Highrising Fear: Tower22
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...
The final shoot is incredibly creepy, even though the image itself wouldn't be so if it were in a different context. Tower22 appears to be playing with unconventional imagery alongside the more familiar likes of sudden darkness and being chased by monstrous things. There's a Gigerian element to it, certainly, but it's a long way off Resident Evil or FEAR. Looks marvelously underwear-threatening, I must say.
Who knows when it'll finally be released, given its lead dev is a plumber by day, but its development is still ongoing and being documented at genuinely fascinating and frank length on its own blog.
Via Indiegames.