Over the past year the horror genre has revitalized fear. Films like David Robert Mitchell’s It Follows, a film featuring a sexually transmitted haunting, and Jennifer Kent’s storybook monster film The Babadook, have received unexpectedly raving reviews and high ratings on Rotten Tomatoes. In 2013, indie horror survival game Outlast allowed you to see through the eyes of investigative journalist Miles Upshur with the Oculus Rift. It was terrifying. Novum Analytics’s 17-month project Night Terrors should achieve something similar, drawing on the immersion of modern tech such as the Oculus Rift and amplifying it a hundredfold.
The game is designed to be played in complete darkness with headphones on, reminiscent of Wrigley’s 2011 mobile space game The Nightjar, a solely auditory-based game, aided by the voice of Benedict Cumberbatch. Like The Nightjar, you become a character in the game, subjected to alien horrors and nightmares. Unlike The Nightjar, or most other games, your living space transforms into the grim setting. The game uses the dynamics of a mobile device to build an augmented reality. According to the developers, the app will take control of every component of the mobile device: using the LED light as a flashlight, the camera as the handycam (creating Blair Witch-esque visuals), and the microphone to pick up environmental sounds and mix them with the game’s spookier ones.
Save the girl and stay alive: those are the game’s two objectives. To achieve both of these, you’ll have to constantly move around your home, turning corners and trying to expect the unexpected. As you move, the game maps your abode using motion and inert object tracking programs, and places the monsters throughout. The monsters are then able to patrol similar to how those in cult horror game Amnesia’s did, except they’re inside your house. And here’s a cute fact: as mobile technology has limited 3D modeling and CGI capabilities, Novum Analytics created their monsters out of puppets, costumes, and camera distortion.
The game so far has several more months of development to go, and is almost halfway funded on Indiegogo. It’s currently being developed for iOS, but will be available for Android and possibly Windows Phone, according to the team’s Facebook page. The game’s initial story lasts the length of a feature film, but the team said it can extend forever, so prepare to be haunted.
You can support Night Terrors on Indiegogo.