Ever since Amnesia: The Dark Descent was released, atmospheric horror adventure games have been popping up, but none are as good. Among the Sleep is probably the only one that has come close (even more so than Amnesia’s own mediocre sequel). You play as an infant (gasp, a baby in a horror game!) and you just wander around a very strange land-out horror adventure trying to figure out who this mysterious dark creature is that is trying to find you.
The game starts out pretty cheery. It’s your second birthday, and you get a gift from a mysterious person. As your mom puts you in your playpen, you learn the controls and get out to open this gift. Lo and behold, it’s a creepy talking teddy bear that you can hug and use as a flashlight. As you go deeper and deeper into this crazy world, the game gets tenser. You go from simple climbing puzzles to finding and hunting for items and keys and running and hiding from this scary creature. A lot of elements feel similar to amnesia, such as not being able to fight at all but only running.
Due to the claustrophobic and nearly haphazard way everything is laid out, no particular moment is really memorable, save for the first 30 minutes. You end up going through random doors; hallways appear out of nowhere in the dark; strange sounds will clatter away in the background; and things will flash in front of you. All of this is to make you tense, but there’s no real scary moment where you jump. It’s all about a tense atmosphere that keeps you on the edge of your seat.
The main goal, you could say, is to find four relics to unlock a mysterious door. This is your hub that you always come back to. The game actually has a pretty crazy finale, and things finally start clicking as to who this creature is and what it represents. It’s pretty sad in the end. The whole game can be beaten in less than 4 hours, which is a real shame. I would have liked to see the actual story unfold and some more cutscenes. The graphics are fairly decent, but the textures are flat and muddy, so you won’t be seeing much in the pitch dark 90% of the time. The game supports Oculus Rift if you are lucky enough to own one, so that is a bonus.
Overall, Among the Sleep is a short but sweet horror ride for any fan of amnesia or adventure games. There’s no combat, just you as a vulnerable baby trying to run away from your fears and keeping your teddy by your side.
Amnesia is probably one of the scariest games ever made. I’m talking about The Dark Descent. It made you fear every sound and corner due to the fact that you couldn’t fight enemies. The atmosphere was so scary and haunting, not to mention the extremely scary monsters. A Machine for Pigs gets picked up by a new developer, The Chinese Room, of Dear Esther fame. While it’s still scary and haunting, it doesn’t make you fear every second like the first game did.
Honestly, the story is confusing and makes no sense. It’s a garbled mess, and all I got out of it was that there was a machine that processed pigs for mass consumption in 1899. You play as a man named Mandus who is trying to find his two boys who went down into the depths of this machine. That’s pretty much all I got out of it. What this machine is doing is creating man-pigs that are trying to “cleanse” the town of people for the coming 20th century. The ending sucked, and the game is overall just really short and anticlimactic.
A lot of features were stripped from The Dark Descent. You no longer use tinderboxes to light areas, and you don’t need oil for your lamp. You just run around with a lantern, flipping switches, and solving extremely basic puzzles. The Dark Descent had you really scratching your head, but A Machine for Pigs doesn’t even try to challenge you. In fact, there aren’t even that many monster encounters. Sure, when you reach them, they are scary and intense, but the first 2/3 of the game is uneventful. As you get to the last few chapters, it’s mostly story and nothing else. The whole feeling of progress from The Dark Descent is absent here, which makes no sense. A Machine for Pigs felt more like a barely interactive story than a game.
Towards the end of the game, it just feels disjointed and unbalanced. You bounce around from level to level, and nothing feels connected. Many times, in the beginning, I wandered around, not knowing where to go or what to do. The game just lacks guidance or real direction and can’t be felt from the very first level.
That doesn’t mean the game is bad. It’s not nearly as good or memorable as The Dark Descent should be. The graphics are really dated, despite the nice art style that is carried over from The Dark Descent. A Machine for Pigs feels like an average indie horror game with a story that can’t be followed. Fans of the original will be highly disappointed, but newcomers should just skip this and play the first game.
Max Brooks has become the number-one expert on zombies as of late. The Zombie Survival Guide seems like some gag gift or joke for the paranoid or extremely nerdy. Most people will imagine a fat, sweaty bearded man with coke bottle glasses reading this in his mom’s basement with a headlamp in sheer panic. It’s not really like that at all. This guide is so well written, and Max cancels out nearly every contradiction as to how this can’t happen. This book is so believable that you stop sometimes and wonder how that can’t be possible and then realize there isn’t one!
The book is broken up into sections; you get started on what a zombie is and the basic workings of how a zombie functions. Zombies aren’t reanimated from graves; they aren’t voodoo zombies; they are humans who contracted a virus called Solanum, and Max explains this as a scientific medical condition. After you get to know what a zombie is, Max will take you through survival by running and defending yourself. He talks about terrain types, vehicles, supplies, weapons, defense and offense tactics, and various other survival skills. The book does a good job convincing you that this is what you should do, thanks to Max’s writing style, where he gets straight to the point and cuts out all the nonsense.
He talks about how to fight, when not to fight, and how to detect signs of a zombie outbreak. They are in four different classes. 1 is just a few zombies, and class 4 is Armageddon. He will also give you tactics on how to defend and fight in different environments, like large skyscrapers and small one-story homes. He completely cancels out all Hollywood clichés and various other zombie garbage that has become “fake” over the years. This is a very detailed guide, and if zombies do start popping, I actually feel I could survive against them thanks to this novel.
Later on, you can read “real-life stories” that happened and are both scary and somewhat convincing. One was even set in my hometown! Max’s writing is full of suspense and will keep you hooked until the end. I just felt the book was a bit short and could have used more content. One thing I liked was the crappy “survival guide drawings” that were peppered throughout the book. It gave the book a layer of humor that you wouldn’t expect. By the time I flipped to the last cover, I felt educated and prepared for a large and small-scale zombie attack. While I was reading, I was thinking about my own living situation and how I would defend it or run. That’s a good writer if he can make you think that. Zombie Survival Guide is a must-have for any zombie fan or survival guide fanatic.
This is a very hard game to review. I wanted to like this game so bad, and it had so much potential. The beginning cutscene is disturbing, and the excellent and eerie soundtrack playing out is fantastic. It starts out like a Silent Hill game with the gritty film grain and the dark atmosphere. I honestly can’t tell you what the story is about because it is never explained at all. Even at the very end, I didn’t know who the bad guy was, why I was doing all this, or who was what. I can tell you that you get dumped off at an orphanage via bus with your little brother Joshua. You walk up to the creepy orphanage, and you immediately know something’s not right. Kids with paper bags over their heads are beating something bloody in a canvas sack. You sneak around to the back, and after a few cutscenes, you realize you’re running errands for this creepy child, but the purpose is never explained.
Once you start playing for a while, you will notice many of this game’s flaws. There’s no map and no sense of direction. You will get lost and not know where the hell to go through the whole game. For most of the game, you are wandering from room to room looking for items for your dog Brown to find. He will sniff these items out and find the next item for you, and you just follow him. If it weren’t for this, the entire game would be broken exploration-wise. Like Silent Hill, there are many secrets in the game, but you won’t care about them. The airship that you wander around is so big and confusing. Each room and hallway look the same, and you can’t tell where you are going even if you memorize it. Some parts become familiar because you go through them over 50 times during the game. I also didn’t even know why I was on an airplane! Nothing made a lick of sense through the whole game.
Let’s start with combat; it sucks big time. Holding R1 will put you in ready mode, and X will swing. This would be great if you moved more than a centimeter so you could go in for a kill. Enemies will knock you down, and you will go through a long and grueling recovery animation only to get knocked over again. There are very few healing items around unless you have Brown sniffing out items like ribbons and socks to bring to the Aristocrat Club to be exchanged for healing items. What’s the Aristocrat Club? I have no idea, but it’s just there. There are three boss fights in the entire game, and they are annoying because the combat is slow, sluggish, and cumbersome in this game. I can’t express it enough. If that’s not bad enough, running around trying to find all these damn items will give you a headache. After you find them, you just drop them because they are no longer needed. Your inventory is constantly cluttered with useless crap that you just end up dropping. Why have this mechanic?!
The game itself is very short, running about 7-8 hours if you follow a walkthrough step by step. If not, you probably won’t even finish this game. I also have to comment on the controversy surrounding the game; there’s nothing all that bad in here. There were claims of the girls being molested in cutscenes, but the worst I saw was an old guy rubbing a girl’s head and her arms a lot. There are no rape scenes; nothing is even sexually provocative. The game is very bloody and downright sick and twisted, but nothing on the other spectrum.
Apart from that, the game had a lot of potential. The atmosphere is there, and it’s pretty scary at times and very disturbing. I just wish I knew what the hell was going on. The story is completely convoluted and doesn’t go anywhere; you can’t make a single bit of sense of it. The combat is atrocious, and the lack of direction and the constant backtracking will make 99% of players quit early on. I really wanted to love this game, but as I got through each hour, the score kept dropping in my head, and the reasons why were piling up. If you are really curious, I would pick it up at a low bargain bin price, but nothing more. If a friend has a copy, borrow it because it is a strange experience and worth talking about with friends.
I usually don’t care much for vampire stories, but 30 Days of Night hits the nail on the head. This comic is so dark and vile that it made me uncomfortable, and that was good. The writing is fantastic, and it sucks you in from the beginning. There’s a tiny little start-up with a husband and wife Sheriff duo of Barrow, Alaska. It’s dark for 30 days out of the year between November and December. They watch the final sunset, and then suddenly things start attacking the remote town.
The two sheriffs do their best to try to round up the town, but they get wiped out quickly and can only save a few. There’s a mysterious man who is sent via helicopter by his mother to take reconnaissance photos; you never find out who this mystery man is either. The leader of the vampires shows his face and runs amok. I won’t spoil the ending, but let’s just say it’s very heartbreaking and pretty emotional. This three-part mini-series does an amazing job of providing excellent character in such a short time.
Ben Templesmith’s art style is something to be desired; it’s an acquired taste. If you read the recent Dead Space comics, you would know what I’m talking about. His art is very messy and spidery; it is one of a kind, but not exactly detailed. It’s all about the atmosphere he gets across. Barrow is a remote town, so you feel claustrophobia when you read it. You know there’s nowhere for these people to go, and you feel the fear as they only have a couple of miles of buildings to hide in. The part about Ben’s art is during fight scenes. He highlights the blood and gore, and you can really get the idea across. He uses side-shot silhouettes and up-close shots of the vampire that look frightening. It’s a very stylized art style, and Ben draws like no one else in the industry. Many people accustomed to Zenescope’s art with rich, vibrant colors and scantily clad women may not like this series. I say dig in because horror comic fans will find a long-running series to dive into and keep busy for days. This is just the tip of the iceberg.
The first Cancertown was just fantastic. It told the slow-spiraling downfall of a terminally ill brain cancer patient who has a disease that makes him think he’s already dead. He then slips into Cancertown, a place full of complicated politics between monsters over who controls the town. The second volume tells of the further demise of Vince Morley and the final struggle to get rid of Cancertown or help find another ruler.
You can already tell from the excellent art that Vince is too far gone. His hair is really long; he hasn’t shaved in weeks, and it also looks like he hasn’t bathed in a while. A girl from his apartment continues to bug him and slowly falls in love with him. Vince finds out he can now come in and out of Cancertown freely without crossing points. Sarah ends up in an asylum, and the doctors are curing her. This is causing disorder in Cancertown, and all the players are trying to convince Vince to stay except one: Papercut. She plays a huge role in this series, but there’s a surprise ending, and I love it.
There’s a lot of action and fighting in this one because everyone just starts brawling with each other. Vince’s ambassador skills aren’t working so well, and everyone has had enough, especially since Piecemaker is gone. No one is there to stop them. What we get here is a great conclusion to a very original dark story, and it goes out with a nice bang. The story is still a bit confusing, and even after it was all said and done, I didn’t quite figure some stuff out. Was Vince really diagnosed with a brain tumor, or did his disease tell him he had one? There are a few flashbacks to a psychologist’s visit, but I’m not so sure his disease was making him imagine he had it. Or did he have the brain tumor that was causing the disease? It’s never really clear, but I guess that’s the point.
Cancertown is an amazing comic series, and any horror fan should read it. It’s a deep psychological horror, and the good ones rarely come around. Just be prepared for some deep politics and some unanswered questions.
I love these sick and twisted horror comics, and Cancertown is some of the best I have read. You follow a man named Vince Morley who is diagnosed with a mental disorder where patients feel they are missing organs, are already dead, or are missing limbs. He has a terminal brain tumor (that he calls Baby Meatfist), and he ends up slipping into this world of Cancertown. It all started when he met a homeless and deformed girl on the street. He gave her a blanket because his doctor said he should do nice things before he died. Later, another bum steals her blanket, and he slips into Cancertown. The lore is pretty interesting, but the whole story feels convoluted and confusing until the end.
You are always left in the dark, but there are a lot of politics in Cancertown. Crosshair and Corpsegrinder are two sick players who both want Morley dead. Crosshair uses sentient eyeballs as weapons and pets. Corpsegrinder can grow bigger when people fear him. Later on, you mean the piecemaker and the papercut. Papercut ends up being Morley’s ally, but who she is and where she came from are later told in the second volume. All the characters’ names are very unique, and I love their personalities. You can slowly see Vince fall apart as he finds crossing points and slips back into the real world, usually waking up in places he can’t remember being. He wants to destroy Cancertown and everyone in it, but he wants to save this girl as well.
As you can see, the story is really complicated, and it is. The art is very dark and atmospheric, if a bit messy. There’s a lot of gore and violence in this series, as well as a lot of cursing. I was honestly more disturbed by Vince’s mental state than anything else. To see a terminally ill cancer patient fall apart at the seams is just horrifying. I just wish the story made a bit more sense because, even at the end, I was still a bit confused about what was going on, but you end up forgiving it for the entertaining journey that Vince goes through.
Cancertown is a rare mature comic; it delves into the psyche of the human mind rather than superpowers. I loved watching Vince fall apart, and I was horrified at the same time. The characters are fantastic and so original that you won’t put the comic down. If only the story wasn’t as mixed up and complicated or just told better, but that’s the only issue I can pull from this series.
I honestly love the Cthulhu lore, despite how complex it is. H.P. Lovecraft has a very old writing style, and his stories can induce headaches when trying to follow them. This comic series does a decent job of summing up the mythology and bringing newcomers into this grand and dark lore. The world of Cthulhu is all about deep madness—so deep that our minds can’t even comprehend it. Lovecraft went beyond zombies and the boogie man. He dove into the human psyche, tore it to shreds, and tried gluing it back together. This three-part series sees some scientists from Miskatonic University trying to solve a mystery about an evil cult and mysterious beings snatching people.
First off, the atmosphere hits right on the head. Right from the start, you get an eerie feeling. The first issue is a back story that one of the characters tells. It’s about how he came across the cult for the first time. A man named Noyes is actually a puppet behind the strange monsters who have burrowed under old New England. The comics flow pretty well, but with only three issues, not much can come of it. There’s no strange plot twist, but at least there are some creepy scenes and a bit of gore. The art style does a good enough job; it’s all done with colored pencil, so it’s a bit strange coming from the marker and other mediums used in comics. The characters are forgettable due to the short length, but the ending is pretty creepy.
The story is a bit more on the realistic side than the pure fantasy that the series stuck to in the later comics (Fall of Cthulhu). I honestly wish they went the more fantastical way, but seeing this in a more realistic sense makes it a bit more believable. The monsters are drawn just as Lovecraft intended, and they look horrendous. This little mini-adventure is fun while it lasts, but forgettable in the end.
Metro 2033 was one of the most atmospheric shooters in the past decade. It had an excellent story, great characters, and solid shooting action. It just wasn’t paced very well, and the stealth sections nearly ruined the game. That has all been fixed in Last Light; this is one of the best shooter and horror games to come out in a long time.
You play, once again, as Artyom. Set in the post-apocalyptic Russian underground metro system, the creatures, radiation, and violent storms have driven everyone underground. Life isn’t so simple. After Artyom launched the missiles on the Dark One’s nest, the war against the communists is getting more heated. The only way to stop this war is to find the last surviving Dark One and use it against President Moskvin to stop the war from destroying the last humans on Earth.
The game is more about Artyom’s journey than the overarching story. The game is broken up into underground sections, stealth, top-side sections, boss fights, on-rails stuff, and then safe cities. The atmosphere in this game is just phenomenal. Never in a shooter—in a long time anyway—have I felt actually afraid. When you’re underground in these dark, decrepit tunnels and you’re hearing strange sounds all around, you get really scared. These sections last for minutes rather than seconds, like most shooters. They let you marinate in this dark, frightening atmosphere. Sometimes your flashlight won’t work, and you just have to use your lighter to see. The monsters are terrifying because they look so close to what they once were—just mutated. This plays out through the entire game, and it’s very tense.
You can carry three weapons with you at all times. They are all great weapons to shoot because some of them are kind of slapped together with parts. The Bastard is an interesting side-loading machine gun; it gets jammed often, and you have to be careful. Ammo is scarce, and you must make sure you save your military-grade bullets to buy ammo and better weapons along with attachments. Once you get to a city, it’s like a breath of fresh air. After being in such a scary situation, you are so relieved to see civilization. There are some throwable objects at your disposal, like bombs, incendiary flares, knives for stealth, and then you have med syringes. You get night vision goggles later on, and you have to use your charger to keep your flashlight and goggles powered on. When you’re on the surface, you must wear a mask, and you need to find filters to continue breathing. Artyom can also wipe his mask when things get blurred out. This is a fantastic mechanic—a wipe mask button—and it just adds to the feeling of survival. If you get hit too much, your mask breaks and you can’t breathe.
While I stuck with mostly the same guns throughout the game, you always feel slightly underpowered. The monsters are vicious and dangerous, and you can’t take them all on at once. Sometimes stealth is the best option, and it’s so much better. AI doesn’t detect you a mile away, and you can stealth kill easily with your throwing knives or from behind. The levels are laid out much better, and you get a sense of accomplishment when you get through a level for the first time. The pacing is fantastic, and I just couldn’t put the controller down; it was that good.
The graphics are some of the best out there. On consoles, it actually ruins the atmosphere because a lot of stuff is taken out due to the underpowered hardware. On PC, the game jumps to life with mind-blowing lighting effects, super-high-resolution textures, and various other things that actually severely downgrade the experience on consoles. Last Light is one of those games where graphics are a huge part of the experience. The lighting, textures, depth of field, all that stuff makes the game just come to life. You have to play it to experience it. I honestly have to say that you won’t get the same experience on consoles as you will on PCs. If you buy the PC version, you also get the Metro 2033 eBook for free.
Overall, Last Light is one of the most intense and frightening shooters made in the past decade; nothing comes close. The sheer terror you feel when Artyom is breathing heavily in his mask, blood and mud are dripping down your mask, and your watch says you only have 90 seconds of filter life left. Mutants are after you, and if you panic and run to find filters, then you have to turn and face them. With the destroyed world around you, you are constantly reminded that this was once a habitable place. You walk through buses and planes with skeletons in the seats and apartment buildings with ghosts that haunt them. Anyone who wants to feel survival horror, don’t play Resident Evil or Silent Hill; Last Light is your one-way ticket.
Dead Space is one of my favorite franchises of all time. The first game was the most memorable with its deformed and twisted monsters, a very deep and intriguing plot, and revolutionary HUD that was very minimal. Dead Space 2 was more of the same, but not enough new to make it memorable. It also had so-called multiplayer, which was fun for a few hours but quickly got boring. Dead Space 3 is here with a co-op and a new more open design. Is it better than DS2? In a way.
The story is pretty epic and is told on a larger scale now. You are no longer stuck on a derelict ship or space colony. You start out on Earth in your run-down apartment, where we find out Isaac has turned himself into a depressive bum. Ellie has recently left Isaac for another man, but they soon get brought back together to save humanity once again. A crazy man named Danik is trying to find a way to bring humanity to “ascension” and “rebirth” by wanting the Necromorphs to destroy everything. You and a team cast off to the Marker homeworld to stop all this once and for all. The problem here is that the game is stretched out so much that the story is hard to follow during the first half. Cutscenes are too far apart, and so little is told because it is saved for the end. The story is a bit disappointing, and the ending doesn’t have the wow factor that it should. You just finish it and think, “That’s it?” It’s one of those trilogy endings.
The gameplay is pretty much the same and untouched. Things feel a bit more smooth and streamlined, but nothing has changed there. The first big change you will notice is that you can create your own weapons. A crafting system has been implemented where you get loot off of dead bodies to craft various items. You can build weapons from blueprints or build your own. You start out with a frame, then add an upper tool, a lower tool, and a tip for each tool. After that, you can add chips that increase the gun’s stats more than two support modules, such as more ammo, stasis-coated bullets, and various other things. This is really awesome and allows you to combine your favorite weapons. Stick a flamethrower under your shotgun. How about a blade gun under your plasma gun? Do whatever you want. The problem here is that you can only carry two weapons now. This really sucked. I guess they thought that each gun had two weapons, so it really was four. It doesn’t really work that way. It also takes a really long time to gather enough materials to craft anything. I couldn’t really do much until I was nearly halfway through the game. This is to encourage people to spend money on microtransactions and sucker them into buying materials. Taking advantage of impatient gamers isn’t a nice thing to do, but what can you expect from a greedy corporation like EA?
The crafting system is similar to your suit because you can gather materials to upgrade them, like air capacity, stasis, telekinesis, health, and armor. Another major addition is side missions. There are only seven of them in the game, but three additional ones are added for co-op only. I found these side missions boring because they were all the same. Go through the same identical compound, killing hordes of Necromorphs, to find a chest of stuff. The stuff isn’t even that good. The loot packs don’t give you much, so these side missions were disappointing. At least the main missions are fun and varied, with some fun scripted events. You can set out scavenger bots to help find loot if you want, but that’s just a distraction rather than a mission. I felt EA really tried too hard with this game. Instead of making the game memorable like the first one with scares, they just make it completely action-based and stretch out the world.
The first half consists of you floating around several ships in space, trying to find information and various other things. Humans are a new enemy in this game and are a nice change of pace, but the same old Necromorphs pop up. Sure, they are cool, but there weren’t enough new ones. By the end of the game, I was so sick of these damn things. I honestly don’t want to see another Necromorph again, not because they’re scary but because I’m tired of seeing them. The game just isn’t as scary as it used to be. In the beginning, it felt a bit eerie, but after that, it was just the same hordes of monsters coming at you. Once you are done being in space, you crash land on an icy planet, which is the “homeworld,” but things just feel the same here too.
The game just suffers from fatigue at this point. Fans will enjoy this game for sure, but you long for a good scare or something to really change. There is a lot of backtracking towards the end of the game, with you running back and forth through the same area several times. It is almost like the developers ran out of ideas towards the end. I would have loved a shorter, more solid campaign, but what is here is fun. The graphics look good on PC, but the textures still stink. Up-close shots really show that this is a console port. There are some nicer lighting effects, but they are subtle. Even an older rig can handle this game maxed out.
Should you buy this game? If you are a hardcore fan, sure, but I just suggest waiting for a price drop. When you finish this 15-hour campaign, you will be slightly disappointed. Sure, it’s fun and all, and crafting weapons is neat, but the scare factor that people expect when they play a Dead Space game is nearly gone.
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