In 2013 I had the opportunity to chat with Steve Gaynor about his then in-development mystery game Gone Home. A playable version was on display at the Game Developer’s Conference’s Indie Megabooth, and while I was interested in some of the other titles being shown (like Thirty Flights of Loving), I was there to see his game. […]
[This post contains spoilers about one of the best moments in Siren. If you haven’t played it yet, please ask yourself what you are doing with your life.] There is a moment in Siren in which your character, a young teenager, is trying to reach a church to meet her parents. The landscape is full of […]
One of the things I learned while working on Dead Secret (big announcements coming soon!) is how complicated item combinations can be. Combining items is a pretty standard Adventure game mechanic. You allow the player to collect parts of an item from different locations, then combine those items into a new item that is necessary to […]
I’m pretty interested in Five Nights at Freddy’s and Slender. Both are low-budget indie horror games that have, in the last few years, reached incredible levels of viral success. The two titles are very different: Freddy’s is about a security guard who must survive the night in a department store full of killer animatronic animals, and Slender is a game about finding […]
When we describe games like Resident Evil to others, we probably say something like this: In Resident Evil, zombies have taken over a big mansion and you have to stay alive by shooting them and solving puzzles. You have to conserve ammo and read documents to uncover the mystery behind the mansion and the zombies. While […]
There’s a lot to like about Outlast. It’s a non-combat stealth horror game made by a small team of veterans that sports super high production value but keeps things simple. The sound quality is fantastic and the graphics are nice and it manages to be pretty scary now and then. It’s got a great mechanic […]
Fatal Frame 4, which I keep coming back to every few months but never seem to complete, has a neat item pickup mechanic. Your character, a young woman trapped in a dilapidated hospital on a forbidden island full of moon ghosts, slowly extends her hand to reach for an item when you hit the A […]
I played Alien: Isolation at the Oculus booth at E3 last week. Alien is a high-end experiment in the genre I’ve been calling “exploratory first-person horror” for the last few years. Mechanically, it’s a lot like Slender or the hiding bits of Amnesia: you are running around a dark space ship with an obfuscated radar, […]
A few months ago I had a discussion on Twitter with Thomas Grip, the brains behind Amnesia: The Dark Descent, the Penumbra series, and now SOMA, about overused elements in horror games. Turns out there are a whole lot of trite, cliché, and downright dated design elements that show up again and again in horror […]
It took me a long time, but I finally figured out why I can’t play Dark Souls. I tried to play it–put a good 15 hours into it, which is longer than it takes me to complete most of the games I play. I even played a bit of Demon Souls before that, so I […]