Wednesday, April 24, 2013

The "Two Girls One Cup" of the Horror Game Genre.

Editor's note about AJ:  Please welcome AJD4 to our blog.  Although his voice has yet to have been heard on Loaded Dice Cast, AJ is a guy we targeted to add to the Loaded Dice Empire.  His tireless passion, good writing, and thought provoking insights have been littering my fucking facebook feed for years now.  Rather than toil away in obscurity, we wanted to bring AJ on to kill it for us, and eventually make us dump trucks full of money, from which we will dispense a pittance to him, since he was giving this fucking gold away anyway.  AJD4 will be doing regular previews and reviews on Loaded Dice Blog on subjects ranging from TV, to Film, to Literature, to German Dungeon Porn, until he gets sick of our shit, at which time we wish him luck getting anyone to love him.  Please give him the proper Loaded Dice Blog welcome/merciless trolling.  Cheers AJ!  -Kevin LD


Do you like to be scared? To have that incessant feeling that something is in the room with you, that it may be right behind you, but you'd rather not look in case you are right? If that's the case this video is made for you.



Red Barrel the creators of "Outlast" (coming to Steam TBD summer 2013) know how to sell a game. They are not touting its multiplayer function, they want you to play it alone. And if you decide to play around other people? Maybe a Sunday night while you and your roommates crawl through the half hour break Fox gives us between The Simpsons and Family Guy, you may be the person having a seizure in the corner while Bob's Burgers plays un-watched in the background.

Using some of the same tactics as games like Dead Space, Eternal Darkness: Sanity's Requiem, and the terror that was Nemesis in Resident Evil 3, this game is designed to put you in that wonderful head-space of asking yourself over and over "Do I want to open that door?" and then explaining to yourself slowly as if to a child. "No, no I don't because something is behind that door, something that is impatient, and if something isn't.... Well, there will be something behind the next door. Or hiding in the closet, or will come up behind me from the last room I was in, wait....that would be this room. No place is safe." Then you open the door and whatever horror lies beyond welcomes you.

Open the door by clicking the break.
     
It's been a hard time for survival horror gamers. With Resident Evil moving towards large explosions and Michael Bay action pieces, and away from the creeping onslaught of crows, dogs, and zombies with it's recent two games Resident Evil 5 and Resident Evil 6. Then the reanimated corpse of survival horror came back to us in Dead Space. But with it's last entry great as it was Dead Space is becoming a buddy action film (The good kind though, like Lethal Weapon meets The Thing. Murtaugh saying "I'm getting to old for this shit" while burning a set of tentacles with Riggs laughing in the background.)

 Recently there has been another revolution for the survival horror gamer. We have Outlast coming out this summer, a new project from Resident Evil creator, Shinji Mikamit's called "The Evil Within" which will warm the cold black box that passes for my heart, and indie games coming out that rely more on shadows and terror then explosions and thrilling heroics. It's heartening to know that there will be games coming out where we can pay to be scared again. We can come home, shrug off the day, dim the lights, grab a drink, and feel helpless, terrified and like we should really take up running again.

2 comments:

  1. Well I almost made brown thunder watching people play this game, which means I must own it. The tension reminds me of Condemned. As a young man I remember playing Silent Hill at midnight in the basement with all the lights off to scare the jeebus out of myself; I think this will be a nice continuation of that tradition.

    ReplyDelete
  2. A fine first outting, AJ. Who says gaming isn't art?

    ReplyDelete