Brian continues his playthrough of SOMA to celebrate #OctFearFest with Co-Op Critics and the Midnight Society. In this episode the techno-organic horror that stalks Simon limits his options for escape. And direct confrontation is a bad choice.
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Brian begins a playthrough of UNTIL DAWN to celebrate #OctFearFest with Co-Op Critics and the Midnight Society. In this first episode, a group of friends come back together a year after two of them mysteriously disappeared.
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October is almost upon us, and that means we’ll be celebrating horror for the next month! For those that don’t know, Brian is a huge horror fan and a horror writer. In fact, he just released a new book called HARROWED that was written with the amazing Jolene Haley–you can find out more here.READ MORE
This week I started a playthrough of Resident Evil HD Remaster on the PlayStation 4. I honestly have not played the original Resident Evil since it came out for PlayStation in 1996. And even then, I never finished it.
So, I begin this series with my strongest memories being the infamous dog scene, and of course, the greatest video game opening of all time. Seriously, that intro is freaking great.
As you’ll see in the video below, it takes me a bit to get used to the controls, and I make one particularly fatal mistake in exploring the early sections of the mansion. But I’m really enjoying revisiting the game so far, and the sense of atmosphere is still there after all these years.
Stay tuned for future installments, as I’m planning on streaming my entire playthrough of the game.
I know I’m way late to the party on this one, but I’ve been spending some time with the Silent Hills P.T. demo a little bit at a time. It’s not really a game so much as a proof of concept, but what P.T. does very well is create a sense of dread.
In the video below, you’ll see just one loop of gameplay from the demo. The first time through the hallway, there’s something banging on the other side of a hallway door, and when that door opens the next time through the hallway, it’s pretty freaking creepy. The demo very effectively doles out small changes each time through the hallway, keeping you engaged and constantly looking back over your shoulder. It’s very effective, and if the game can capture this vibe, Silent Hills could be amazing.
After doing a couple of Twitch broadcasts with XBox One, I wanted to give the PS4’s version a try. So, I downloaded Outlast and played through the opening chapter. While getting the broadcast up and running was easy, I couldn’t figure out how to get the chat bar to disappear so the broadcast could be recorded in full-screen.
I’ll keep playing around with it, but you can check out the first part of my outlast playthrough below. I’ll say this about Outlast–that game is super creepy if you play late at night with the lights out.
Man, I hate to be that guy.
You know, the guy who’s all like “They changed my beloved franchise into something I don’t recognize anymore just to sell more copies to the mainstream!” That guy.
But, as much as I hate to say it, they changed my beloved franchise into something I don’t recognize anymore just to sell more copies to the mainstream.
And by my beloved franchise, I mean the Dead Space franchise. Because Dead Space 3, to me, is a stark contrast to the survival horror game that was the original, and it took the worst parts of Dead Space 2 and used them as building blocks for the third game.
Have I mentioned I love the Dead Space franchise? Because I do. I covered the hell out of the original game during my days at CBR. My pal Antony Johnston worked on the first game, wrote all of Dead Space Extraction and wrote some great tie-in comics as well. I interviewed the writer of Dead Space 2 on Secret Identity. I’ve read all the comics, and the tie-in novel. I’ve watched all the animated films (the first of which was written by comic superstars Jimmy Palmiotti and Justin Gray).
I tell you all that because I really do love the Dead Space world. And both the world, and the games themselves, are firmly rooted in horror. The first game was a genuinely scary survival horror game that helped keep a failing genre afloat for a few years until other games started picking up the slack. Dead Space Extraction featured simplified mechanics but retained the great story and tension of the first game. Dead Space 2 was the equivalent of Aliens to the first game’s Alien, taking the action up a notch but keeping the scares and expanding the world at the same time. There were some questionable design decisions in Dead Space 2, but the whole of the game overshadowed any of the stumbles.
With Dead Space 3, the pendulum has swung completely to the action side, at the expense of both the storytelling and the horror of the first two games. The two places where this is most evident is in the pacing and in the way combat is approached.
What made the first two games so scary was the methodical pace they had. You would frequently find yourself introduced to an area and then be forced to explore it before any real combat began. Tension would continue to build, as there could be several minutes where you did not see an enemy, or perhaps just caught a glimpse on one off in the distance. When combat did occur, it was less about dealing with hordes of enemies and more about using your skills to take on small numbers of dangerous enemies at a time.
Dead Space 3 still uses pretty much the same mechanics as the first two games, but they don’t hold up as well because the nature of combat has changed significantly. Most encounters are with multiple enemies of different kinds, so I constantly have to use my stasis (slow things down) and kinesis (throw things around) abilities in conjunction with my weapons. And this is where things break down. Isaac moves pretty slowly, and aiming is imprecise. Which often means that I’m either wasting precious stasis blasts by missing enemies completely, or I’m waiting until they get in close enough to guarantee a hit, which defeats the purpose. So, combat often devolves into me firing wildly at the three enemies that are now on top of me, and trying to stasis them long enough to stomp them to death. Elegant it is not.
And that for me is the most glaring inconsistency in the design of Dead Space 3. The world itself, the atmosphere of the game and the mechanical systems seem designed for a methodical survival horror game, but the combat feels designed for a much faster action shooter. The result is a game where I actually dread combat, and as soon as I run into a frustrating encounter, I end my play session.
I could not stop playing Dead Space 1, 2 and Extraction. I have to force myself to spend time with Dead Space 3. That’s a real bummer. In many ways, I just wish someone would novelize the events of Dead Space 3 so that I could keep up with the story, but not have to play the game.