By Adam Smith on June 11th, 2012 at 7:00 pm.
Free fear for all! A Mother’s Inferno, created by seventeen students at the Danish Academy of Digital Interactive Entertainment in the fall of 2011, is a short, experimental first-person adventure built in Unity that is interesting despite its flaws. More variety in protagonists is an excellent way to diversify the horror genre, as promised by the trailer for Among the Sleep and where that game will put players in the booties of a toddler, A Mother’s Inferno casts them as a parent. A train journey with a son and mother goes to Hell, literally and rapidly, and plunges into Dantean depths. Available in browser or to download on PC and Mac. Teaser below.
As progress is made, each carriage contains fresh horrors, some surreal, others a little too blatantly ‘fires, horns and brimstone’ for my tastes. There’s an attempt at a control scheme that you might recognise from Frictional’s work, with doors having to be dragged open rather than just clicked into a new state, but the floaty hand with which this mother grips and grabs ended up reminding me more of Trespasser’s rubbery wrists.
If you’re up for a bit of horror do take a look though. I found it via the fine folk at Hookshot Inc where it received much more love than I felt for it. Perhaps you shall be equally pleased by its infernal charms.
11/06/2012 at 19:25 Hoaxfish says:
I got past the first thing with the mirror shard, then got stuck at the psychedelic chicken thing… not sure if it’s a bug or what.
11/06/2012 at 19:38 John Richardson says:
Wait for it to turn, grab it and stab from behind
12/06/2012 at 05:02 thebigJ_A says:
No, that’s not what he means. You can’t even walk to it. Once you go out the door you hit an invisible wall at the edge of the platform the chicken is on and can’t move forward.
It happened to me, too. Oh well, guess I’ll never know what’s beyond the chicken. (There’s a sentence I’ve never said before!)
12/06/2012 at 20:09 Baines says:
I simply YouTube’d a walkthrough video. Seeing the problems the guy making the video had at a few points, I feel it was the better use of my time.
11/06/2012 at 19:30 niuaas says:
http://yep.it/hwxypo
11/06/2012 at 19:31 niuaas says:
http://is.gd/PFQQs4
11/06/2012 at 20:35 wodin says:
fatal error..short and not sweet..
11/06/2012 at 20:46 mandaya says:
aaaaand for everyone going all WTF?? please consider this here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kübler-Ross_model
there IS more than meets the eye in this game, and it is maybe a little too clever for its own good.
11/06/2012 at 21:56 Gasmask Hero says:
Took an age to download, took an age to kill the first skeleton. Took slightly less time for me to develop a headache from the flashing colours. Took even less time for me to grow tired of being trapped beneath a ‘Denial’ sign with no apparent way forward. Took me no time at all to close the browser window.
Yeah, Kubler-Ross, the whole stages of death thing…yeah, clever, look, Denmark? Sweden does this whole thing a lot better. Go look at Norrland, for instance. And they didn’t need 17 people to do it.
12/06/2012 at 05:03 thebigJ_A says:
Yup, it’s broken.
12/06/2012 at 09:11 BjarneBiceps says:
it’s a school production, so only 17 people because 17 people applied, it has nothing to do with anyone choosing that this amount of people where the optimal or anything. 17 people stuffed into a room with the order to “work together” and we only had 6 weeks, from scratch to build this.
I’m pretty proud of our game, because our goal was actually not to make a nice little candy -play-it-safe-game. which we pretty much did.
and if you experience that you cannot move forward or parts are missing then that’s because you are playing the browser version, sometimes, on some machines and the unity webplayer messes up a few things and some parts doesn’t work. unfortunately. so download it instead :)
I’m just glad nobody mentioned the bad sounds yet ;)
12/06/2012 at 14:18 C71 says:
I registered just to ask this(since I can’t find anywhere to discuss about this..)
Is there any alternative ending(s)?
14/06/2012 at 08:05 Xerian says:
Yeah, hussah! Lets all bash a quite nice game given to us for free, made by 17 *SCHOOL STUDENTS* in about a month. YES!, lets bash it. Hate on it, hate on an entire country! DIE DENMARK DIIIEEE! So, look, person, alot of other people do gaming better than you, without complaining about free stuff, so just… Dont talk, okay? Thanks.
*Disclaimer: I’m danish, and utterly love being so, as we’ve invented a ton of stuff that most of the world would be fucked without.
13/06/2012 at 05:59 horseflesh says:
I actually love this game a bit. It’s got that great Scandinavian horror quality that can be so pointed.
Getting past the chicken isn’t that hard, that is presuming it’s not an error you’re facing. get behind it and grab it then chop it’s head off, then it “runs around like a chicken with it’s head cut off” and you have to avoid it’s front after it’s heads been removed, but so long as you do that you can just leave.
I suppose I like grim on occasion, this is something like that (no not into metal).
13/06/2012 at 11:06 essentialatom says:
I couldn’t get any sleep last night (and I freaked myself the hell out by watching Alien in the dark) so I just played this in that undead netherland of not-quite-awake-not-quite-asleep-but-I-really-must-go-to-bed-soon. Wonderful experience. I got stuck on a bit that I imagine is not too far from the end so I’ll look for a video that shows me what happens too. I like this little game very much. Time for bed.
Edit: Yes, I was on the final bit. Such life. Would like to see this in IMAX.