Stridulating In The Night: Killing Floor 2's Mutants

Dear readers, until today I had thought that the screaming and chattering noises spiders make in movies and video games were entirely fictional. I had intended to post a Killing Floor 2 trailer which introduces a few of its mutants, including the arachnoid Crawler, and say something clever about the "shared unnatural sonic vocabulary" of popular media. But, curious about the origins of this, I read around a little (looked on Yahoo! Answers) and discovered the world is a terrible place.

Now I know that some spiders do actually hiss and rattle ('stridulate,' we say--know your enemy), I find this trailer for the co-op FPS abhorrent and oh god why have the hairs on my neck pricked up what's that feeling is there a spider on me you have to tell me I mean it.

The trailer's an in-engine cinematic with in-game assets, so more about the grand dream of what these monsters are than what they'll actually be. Killing Floor 2's Clot which here seems so threatening will, I imagine, still be cannon fodder that vanishes in showers of blood and severed heads. The Crawler was sort of inept in Killing Floor too, but good grief here it's the most horrible thing and I hate it. The re-envisioning of the Fleshpound looks pretty good too, as do the two new monsters, in that 1990s-comedic-horror-movie-with-a-heavy-metal-soundtrack way.

Killing Floor's backstory of all these monsters being mutated humans feeds that cheery horror movie vibe well. All of its enemies could be played by people in costumes, with careful application of prosthetics and makeup from Tom Savini. They're low-fi and campy, and I like that. I'm quite keen to see KF2's take on the wacky final boss, the Patriarch.

Developers Tripwire haven't said when they plan to release KF2, only that it'll start in Early Access.