Lately Nanashi no Geemu has got me thinking about how horror operates at a fundamental level. One of the keys, it seems to me, is connection with familiarity. Silent Hill uses normal, every day locales (an elementary school, a mall, an apartment complex) and then taints them with monsters, death, and eventually decrepitness. Nanashi No […]
I have completed Nanashi No Geemu, SquareEnix’s Nintendo DS horror game about a cursed 8-bit RPG, and posted a review. The game is a paradox. On the one hand, the game play is extremely shallow and repetitive. On the other hand it’s amazingly innovative and, at times, genuinely scary. Excellent execution of a mediocre idea, […]
Thanks to forums member faDeD for turning me on to a new WiiWare horror/puzzle game called LIT. I haven’t had time to play it yet–as you can probably tell from the dearth of posts recently, it’s been a busy month–but it looks like a lot of fun. I am keenly interested in how horror games […]
Out with the old, in with the new! If 2009 is anything like 2008, we’ve got a lot of horror games to look forward to. 2008 was a good year for us horror gamers; in fact, it was the best year we’ve had since 2005. A total of seven horror games were released in the […]
My train ride to work only takes 30 minutes, but it often feels much longer. I ride Denentoshi-sen, a line that runs from Shibuya all the way down into Yokohama, and has the unfortunate distinction of being Japan’s second-most crowded train line. Even a a short ride like mine is exhausting when you spend the […]
The Resident Evil 5 demo went live on Xbox Live today, but only for residents of Japan. Luckily enough, I happen to now be a resident of Japan, and I’ve put a little time into the demo (if you live in another country you’ll have to wait, but if you are adventurous you could try […]
It’s been pretty quiet around here lately, for witch I apologize. But, I have a good excuse: I’m preparing to move, and not just down the block. No, my family and I are moving to a whole ‘nother country next week, and I’m frantically trying to close all of my accounts, cancel all of my […]
Leigh Alexander has an excellent article on the way survival horror games have changed up on Kotaku this morning. If you’ve never read Alexander’s stuff before, she’s one of the few game journalists that really gets genres like survival horror (I’ve linked to her writing before). Her latest article, Does Survival Horror Really Still Exist? […]
Last year I wrote about how I learn a lot from bad games. But what I didn’t say in that post was that I secretly love to play bad horror games, just as I secretly relish terrible horror movies. There’s a certain type of humor that is evoked by games and movies that are so […]
Here’s a couple of videos I’ve come across lately: Some super alpha handicam vid of Sadness actually running. I think that this footage is legit; that black box on top of the guy’s TV is a Wii dev kit (I used to have the same kind on my desk), and the footage looks like prototype-level […]