitter make it look like he was making progress in September? There were a few new screenshots and some vague insinuations about mental health issues, but nothing conclusive. For what it's worth, Kitty Horrorshow did some writing for the game a year or two ago, but I don't think she's in the loop regarding its progress.
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Nov 2, 2016 23:41
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In other horror-adjacent news, the guy behind Tangiers has resurfaced. As it turned out, his absence was the result of some severe personal issues that appear to have been sufficiently wrangled to allow work to continue on the game. Also, there was a demo/concept thingy for the Pathologic remake back in December called "The Marble Nest." It's janky, but it's basically a test build designed to show off what the main game will be like.
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Feb 6, 2017 03:04
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NecrovisioN is a classic of Polish eurojank, you philistines.RentACop posted:What was that game in development where the guy is running through a ww1 esque trench and some gangly monster comes at him at the end? Ah, had that trailer bookmarked! It's for a game called Ad Infinitum. Still in development it seems, but progress is apparently being made. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eprVKIH4Xxs There was also 1916: Der Unbekannte Krieg, but that was just an old student project that was promised to become a full game but never appeared. Anyway, that one had Braquean dromaeosaurs as the main monster.
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Jul 11, 2017 02:24
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My favorite joke to come out of Until Dawn is the fan theory that no one told Peter Stormare what emotions he should be portraying in any given scene, so he just decided to do all of them at once.
Marshal Radisic fucked around with this message at 21:19 on Jul 25, 2017 |
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Jul 25, 2017 06:50
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Crabtree posted:I'm still wondering if you can make a game about intentionally pushing Uncanny Valley with I guess really too real graphics or channeling early Pixar/ Spirits Within to make an engine that is scary even without the setting. drat, that just reminded me of something cool David Cage did! (Yes, really.) In Beyond: Two Souls, there's a scene where child Ellen Page gets in contact with the ghost of Willem Dafoe's wife and starts channeling her. For that scene, Quantic Dream apparently did mocap of the actress's face while she delivered her lines, then animated it with the character model for little Ellen Page, so there's this scene where this little girl's face suddenly starts moving and emoting like an adult woman's and it's a nice creepy little moment.
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Jul 26, 2017 20:04
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Fil5000 posted:I think the Suffering games came out recently on GoG, actually. Yeah, here: Does the USAF still own the rights to the franchise? I'd heard rumors years ago that they'd ended up in some ridiculous situation like that.
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Sep 16, 2017 17:01
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Xenomrph posted:USAF as in the United States Air Force?
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Sep 16, 2017 19:31
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s.i.r.e. posted:This is confusing, what? I talked a little bit about it in the Hellblade thread, and what I wrote will probably answer your question. Marshal Radisic posted:It's funny, actually. The game pulls that old trick of being completely honest, but just vague enough that you completely misinterpret what it said. The exact text that appears on the screen reads "The dark rot will grow each time you fail. If the rot reaches Senua's head, her quest will be over, and all progress will be lost." All this is borne out in the game; what isn't said is that the dark rot is Senua's personal metaphor for the fear she has of her mental illness (as well as a gameplay device to put stress on the player) rather than a permadeath mechanic. In any case, the game clues you in that something's off when the rot grows after you kill Valraven and Surt and starts advancing/retreating arbitrarily after multiple deaths.
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Sep 19, 2017 02:25
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You can just buy it from her itch.io page with Paypal. It's only US$2.99 at minimum.
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Sep 19, 2017 05:06
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Crabtree posted:Tomb Raider 2013 was 3 parts snuff film where Lara has to be brutalized throughout the entire plot and somehow not get rabies, lock jaw or who knows what kinds of diseases were in the poo poo-filled, rusty metal infested brown water that she dragged her constantly impaled torso through before climbing up a frozen mountaintop; and one part perfect hair simulator that kept looking beautiful despite how she hasn't bathed in like weeks. To me, it felt like the ultimate problem with the game was that they couldn't pitch the story as a pulpy, fun adventure story (even if it would probably suit the material better) because the public would just dismiss it as a pale retread of Uncharted with Lara Croft, so they had to go the gritty route, which had its share of problems.
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Sep 23, 2017 02:40
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Crabtree posted:I wonder how much you can make a game break itself to be unnerving before its either just goofy early 90s 3D models flying over the place or just going to make the program crash to desktop. Because you could probably get something out of Stealing directly from The Forbidden Room and trying out their artificial decay effects. See if you could make an FMV actually scary by presenting it as some lost or fractured vision.
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Sep 25, 2017 18:10
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Thanks for the review, Too Shy Guy. I replayed FEAR a few days ago as part of my annual Halloween game binge, and your thoughts pretty much sum up my thoughts on the game. Looking between it and its sequel, I find I appreciate the first game more nowadays. Monolith had trouble balancing the action and the horror, but they at least gave you some down time between major firefights so you could properly experience the spooks. FEAR 2, I found, was too busy for its own good, and I always found myself too amped up to be properly scared. One thing I really would praise the game for it the way it delivers its story. Audio logs were nothing new in 2005, but FEAR had the most naturalistic rendition of them I have ever seen in any video game. Every log is done as a voice mail message which you find on the course of your search for Fettel. The first ones you find, at a water treatment plant occupied by Fettel's goons, are pretty normal, essentially just people calling from other parts of the plant asking what all the noise is. The backstory only starts coming together when you reach the Armacham building, and as you listen to the voicemails of the employees you slowly put together a record of what happened over the last 48 hours. (In retrospect, I think having some sort of journal feature would have helped players keep track of what's going on.) I also like the fact that, despite being a superhuman killing machine, you're always two steps behind everyone else. You never quite know what's going on, everyone seems to know more about you and the situation than you do, and you never really succeed in completing your mission objectives. It's a subtle way to add a little unease into the power fantasy. Finally, I've noticed another little J-horror nod beyond The Ring in the first level. Right above you on the roof where you first meet Fettel, there's a big ol' water tank. Given the later revelations in the game, I'm pretty sure it's a very subtle Dark Water reference. Sakurazuka posted:Playing A Machine For Pigs now and lol I'm glad The Chinese Room learned a modicum of subtlety in between that and Everybody's Gone to the Rapture.
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Oct 13, 2017 20:44
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Too Shy, I was wondering if you had any plans to do a write up for Observer? I played it for the first time about a week ago, and while it's made by the same team that made Layers of Fear, it definitely feels like an improvement on that game. For starters, the narrative is tighter: you're a detective in dystopian cyberpunk Krakow who's stuck in a locked-down tenement block looking for his estranged son, which gives you both a clear objective for the entirety of the game and an excuse to poke around the building. Secondly, it integrates the scares into the story better than Layers of Fear did. The whole conceit of the game is that your detective character is an "observer," someone who can plug themselves into other people and run through their memories. Naturally, because this is dubious cyberpunk technology being used on people who are usually dying, the memories are these weird, glitchy places full of the reality-shifting mechanics the developers love so much. It starts out pretty straightforward, but naturally it gets more unsettling once your character's memories start bleeding into the sessions and his sense of reality begins to break down. The later half of the game has some "sneak around the unkillable monster" sections, but they're probably easier to deal with than some of the other game you've tried. In the most of them the monster just patrols around in one big rectangle, it's easy to see where it's looking, and your only goal is usually to do one thing and then get out of the room. For what it's worth, I found Layers of Fear wore out its welcome well before the end, but enjoyed all the time I spent with Observer.
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Oct 18, 2017 20:44
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Crabtree posted:Do the likes of the new wolfensteins count as a form of horror insofar as someone being in a horrible and monstrous society at large? I mean yeah, still shooter about killing nazis, but its brutal to the protagonist in such ways that if you went a little bit farther with it you could probably make something of a horror game that doesn't rely on the supernatural to create a scare or an oppressive environment. Just ordinary people letting many suffer just so they could live in comfort. As an aside, I must admit that Blazkowicz's terror campaign also unnerved me a bit more than most people. Sure, MachineGames did carefully omit any civilians out of the levels with major attacks, but when that car bomb ripped apart the London Nautica and when that spindly torque shredded that troop train and span of the Gibraltar Bridge, I wasn't exactly feeling like a hero. (I suppose it doesn't help that I stubbornly kept thinking of my enemies as "Germans" rather than "Nazis" through the entire game.)
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Oct 29, 2017 04:29
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Sakurazuka posted:Started Observer, it's cool I can just wander around the building and find weird stories going but drat the PS4 version runs like crap By the way, does anyone think "Hey baby, I'm home," could become the "get out of here, stalker" of the 2010s?
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Nov 6, 2017 15:31
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I think this is the guy. The channel is barely organized, so you'll have to do some poking around, but you'll find three recorded streams for Outlast 2 if you scroll through the uploads library. EDIT: drat, beaten. Ignore me!!!
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Dec 11, 2017 03:16
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Oxxidation posted:Mass automated blood sacrifice to hold off the calamity of the next century. The Machine decides that’s easily doable if absolutely everyone just dies right now. For myself, I ended up tuning out of the game with the pigmen invasion. I'd gone into the game believing it to be a standard horror setting where this one little piece of the world is weird but everything outside it is fine. Two-thirds of the way through, I stumble outside and find late Victorian London being invaded by man-beasts during a suspiciously snow-free New Year's Eve night, and that Mandus has apparently been feeding hundreds of people into his magic murder machine for a year and no one noticed somehow. I'm normally pretty liberal about suspending my disbelief, but these revelations combined with the hectoring tone of the narrative to turn me off entirely. Regarde Aduck posted:I'm one of the very few people that liked AMFP. It wasn't scary and failed as a horror game but I enjoyed it as a "thriller" and fairly interesting walking simulator. I liked how the fact the guy had invented and built a nuclear reactor was a background detail. I liked the Orgone and Vitae alchemy and the caustic nature of the ingredients on body and soul. I liked how once you got to the heart of the machine space-time (or just his mind) started to break down. I got the impression that the machine he built in his madness was a kind of technological equivalent to the supernatural temples of other dark places of the weird elder beings that Alexander may or may not have been. He built a fringe-science-temple to the dark gods and that's cool. And yet, with all that being said, I did like all those parts of the game Regarde Aduck mentioned, particularly near the end when we start wandering through increasingly abstracted mechanical spaces where no human has ever set foot, and the denouement at the steampunk-Aztec temple. It's those things that have put the game into my yearly Halloween rotation, even if the narrative still sets my teeth on edge.
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Feb 1, 2018 02:20
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I thought that Christoph Frey's The Space Between had a good handle on depicting sexual anxiety, and the most salacious image in that game is a woman standing behind a sheet with two holes cut out of it.
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Oct 25, 2020 19:53
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CuddleCryptid posted:I appreciate the surety of purpose of someone who failed on wendigos that hard and then over a decade later figured that film was just the wrong medium and went back for a second stab. The man likes his wendigos. There was also his film The Last Winter from 2006, which is a horror movie set at an exploratory drilling site in Alaska where the crew start being picked off by...ghost wendigos, more or less. You cannot underestimate how much Larry Fessenden loving loves wendigos.
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Nov 2, 2020 06:40
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Len posted:SCP predates NoSleep and Southern Reach Trilogy I think and the FBC is literally just the SCP Foundation Remedy's even gone as far to say that the SCP wiki was a big inspiration, and a lot of the collectible files describing contained objects are written very much like the earliest "Series I" articles, focused on a short story about an ordinary object that does something spooky. (More recent articles tend to be more narrative-driven, esoteric, unreliable or meta-textual, and burdened with their own canons. Whether that's good or bad is up to you.) Basic Chunnel posted:Was the whole "the building is an artifact too" bit in the SCP lore? I can't remember. Containing anomalies inside anomalous structures is a bit of a cliché for the Foundation, but I can't for the life of me think of an example offhand.
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Mar 10, 2021 05:14
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Bonaventure posted:remember the steve buscemi villain from RE5? i forget his name completely. it began with an I? Irving, the man who looked a few chromosomes short a genome?
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Apr 21, 2021 18:47
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Morpheus posted:The best description I've ever heard for Ethan Winters is 'what if you gave Griffin McElroy a loaded gun.'
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May 26, 2021 16:50
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I'd also add Cryostasis to that list, though the exact nature of the delusional world you explore in that game is kept deliberately unclear. You can point to possibilities - Alexander Nesterov's dying dream, the Captain, the First Officer/Chief Engineer/Warden, the concepts of "hot" and "cold" themselves - but there's not enough evidence that points to any ultimate interpretation.
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Jun 24, 2021 02:51
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TheWorldsaStage posted:Downpour also lacked Akira Yamaoka, depriving it of the one thing that could have made a playthrough worth it in the slightest. It lacks Akira Yamaoka and Masahiro Ito; the monster design in Downpour is sadly very generic. I mean, the Pyramid Head-equivalent monster is a big guy with a poncho and a gas mask who swings around a cinder-block hammer; alright as a generic antagonist, but not very memorable.
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Jul 4, 2021 07:26
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Professor Wayne posted:They're updating Isaac's name to reference more hip sci fi authors. Meet L. Ron Dick. DLC campaign starring Issac's old frat brother Jim Tiptree, Jr. (Also known as "Big Al" to his friends.)
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Aug 24, 2021 00:40
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In a sense Issac did "speak" in DS1 in an indirect fashion. If memory serves, in the missions objectives submenu there'd usually be a paragraph of Issac's thoughts and reactions to the most recent story event, as if he'd been jotting notes down. Most players missed it since there wasn't really a need to go to the objectives submenu, but it's always had me wonder if Issac was going to be fully-voiced in an earlier iteration of DS1, but someone changed their mind later in development.
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Sep 1, 2021 03:23
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Section Z posted:Also couldn't you see Isaac's face for a few moments at the very start of the game, but only if you stopped to rotate the camera? Granted it has been a loving eternity since I played dead space so I could be misremembering that.
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Sep 2, 2021 04:52
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veni veni veni posted:It's funny that they changed his look in every game.
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Sep 2, 2021 08:45
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Pulcinella posted:Definitely feels like they were able to nail the visuals years ago but just have had no idea on what to do for the actual gameplay. (Seems common in Indie games. Sable ran into the same problem).
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Dec 14, 2021 19:22
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Pope Guilty posted:Video games needed the equivalent of Laurence Fishburne saying "We're leaving." in Event Horizon
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Aug 19, 2022 22:51
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Consummate Professional posted:Did Isaac really have 0 lines in the original? That was so long ago lmao I think a Visceral dev showed up in an old LP thread and said that they were going back and forth on whether Issac should speak in the first game. They decided to keep Issac silent for the first game, then after release they decided they'd made a mistake and had him talk in the sequels.
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Feb 5, 2023 21:23
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Oxxidation posted:the way dear esther’s narrator begins to mix his metaphors in a delirious fugue is still one of the most impressive bits of writing I’ve seen in a game even if it stretches the definition of the medium to its limit Dan Pinchbeck has a particular talent for replicating that particular type of broken syntax and obsessive repetition produced by disordered thinking. Aside from Dear Esther and a few diary entries in A:MFP, the only other time he really brought it out to shine in was in Korsakovia. The mod itself isn't really playable these days, but TCR put the script up for download. Come to think of it, Korsakovia had an interesting conceit I don't think I've seen any other horror game replicate. The game starts with the main character, Christopher, having been institutionalized with severe delusions. All the gameplay takes place in Christopher's apocalyptic fantasy delusion, while his interactions with his psychiatrist in the real work take the form of voiceover along with his internal monologue. However, the game never leaves the perspective of the delusion, creating this tension where you're walking around this world you know as a player is "fake", while being barred from ever seeing the "real world" outside of Christopher's head. Naturally, all this compounded as the game progresses and Christopher starts incorporating his psychiatrist into his delusional reality as another character. The game was mostly a jumping puzzle in the Source engine, so it was never much fun at the best of times, and engine updates kept breaking it, but I'm still disappointed TCR decided to abandon it. It was a very interesting idea.
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Nov 3, 2023 04:13
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