Format: PC
Release date: 2013
Well, fuck. A FPS horror game, set in a mental asylum where all the patients are violent hyper crazed lunatics, and you are a guy armed only with a night vision video camera and can’t fight back? Better get Clarkie to play that shit.
Outlast is actually amazing. It’s a superb horror game, crafted with so much care and attention to detail. Its pants shittingly scary, and I hated every minute of it. That’s why I love it.
By this point, my friends have subjected me to so many scary games, I’ve grown to both admire and ALMOST enjoy them… I certainly know a good one when I see it. Too many cheap jump scares for example, quickly becomes tedious. A good horror game knows when to ramp up the tension with silence, when to stretch the quiet moments where anything could be waiting around the next corner. It must have thoughtful sound design and make expert use of lighting effects to create an atmosphere of pure terror. And if you must have a scary monster or creature to hunt the player, give it the entrance it deserves by building it up, tease its existence and make the player doubt himself of its existence at all…
The best horror games know how to really get under the player’s skin. The creators of Outlast understand this perfectly and made a game that had me screaming in blind panic when it finally revealed the reason for all of the madness that was occurring in the asylum. I barely even saw the fucking Wall Rider monstrosity, and I didn’t have to – all I knew at that moment was to run for my life. My mates’ ears are still ringing from the scream I released that night.
Dome Keeper is an excellent little spin on the tower defense game, in which you play the role of a jetpacking miner defending his base from swarms of aliens, whilst searching for a hidden relic buried somewhere beneath him. And now, with this huge free update, you can play it with friends.
I want to talk about Cloudpunk, a game where you get to be a flying-car delivery driver in a futuristic cyberpunk city. Its world is an incredible achievement of environmental design, and while the gameplay itself may be basic, the city of Nivalis is a thing of beauty to behold. Nivalis is built out of hundreds of hand-modelled cuboid buildings; there’s nothing procedural about it. Apparently it took 3 years for the devs to design the city, and it really shows.
I do love me some quality pixel art, and it doesn’t get much better than this. Cast n Chill is a cozy side-scrolling fishing game by small indie dev team Wombat Brawler, with absolutely gorgeous visuals. It’s simple to play, and you you can dip in and out of it at your leisure, making it a fine addition to our collection of coffee break games.
Format: Sega Mega Drive
Year: 1992
Another rare game in my long list of memories that include my brother, Sam, is Streets of Rage 2. It was the best in a trilogy of side scrolling beat-em-ups on the Sega Mega Drive. (Genesis in America). We would always play as the same 2 characters: I was Axel, and my brother would be Skate. He loved the agility and bombastic acrobatics that the tiny skater dude could pull off. Many of the boss fights would end with Sam leaping onto their necks and pummelling them in the back of the head. I liked Axel’s swinging flaming punch, and his multi-hit special combo. It’s a simple but satisfying game built around stylised hand to hand violence.
The latest trailer for Dune Part Three just dropped. It looks rather splendid.
The first horror game I ever played, and I never got beyond the room in the attic where the wolf attacks you. All 5 polygons of the terrifying beast were enough to send me fleeing from the room, leaving my father to deal with it.
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