Monday, May 13, 2013

Browsing The Horrors of Steam's Greenlight District

Because I feel that I haven't talked enough about horror related video games in the last post, I'm going to be bringing them up all over again, but this time in a slightly different light.

Around the end of last week I was browsing Steam's Greenlight section upon realizing that I hadn't looked at any games since the area was first launched.  I will admit that I'm a bit shallow in that if the thumbnail title and title of a game doesn't look/sound interesting I won't click it to find out more about that game.  I admit that it's not the best way of finding new and interesting games, but that's they way my brain happens to work and it's a little hard to try and rewire to look for and think differently.  I feel like this is the argument for bigotry, but that's something else entirely.

Back to video games.  Horror-esque video games.

The first game I came across was Among the Sleep.
After finding out more about the title, font and art, Among the Sleep is an POV horror game where you play as a two year old in a world that seems to move in and out of a dream world.  That alone sold me to support their project.  At the moment they are $16,329 short of their $200,000 goal and have four days remaining.  Check out the video and support if you think the game and people warrant/deserve it.

The second game was Darkwood.
Darkwood is a top down adventure horror game in a randomly generated open world.  The game is also permadeath, which could understandably be a turn off to a lot of gamers, although the creators say/hint that some of what you do will be carried over in subsequent playthroughs such as looting your corpse.  The game trailer, which is "pre-alpha" looks pretty damn good and terrifying.  The group is currently fundraising over on Indiegogo and they're 23 days out and have 23% of their goal, so a pretty decent start and plenty of time to go. 

The third game is titled The Forest and doesn't have so much of a title screen as it does a logo:
The Forest can be found on Steam's Greenlight page and is an action/adventure/simulation/horror game.  I don't feel like there are enough of simulation/horror video games out there and come to think of it, I can't remember ever seeing a game described as "simulation/horror," but I tend to be somewhat sheltered so that may be the case.  The trailer give glimpses of things that you can do in-game, such as cut down trees to build a shelter and it feels like this is just the tip of the iceberg as far as the simulation part goes.  I have hopes, high or otherwise, for this game and I hope to see it "greenlit."

The one game that doesn't fall under the horror genre that I looked a bit at was a game called Realm.
Realm is a point-and-click game that looks absolutely beautiful.  In their promotional video, the creators point out several things that people do a lot of in point-and-click games, such as "CLICK ALL THE THINGS" and trying out everything in an overloaded inventory to see if it has an effect on the object.  I like their approach and I would hope that their game gets fully funded on Kickstarter, but with only eight days remaining and the project still needing £131,152, (that's $200,551 for us Yanks) the end doesn't look too good at the moment.

Lastly is the "sequel" of sorts for Eternal Darkness: Sanity's Requiem that I brought up last Tuesday, Shadow of the Eternals, which now has an official Kickstarter campaign going.  This will bound to cause a bit of confusion as there was already an existing crowdfunding campaign going directly through the company.  The official word is to donate (if you want to and haven't already) through the Kickstarter campaign, which as been adjusted to include the amount already taken in from the first week of crowdfunding.  

That's it for me, for today.  Friday I'll have up my review for the free-to-play-download game, Papers, Please so come back for that and everything else that we'll be posting during the week.

~JWfW/JDub/Jaconian
Time Again



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