Tag: Survival Horror

Routine
News

There’s a good reason you don’t know much about survival horror game Routine

It’s been four years since first-person, survival-horror-in-space game Routine first pinged on my radar, and I barely know more about it now than I did then. This isn’t due to negligence on my part—Lunar Software, the team making it, have been very stringent on what info they put out into the wild. This hasn’t changed with the latest update on the game’s progress: specifically, a trailer and the reveal that it should be out in March 2017. There’s little in this new trailer that we haven’t seen before, including an abandoned lunar base, the handheld scanner-cum-gun, and a nasty man-robot…
News

The domestic horror of Allison Road isn’t dead after all

In early June, first-person survival horror game Allison Road was cancelled. Today, it’s alive and kicking. Allison Road‘s creator, Christian Kesler, announced this week that he’ll continue working on the game—which some call a “spiritual successor” to the Silent Hills playable teaser P.T. (2014)—on his own, under the label of Far From Home. “After the set back, I took a bit of a break from working on it and re-evaluated all the work that had been so far—the whole journey, so to speak,” Kesler told IGN. “I started making a few necessary changes,  in my opinion, to the story and the flow, little bits…
Haunting Ground
Feature

Heart attacks and doggy treats: the PS2’s most bizarre horror game

This article is part of PS2 Week, a full week celebrating the 2000 PlayStation 2 console. To see other articles, go here. /// On the US release of Dario Argento’s 1977 film Suspiria, New York film critic John Simon panned it as “a horror of a movie, where no one or nothing makes sense: not one plot element, psychological reaction, minor character, piece of dialogue, or ambience.” I used to agree, but I’ve seen Suspiria a lot since then. It’s true that the film’s rather twisted internal logic requires a degree of good faith on the part of the audience;…
News

Lo-fi survival horror returns next week as Back in 1995 comes out

The year 1995 was a turning point for the videogame industry. It was the first year of E3—now the biggest videogame awards and announcement show, which still runs annually. It was the year of the release of Sony’s PlayStation in Europe and North America (it had been released the year prior in Japan), as well as the release of the now cult-regarded system Sega Saturn (also released in 1994 in Japan). While the systems’ most notable games didn’t see release until a year or so after, 1995 was the start of something new. The dawn of a new generation—and a delightfully…
Feature

Resident Evil Zero is where monster movies go to die

2002’s Resident Evil for the GameCube was a luxurious, Gothic remake of the 1996 PlayStation original. It came out a year after Fatal Frame and Silent Hill 2, slotting perfectly into their bleak new visions of horror: unrelentingly dark, art-directed to the nines, and tense as shit. Resident Evil is creepy despite its ludicrous premise: you poke around a huge, dark mansion while fending off zombies and various oversized snakes, spiders, and sharks. Central to the game’s success is its atmosphere: the vivid, lush pre-rendered backgrounds buzz with animated touches, like flies around a lamp or lightning flashing through a…
News

The tortured existence of the town that supposedly inspired Silent Hill

A new victim of the Silent Hill mythology has been uncovered, and it is neither in the form of a new game or a new movie (thankfully, for the latter at least). A recent addition to The Campo Santo Quarterly Review, a journal curated by the ombudsman of the small yet star-studded game studio of former Telltale talent, details the riveting yet distressing tale of the “the real Silent Hill.” Written by Duncan Fyfe, the article “Survival Horror” focuses on the ruined town of Centralia, PA, the begrudging inspiration for the 2006 film Silent Hill. Though the film was never shot there,…
News

Allison Road ventures into the woods with its latest horrifying reveals

The world outside Allison Road’s iconic house setting is even stranger and more dangerous than what’s previously been revealed. New concept art for the upcoming horror game shows off an eerie forest setting, a moss-covered wood in the shadow of a looming mountain and overlooking a grey lake. In one image, an old dock juts out over a bottomless void. A figure kneels on the dock near a small rowboat, which hovers above the empty lake as if all is still well. Both the dock and the lake do look normal in the image before it, which makes me wonder…
News

Imber grants us a glimpse of its subtle domestic horrors

There isn’t a lot that happens in this short video of Imber, but that’s a good thing; it makes the ending that much weirder and left me wanting to know more. Imber, like Allison Road, seems to be concerned with exploring the horror of a familiar space. The video depicts your character waking up in a small home and exploring the various living areas before an odd noise draws them back out into the main room. the right kind of weird  The sound is strange. It’s hard to pinpoint exactly what it sounds like and because it’s a video, the…