During subway rides and at home for the past couple of days, I've been stealing some time to play a preview build of development studio Renegade Kid's February 2010 game, Dementium II. I fared better than I did during my first hands-on with the game just before Halloween.

Renegade Kid has created a first-person horror game that, for a cumulative two hours, kept my character perilously close to danger and death as I crept through an insane asylum and neighboring town. This is not a game to play if you want to feel comfy and settled, though as far as controls go, it actually is quite solid: The action is on the top screen, the stylus controls where you look, face buttons handle foot movement, and a shoulder button triggers melee weapons and gun attacks. The lower screen shows a map, which, in Super Metroid style is marked with blocked passageways that can be accessed with only the correct weapon — or, in more of a Resident Evil-style flourish, by solving a puzzle.

The game does creepy well. You wake up in an insane asylum that at its most hospitable has guards running after you with electrified shock sticks. Sometimes this demented place becomes an alternate hellish version of itself, its colors turning sickly greens and grays and its inhabitants suddenly including demons and helpless screaming men whose bellies are being bored by giant drills. The sounds, as I noted in my first preview are full of screeches and scratches and other unsettling tones. This kind of environment mixed with ammo scarcity and lots of angry demon enemies makes playing the game an experience of feeling perpetually imperiled.

For this preview I played into the game's third chapter, leaving the asylum after beating a monster boss (who wasn't as tough as he seemed when I fought him in October) and trudging out through a boiler room and into the snow. I found a village and some locked-door puzzles but mostly had to kill monsters, being sure to never use too many of the scarce revolver bullets and shotgun shells I found. My Metroid skills were put to good use, as I noted green markers where I'd found areas blocked by boarded-up doorways. Once I found a sledgehammer I was backtracking and knocking through those boards.

There's a so-far simple story driving me through the game. My character is William Redmoor and he's being taunted through voice-over both by a guy who seems to be running the asylum and possibly by the former Mrs. Redmoor. At the wife's behest I was eventually trying to dig up our daughter's grave. Creepy stuff. The story didn't feel complex, but it suited the atmosphere, as did numerous graffiti marks on the asylum's walls and the too-placid homes in the snow village through which I trekked.

There's little like this kind of game on the DS. There are few M-rated games, few horror titles and few Metroid descendants. Ultimately, though, this is a DS game, which means that someone who likes those things best not be bothered by the system's limitations. Renegade Kid's game looks good, but can't look much better than Nintendo-64-level 3D. For a horror game, I think that works, as the abstracted gory realism takes on almost a nightmarish edge. Less easy to tolerate is the limited artificial intelligence, which leaves enemies running at you in predictable patterns and results in combat that can feel more repetitious than what you're getting in 3D horror games on consoles.

There's plenty here to like, with key questions only lingering about the game's length and variety, both of which will be answered when Dementium II is released for the Nintendo DS in North America on February 16 of next year.

It's easy to make light of a horror game when you've only got screenshots and the odd video to go by. AJ testified that Calling has some genuinely scary moments during her preview of the game, so chances are I'll stop laughing the moment the game starts. Then I will play until the first scary bit, take the game out, and play something with stuffed animals in it.

As the name suggests, there's an awful lot of cell phone usage in the horror/adventure game. During a demo given to games journalists by the Japanese director, a poor woman finds a haunted cell phone that just wouldn't stop ringing. Even worse, she keeps answering it and the ghost on the other end keeps giving her updates on its progress (e.g. "I'm on the second floor landing..."). I imagine it would have been scarier in context, but at the time, it was downright funny. Especially because I had no idea which floor the girl started on, so I wasn't sure if the ghost was really close or just taking forever to climb the freaking stairs.

Also, if that haunted phone was the ghost's phone — and she said it was — what phone was the ghost calling from to provide the status updates?

What Is It?
Calling is a horror/adventure game with four main characters for the player to guide through a branching storyline. There are multiple endings, ghostly encounters and creepy environments to explore and hopefully survive.

What We Saw
After watching the demo, games journalists were given the chance to play through a single level starring a male character trapped in the empty apartment of a traditional Japanese doll maker.

How Far Along Is It?
Still in alpha — the game isn't due out 'til some unspecified time in 2010.

What Needs Improvement?
A Little Bit Waggly: For the most part, the Wiimote's motion controls are limited to gentle flicks to open doors or slide screens aside. However, there were two instances in the level where a ghost got the jump on the player and to get free you either had to mash the A button with perfect timing (like a quick time event), or just waggle furiously until the ghost let go. Guess which method is easier?

What Should Stay The Same?
It's Actually Kind of Scary: There was a part in the game where a guy comes upon a room where the sliding doors only open partway. Looking through the door and down, you can see the dead body of the doll maker. After sighting this grisly thing, I turned the character around to go into another room — but I stopped because I heard shuffling and giggling behind me. So I turned the character back around and — gah! — there were dozens of the creepy little dolls filling the slit of the partly-opened doors. Their hair fluttered and their eyes blinked and they were tittering at me in the creepiest way. It was genuinely upsetting.

Movement Is Controlled With The Analog Stick: This is the best possible way to control motion from the first person perspective, I think.

Final Thoughts
I came down pretty hard on Ju-on not because it was a nuanced Japanese horror experience (which Calling also strives to be), but because it fell flat on its face in the scary department. I realize minimalist storytelling is a big part of Japanese horror films — but I think this cost Ju-on dearly in the gameplay department. So already, Calling is a cut above where Ju-on wound up even in this early stage of development. Here's hoping the final product goes even farther toward that ideal scary experience.

Nice qualifier, there. After all, not everybody is sold on the scariness of some games.

The article goes on to quote video game industry analyst Michael Pachter of Wedbush Morgan Securities as saying that horror video game sales are up this year from last. By September 2009, they'd scared up $147 million in sales compared to the $131 million they brought in throughout 2008.

Best part, though, is where they got Freddy Krueger actor Robert Englund to explain why video games are scary:

"Halloween gives fans the chance to dress up in costumes and celebrate horror, but video games are the best way for fans to actually participate in these worlds," he told Reuters.

The second best part? Reuters says that Dead Space 2 will be out in 2010. According to the piece, "'Dead Space 2' is in development for next year." See you next year!

Horror video games scare up record sales [Reuters]
Image Cred

Some of the scariest experiences I've had in my life come from video games. I can remember running from the family computer room in tears after a wax skeleton in an Are You Afraid of the Dark game chased me through a basement.

My chest still gets tight whenever I hear a burst of radio static, thanks to Silent Hill.

And there is this one scene in Dead Space that gives me goose bumps whenever I think about it.

Horror in video games is more complex that what goes on in horror movies. True, the feeling of terror you're supposed to experience is similar. Scary video games and movies both rely heavily on pacing, shocking imagery and music. However, games are an interactive experience. There are consequences for the player that nobody in a darkened movie theater could relate to. Horror games need gameplay elements that don't distract you, level design that leads you into danger in ways you can't predict and art direction that plays with your head so that you buy into what you're experiencing instead of rationalizing it away as "just a game."

Scare Tactics: Dead Space

Here's how a game can use its gameplay, level design and art direction to utterly freak you out: see Dead Space. In this game, you're a space mechanic stranded on a ship overrun with creepy, crawly aliens. On a superficial level, it's no different than a zombie shoot-em-up game. However, there is so much going on at a deeper level in Dead Space that it creates a multifaceted horror experience.

For example, art director Ian Milham explains that the use of differed lighting over a setting that looks like the inside of a rib cage was a big part of making Dead Space scary. "In a horror game, when you're walking around, you walk slower than … in a shooter game," he says. "You look at the world a lot more intently because you don't know where [enemies] are and you get kind of spooked out. So the ribbed motif created hard scissor-lines in the background and moving shadows — there's a lot for the light to play across."

The effect creates the scene that gives me goosebumps. You're walking down a hall where all you see is harsh shadows. Then you round a corner and see a mutilated person banging their head against the wall. The light from a nearby doorway plays across the gray steel wall and the red, ragged flesh hanging from the man's torso. The image is so shocking that for a moment you don't realize what's happening to this person. Then he shifts backward and slams his head against the wall so hard his skull cracks and he falls down dead. His smashed head leaves a red smear on the gray wall.

That part of the game stuck with me almost more than the creepy aliens that still retain fragments of the human bodies they took over. It's beyond scary to me — it's flat-out disturbing.

"Scary is the result of lot of things," Milham says. "The first thing you've got to do is give the world and what happens in it consequence and reality and make it super-grounded. So … when you see something terrible, you really believe it in a way [that you don't normally believe with a video game]."

A big challenge the Dead Space team had to face was making you believe that you were powerless as the main character – even though you're able to make him run away from danger or shoot aliens with space weapons. "One of the things I said [to the design team] is ‘No Final Fantasy effects with weapons,'" says Milham. "If you're too fantastic with something, you don't really believe it. All the scary stuff just kind of goes away."

Head Games: Arkham Asylum

Here's another game that can freak you out, even though it's not a horror game: Batman: Arkham Asylum. In this game, you're following a story based on familiar characters from a comic book series with an established history. Batman seems nearly invulnerable because of his high-tech gadgets and rippling muscles. But then you encounter a character called the Scarecrow who employs mind tricks to weaken Batman. Okay, fine, that's canon — but the Scarecrow level design in Arkham Asylum isn't just playing with Batman's head. It's playing with yours.

"During the Scarecrow levels we wanted to provide a constant sense of tension and vulnerability, as if they're constantly just inches from the Scarecrow's grasp," explains Jamie Whitworth, designer on Arkham Asylum. "We compared this to common scenes in slasher flicks when the protagonist is attempting to hide from the villain whilst both characters are in the shot and would usually end in a panic stricken dash to safety."

But unlike a slasher flick where you're yelling at the dumb bimbo to run or call 9-1-1, you're the one responsible for getting Batman through the levels unscathed. You see him cough and know he's been Fear Gassed by Scarecrow. Then the lighting begins to change and the long corridor down which you're walking skews to one side. Little by little as you walk down the hall, the pieces of the realistic setting fall away to reveal things you know can't be true — like rain falling inside a building. But your eyes are still seeing them. The gameplay communicates to your hands that, yes, that is, in fact, a gap you can fall through in the floor. You believe the upsetting things you start to see: such as a weeping person who sometimes appears as Batman and sometimes appears as an Arkham patient, depending on the light.

"[D]ropping players directly into the surreal Scarecrow levels wouldn't have provided the necessary set up and it was easy to lose the sense of dread when these rooms were taken out of context," says Whitworth. "The hallucination sequences were used to chip away at the player's confidence and sense of reality so that they were on the edge before Scarecrow even shows up."

The overall effect is unnerving in a way that's similar to that hallway scene in Dead Space, if ultimately a lot less disturbing.

Lingering Fear

Horror in video games is both a tangible sensation and abstract emotion. Unlike a movie, which can only appeal to a limited spectrum of those senses at a time, the horror we experience in video games can come at us both from what we see and experience and what our minds supply us with as we play. When done right, it leaves a lasting impression on a player... like a scar on the mind you worry at whenever the lights go out.

That's probably the best tool developers have to work with when making their games scary: your own mind.

"A lot of the horror comes from not knowing what's coming next, that sort of endless tension," Milham says. "You set up rhythms where you do an obvious scare with obvious foreshadowing and then you do another. And then you do the foreshadowing and you don't [scare them], and you wait a couple beats longer just long enough for them to go ‘Oh you guys, you were going to scare me and then you didn't.' And then... OH MY GOD!"

PIC — Scarecrow
PIC — Batman
PIC — The Ring

The Calling plays on classic Japanese horror films like Ringu, with a mysterious website called the Page of Black. A simple black page with a counter in the center, rumor says that those who gain access to the linked chat room soon die after the onset of a mysterious, unexplained coma. The player wakes up in a strange room and receives a phone call from a ghostly voice. Soon they find themselves drifting in and out of a state of limbo known as The Border, where lost spirits roam, some communicating with the player, and others taking violent exception to their presence.

It sounds to me an awful lot like a Silent Hill title, with a mix of puzzles and exploration in a nightmarish world, but with Konami Digital Entertainment distributing the title in Europe next year, I doubt it's all that derivative. If anything it looks slightly scary, but we'll have to see more before we decided whether or not to run screaming.

Call for Papers

As fear is the oldest and strongest emotion of mankind (Lovecraft), human beings have always taken a malicious pleasure in frightening themselves. If literature and cinema were and still represent good means for the expression of horror, nowadays, the experience of fear is as intense in video games.

While academia has been studying horrific literature and films for a few decades, such an interest for the videoludic side of horror has not, until now, showed up. Yet, since the cinematic staging of fear in Alone in the Dark in 1992, the "Survival Horror" has become a prolific genre offering a wide selection of significant games such as the Resident Evil, Silent Hill and Fatal Frame series. Because it is at the crossroads of diverse cultural heritages and the latest technological developments, and because it exhibits the ins and outs of the matrix that governs all but a few games (spatial navigation and survival), horror video games require a deeper study.

This international conference wishes to study horror video games (not necessarily labeled survival horror) from an eclectic range of critical and theoretical perspectives. It aims to fill a gap in game studies between general theory and analysis of particular genres and games.

Possible Topics

Here are some examples of relevant themes we wish to explore in this conference:

Historical approach

Origins and history of horror video games
Impact of the technological evolution on horror video games
Theoretical approach

Simulation of horror, fear, terror

Narratives and themes of horror video games
Interpretation of individual works and series
Transmedial approach

Transmedial study of horror video games (game/film/literature)

Remediation in films, literature and video games
Socio-cultural approach

Transnational analysis of horror video games (United States/Japan)

Social and cultural meanings of horror video games
Horror video games and censorship
Analytical approach

Aesthetics of horror video games (lighting, sound, editing, 1st/3rd person perspective)

Study of specific games or series (Alone in the Dark, Resident Evil, Fatal Frame, etc.)

The organizing committee remains open to proposals that respect the general spirit of this call for papers.

Please submit your proposals before January 15, 2009 via email to the following address: thinking.after.dark@ca.inter.net.

Your proposal must include:

1. The title of your paper and an abstract (no more that 500 words).
2. Your academic status, your institutional affiliation, your department and your contact information (mailing address, telephone number, fax number and e-mail address).
3. A short biography underlining your work related to the themes of the conference (no more than 250 words).

A selection of papers will be published in a special issue of Loading…, the journal of the Canadian Game Studies Association (CGSA).

———-

Looking forward to meeting you in Montréal next April,

The organizing committee.

It might be the little touches, like the F5 Energy Drink that sponsors the doomed titular LAN party or the film's featured pro gamer "Mort@lity," or maybe I'm just watching the teaser trailer with blood tinted glasses.

LAN Party Massacre is obviously gory, so if you start to feel queasy when prosthetic throats are ripped out of spokesmodels, you may want to pass on the trailer at the official site.

LAN Party Massacre Official Site [thanks, Ryan!]

Someone hold me.

I've played the game a bit myself, and while there are points where it feels a bit like your standard Korean MMO given a fresh coat of paint, the game mechanics are actually rather entertaining. The only real problem I have with it is that it is hard to maintain an atmosphere of horror after you've killed the same monster 20 times, but it definitely has a few moments. Hit up the link below to get things started!

Requiem: Bloodymare Official Site [Gravity Interactive = Thanks Andthenjaredsaid!]

Leigh and I are very excited about this new venture. We are big gaming fans and we think it would a great opportunity to continue the SAW legacy into a different platform/medium. Keeps things fresh for us anyway. A lot of people have asked us if we would be interested in writing another SAW movie...well, we are writing another SAW story...but it's for the game. We're treating this story like the SAW movies with lots of twists and turns. We have no idea how that is going to apply to a computer game format, considering that most games are generally pretty simple in it's plotting. Maybe its a good thing that Leigh and I are naive to the video game world and that we're writing it like its a movie!

Ah yes, ignorance is bliss, and could make for a relatively blissful video game version of Saw, at least until the game developers get a hold of the script and pull a more horrifying hack job on it than anything Jigsaw could have come up with.

Still, it's good to see such an important person to the franchise working on the game. It's not every day you get the creator of a movie working on a video game adaptation, much less the creator who is also the executive producer of the most popular horror franchise of the last few years.

The New Year - 2008 [James Wan's MySpace Blog - Via WhatUpThug]

Play Daikatana Free [GameTap]

[Thanks, John]

Move over Alien, there's a new scary... alien in space. GameTrailers managed to nab a world exclusive trailer for EA's upcoming space horror game, Dead Space. I'm a big fan of the survival horror genre but usually my tastes tend towards the Silent Hill, Resident Evil end of things. I have yet, to my memory (which is admittedly poor) played a horror game in outer space much less zero gravity, so I'll be anxious to check this out when it hits next year. Definitely one for lights out...

We have no idea what we're meant to be doing or what we're meant to be achieving, so we resort to blind pointing and clicking and spinning in circles (At which point we note there's no bloody door into this room where we start, which spooks us pretty bad.). Through this we ascertain several things - that many objects are "interesting", without really giving any other reason why (And entirely unpick-up-able) and many labels are smudged. Papers? Can't tell the date. Bottles? Unreadable label and can't make out what it is (Clue: Looks like booze to me). Windows? Too dirty to see through.

There's not much to do. The full game apparently features some kind of Thinking Screen, which allows you to combine and mess around with objects, except that's not functional in the demo. Which strikes me a bit of a bad idea to not allow you to play around with one of the game's selling-points in the demo, much like giving a level of GTA where you weren't allowed to run over people or something.

Like so many blog posts, the comments are nearly as entertaining as the post itself. On the problems of staircases: "You know, it kind of dawned on me now - staircases are one of gaming's best, unsung archnemesis. As far back as I can recall, staircases have nearly always contributed to gamer frustration and prevented him from achieving success." In any case, if you're interested in an HP Lovecraft-inspired, point and click, adventure-horror PC game, you may want to take a look.

Things Man Was Not Meant To Click At [Rock, Paper, Shotgun]

Strauss Zelnick at Take-Two had explained to him:

This is still animation. It's not photo-realistic. It's not live action. And compared to an R-rated movie, which is intended for 17 and above, like 'Saw' or 'Hostel,' it's actually pretty tame. But you make your own conclusions when you play the game.

After playing the game, the NYT writer commented that, "(He) did not find Manhunt 2 particularly frightening or sickening, more like a violent interactive cartoon", but he did completely agree with the game being rated as Adults Only. Then Schiesel took Zelnick's advice by comparing it to Hostel and Saw II which the writer rented. The outcome? In Schiesel's words:

Banning the original version of Manhunt 2 may be a good way to demonstrate that the industry can police itself. Side-by-side, though, movies seem to be way ahead of games in delivering top-notch gore.

Couldn't have said it any better myself. Kim Phu

Gore Galore but a Violent Game Can't Hold a Gutbucket to the Movies [NYT]