Rock, Paper, Shotgun

Zombies, girls with long, dark haircuts, things that vanish when you try to approach them, flickering lights, mutants: horror games seem less and less interested in doing anything else. The tropes of the genre are wearing desperately thin – which is why Amnesia was so warmly-received. Despite indulging itself in a fair few horror staples, it worked hard on the overall unsettling feel, and less on fairground ride jumps. Another indie project, Tower22, appears to exploring similarly ways of roundly convincing us that everything is terribly, terribly wrong – take a look at the 10 month old but extremely impressive and increasingly terrifying trailer below, and then cross your gnarled fingers that its creator will finish and release this tale of dread and monstrosity inside a Russian towerblock (as designed by a German dev). But what starts looking a lot like City 17 ends up as something else entirely…
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I remember when Frictional released Amnesia, there appeared to be a lot of talk about whether a game so relentlessly horrible would have a broad appeal. Refreshingly frank about both potential and actual sales figures, the team said 100,000 copies would be a dream figure. What, then, would they make of four times that number? It can only be assumed that dreams have piled upon other dreams, Inception-style, for 400,000 units have been shifted. So, yes, they have their dreams and almost half a million people now have fresh nightmares. I, for one, am now so afraid that doors will not open in the correct direction for a hasty retreat that I must check every single one when entering a new building. Just in case.

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This one’s a little disturbing, so if you’re in a good mood then proceed with caution. The Guardian has spoken to a Chinese man by the pseudonym of Liu Dali who claims that during his spell in a prison in North-East China, among the traditional back-breaking labour of breaking rocks and “whittling chopsticks and toothpicks from planks of wood”, the guards also made him and the other convicts play massively multiplayer games in twelve hour shifts, in the interest of selling the gold online. I’ve never bought MMORPG currency online, but I imagine if I had I’d currently be feeling quite ill.
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So you know about Ludum Dare, the triannual make-an-indie-game-in-48-hours-using-one-word-as-inspiration competition? Well, did you know the Ludum Dare community also has something called Mini Ludum Dare? It’s the same idea, only it takes place many times a year and lets people play with rapid games development without the pressure and ceremony and whatnot. Which isn’t to say it doesn’t cough up some sharp stuff. I’m signing off for the night, but I give you Covetous, created for the theme of Greed. Sweet dreams.

Frictional, they behind the fascinating Penumbra series, have put up a teaser trailer for their next game, Amnesia: The Dark Descent. Well, they call it a teaser. It’s almost four minutes of game footage. It reveals that the game is going to work in a similar way to the Penumbras, first-person, but with a cursor on screen for interacting with the world. Which is splendid news, since it’s been my constant lament that no one else in adventure gaming has had the scrap of sense to copy this, or license Frictional’s self-made engine. It makes meaningful use of physics in first-person gaming, rather than leaving you feeling like some balloon-handed drunk crashing into everything. And you can lean. And get scared.

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At what? At a game about beating a woman. As in savagely, brutally, unforgivably, not as in “at badminton” or “in a round of cribbage.” It’s horrible, despite being nothing more than crudely looped video footage overlaid with a strangely undersized floating hand. As it spools hideously onwards, a voice demands you hit her harder, even as blood and bruises blossom gruesomely across her face. Horrible.

Shockingly, it turns out to be a Danish public service announcement about domestic abuse, designed to deter gentlemen who think of themselves as ‘gangsta’ from treating their girlfriends and wives with horrific, violent contempt.
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The hats weren’t actually the first RPS-mail. I returned from my trip to Relic and Gas Powered Games to find a parcel addressed to Rock Paper Shotgun from Koch Media. Inside it was a copy of Obscure II, which I thought appropriate as I’d never heard of it. The developers had fallen for that basic mistake of giving the game a name which can easily be turned into a joke for a bitchy review, but – no – really, I hadn’t heard of it. That fearlessness deserves some kind of respect. Also, I chatted to Walker, who had played and actually 79%-liked the original, saying it “rewards innovation over frenzy, and it seems only fair to do the same in return” (Or at least that’s what professional parasites Metacritic claim, anyway, as John couldn’t really remember anything other than he’d played it). Like its prequel, Obscure II is a Survival Horror game but rather than feeding the Romero/Tartan-Extreme-Import duopoly, takes the American teen horror film as its basis. Oh – and it’s got co-op too. I decided I’d better play it.

That “playing it” happened when I was somewhat inelegantly wasted on Saturday night at about 4am. The morning after, between bacon sandwiches, I talked Jim into joining me in some Survival Horror Co-op with reviewing consequences and actually took notes and stuff.

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