Bethesda opened its E3 presentation with The Evil Within. On-hand representatives claimed, “We wanted to make a game that was truly horrifying.” Horrifying was right.
The Evil Within was so damn scary that I truly do not have faith in myself, or many others to review it. The game has an old Resident Evil or Silent Hill feel that keeps you not only on the edge of your seat, but on the edge of sanity.
Sony brought a thirty-minute demo of The Last of Us to PAX East. There wasn’t a single moment when the line for this survival horror/action game wasn’t capped, and there was a damn good reason for it. The Last of Us is a damn fine game.
Fallout, Borderlands, Left 4 Dead, Metro, and other post-apocalyptic games have one shared aspect in common: A lack of realism. If the world were to be laid waste by nuclear warfare, there wouldn’t be bullets and food everywhere. That’s where The Last of Us shines.
Indie developer Red Barrels, made up of ex-Ubisoft and ex-Naughty Dog veterans who worked on Prince of Persia, Assassin’s Creed, Splinter Cell and Uncharted, is looking to keep the genre made popular by Resident Evil alive with a new survival horror title called Outlast.
Set in the Colorado mountains, you play a journalist named Miles Upshur, who investigates an abandoned asylum taken over by the Murkoff Corporation. Sounds familiar, right? Abandoned building, evil corporation… But there is no combat. You’ll have to flee from threats. The only reloading involves batteries you can find around the environment to power your camcorder, which you’ll need to see in the dark. And Outlast is dark.
Deep Silver made the trip to PAX East this weekend, and brought along Techland’s second installment in the Dead Island series: Dead Island: Riptide. It takes place directly after the original’s conclusion, and sees the entire cast crashing back onto the island of Banoi when the survivors’ helicopter fails to navigate a terrible storm.
Your character’s awakened by a woman who relates the crash information. With mascara running and sweat forming on her brow, she tasks you with discovering if some other survivors need help with their stronghold. After traveling inland a bit and gathering familiar weapons featured in the original Dead Island, you encounter the stronghold as its being attacked by zombies.
It’s Halloween time!! And hurricane time! Oh golly! Hope everyone’s okay. If your head’s still above water and you still got power, why not give a listen to our Halloween-themed episode all about scary games, survival horror and games not of that genre that still scared us anyway! Host Tim Torres, Gabriel Zamora, Sean-Paul Adams, and contributing editor Johnathan Gibbs makes his podcast debut to talk about Resident Evil, Silent Hill, Castlevania, Dark Souls, the frightening religious overtones of Xenogears and more!
SEGA tried to do some interesting things here and sadly came short, due to the horrible controls and voice acting. The concept is interesting, and maybe with a bit more polish the came could have been a winner. But this is not the case; instead you’re left with a short, forgettable experience that’s more trick than treat.
Survival horror is pretty much dead. Silent Hill has been spun off into a Gauntlets-type dungeon hack, Fatal Frame’s nowhere to be found and the Resident Evil series mutated into a Call of Duty/Gears of War action clone in a weird cyclical cannibalistic situation — Resident Evil 4 spawned Gears of War which spawned Resident Evil 5 and, well, the rest of this generation. Ironic, I guess, that it didn’t … survive. It was very much a product of its time, when pre-rendered graphics and static camera angles were the height of sophistication. And c’mon, how long could monsters jumping out of windows stay scary? Things are different now.
The Resident Evil 6 demo is out for gamers who own the Xbox 360 version of Dragon’s Dogma. Hope you didn’t trade your Dragon’s Dogma disc away, as you’ll need that to download the demo! It says so in the fine print on the voucher included with the game. You did read the fine print, didn’t you? Good. Go, download the unlock and experience what we played at E3 last month.
The rest of the world, (that is, PS3 owners) will have to wait until September to get a taste of Capcom’s latest offering of “dramatic horror.” Because you have to jump through a million hoops to play console-exclusive demos of multiplatform games that will be out a month later after the demo’s available to everyone anyway… Makes sense to me!
After a disastrous demo at E3 last year, I was afraid Silent Hill: Downpour would take the once-venerable horror series back down the path to franchise fatigue. With all the original creative leaders gone from the series, I was left to wonder why Konami would bother. Not that that’s stopped Final Fantasy or any number of other properties, but c’mon, how many more pathetic saps can be drawn to an evil town before it gets ridiculous? How many more “unexplored sections of the town” can be explored? How many more Pyramid Head rip-offs are we willing to put up with?
Alan Wake’s American Nightmare is a downloadable B-movie in video game form from Remedy, the guys behind the first two Max Payne titles. Trading in film noir and John Woo action for supernatural, reality-altering weirdness, American Nightmare follows the be-flanneled Alan Wake, a writer for a cheesy Twilight Zone (or Night Gallery) take-off called Night Springs and it seems he’s found himself in one of his own stories. Stuck in an Arizona town with only a flashlight and a gun (and then an arsenal of guns), he has to battle the Taken, regular people corrupted by “the darkness”, and put an end to the plans of his own dark doppelganger, who wants to take over Alan’s life and spread darkness all over the world.
