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2 months ago
Feature: Scream if you wanna go faster
Four developers of scary games explain how to make scary games very scary indeed
The inspiration for Alien: Isolation came from a simple thought experiment: what if somebody let a lion loose in developer Creative Assembly’s office? “I’d get behind my desk and make sure it wouldn’t see me,” says the game’s creative director Alistair Hope. “Then, you’d need to get to the fire escape. Maybe I’d move desk to desk and distract it. If you are confronted by…
5 months ago
If you have not bought the Amnesia first-person spookers intentionally, inadvertently acquired them in an old bundle you don't really remember buying, nor grabbed them when they were free in January good news: both Amnesia: The Dark Descent and Amnesia: A Machine For Pigs are free for keepsies right now on Steam. What's changed since the last giveaway? I still have not finished either of…
7 months ago
Hey, come here a second. I want you to stare at this dank room full of eerie machinery. Really give it a good stare. Drink in the atmosphere, maybe play with some of the meatblobs, think about how small we are in the universe, andBOO! Liked that, did you? If you quite like a spot of spooking with cosmic horror and science gone meatwild, you…
10 months ago
Feature: Is #1 A Jump Scare?
To compile a list of the 25 best horror games on PC is to look into the void for so long that the void not only starts to look back, but shakes you by the hand and takes you out for coffee. It is to fight with monsters until you become a monster and then go on a European railtrip with the other monsters, and…
1 year ago
Feature: Never forget
Have You Played? is an endless stream of game retrospectives and PC miscellany. One a day, every day, perhaps for all time. I have a limited patience for scary games. I enjoy a surprise jump-scare here and there, but I struggle to enjoy an incessant barrage of them making every step an anxiety-inducing moment. And yet, wow, I love Amnesia.
Feature: Fear is contagious
Have You Played? is an endless stream of game retrospectives. One a day, every day of the year, perhaps for all time. Before they struck (presumably cursed) gold with Amnesia: The Dark Descent , Frictional Games released a trilogy of shorter first-person horror games under the title Penumbra [official site]. The first of these, Overture, was a bit wonky, and the third, Requiem, completely lost…
3 years ago
Feature: Abandon all hope
These are my personal Edwin Droods. Stories that I've failed to finish, for one reason or another, and that are left suspended. In the manner of somebody reversing out of a relationship like a heavy goods vehicle, trundling slowly and beeping nonchalantly, I'd like to say to the games included: “It's not you, it's me.”
While Frictional are exploring the depths of consciousness in their latest creep-fest Soma, other developers are continuing the story they began in Penumbra [official site] all those years ago. A team going by the name CounterCurrent Games released an unofficial total conversion going by the name Necrologue last Halloween and this year they finished the story with the fantastically-named Twilight of the Archaic [official site].…
Feature: Cartesian BOO-ality
Five years ago, Frictional released Amnesia: The Dark Descent, a horror game that made us afraid of the water. That was five years ago. Now, with SOMA [official site], the studio have switched from gothic castles to science fiction and they're taking us right to the bottom of the ocean. I've faced my fears and here's wot I think.
Next week, Frictional's Soma [official site] will finally be available. Amnesia: The Dark Descent is five years old and surely everyone is ready for another round of the first-person frighteners? I've already played a fairly large chunk of the game and will have a review ready for you before launch, so you can trust me when I say that the "story trailer" below has been…
That's the cheese of Yuri with his mind-controlled squid and the whine of you whimpering as horrible things stalk you through the dark, to be clear. Point is: you can now download and keep forever Westwood Studios' olde RTS Command & Conquer: Red Alert 2 and Frictional Games not-so-oldish first-person spooker Amnesia: The Dark Descent and not in that way, you little urchin. RA2 (plus…
I'd presumed Frictional's upcoming SOMA was basically just sci-fi Amnesia: the night is dark and full of terrors, and all that. Turns out there's at least one major change to formula: you get to talk to people. And you know things about those people that they don't know themselves. And it's horrifying.
4 years ago
We're seven years old! (Actually, we were seven years old last month, but we've never been much for punctuality.) And so by way of celebration we've curated the latest weekly Humble Bundle, and that means we've chosen some of our most beloved indie games from the past seven years for the Pay What You Want sale. An esoteric bunch, but so very beautiful, all. If…
Somewhere in the dark and nasty regions, where nobody goes, stands an ancient castle, according to an old British legend. Deep within this dank and uninviting place, lives Jonathan Burke, overworked servant of "the thing upstairs." But that's nothing compared to the horrors that lurk beneath the trap door, for there is always something down there, in the dark, waiting to come out. Don't you…
Feature: Creeping With The Fishes, Pt 2
I played Amnesia: The Dark Descent spiritual/ghooooostual successor SOMA, and it didn't really do it for me. That said, Frictional creative director Thomas Grip's plans for the wetter-is-deader stroll into the maw of madness are quite interesting, though whether he can pull it all off remains to be seen. Today we continue on from our previous discussion, pushing doggedly forward into Grip's plan for possibly…
Feature: Creeping With The Fishes, Pt 1
SOMA didn't scare the scuba suit off me, but I did find a creeping sort of potential in its soaked-to-the-bone corridors. Amnesia: The Dark Descent 2 this ain't. Or at least, it's not aiming to be. Currently, it still feels a lot like a slower-paced, less-monster-packed Amnesia in a different (though still very traditionally survival-horror-y) setting, but Frictional creative director Thomas Grip has big plans.…
Feature: It Is Much Deader Where It Is Wetter
It's not that I feel like SOMA is poorly made. On the contrary: for a demo of a game that's at least a year out, the Amnesia spiritual successor practically sparkles beneath its grimy, moss-encrusted shell. I just feel like, despite a very unexpected setting, I've been here before. Crept through these halls, turned these nobs, let these tidal waves of otherworldly sound crash into…
5 years ago
Everyone knows that the scariest things aren't actually monsters themselves. It's the horrors lurking in our own runaway imaginations, creatures of such impossible (and impossibly specific) phobia that our only recourse is to head for the hills long before we ever see them. That's the power of a great horror environment. SOMA's Upsilon research facility, for instance, creaks, groans, and whines quietly to itself like…
Feature: Fear Responses
Level With Me is a series of interviews with game developers about their games, work process, and design philosophy. At the end of each interview, they design part of a small first person game. You can play this game at the very end of the series. Thomas Grip is creative director of Frictional Games, based in Helsingborg, Sweden. They're known mostly for the Penumbra (a…
Feature: Fear Of The Unknown
It was not so long ago that our own Adam "Murder Maestro" Smith lamented the lack of imagination in horror stories. Implausibly trap-laden asylums, spoooooky forests, and hastily cobbled-together castles dominate, while more interesting locales and subject matters are few and far-between. While I wouldn't go so far as to say that horror's stuck in a full-blown rut, it could certainly end up there if…
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