12/17/2022 0 Comments Dear esther scary![]() Peppering large space with narrative triggers was always the wrong lesson to take from Dear Esther (The Chinese Room, 2012). The player is terrified that something will have changed. ![]() And having to run around the house again and again would normally render the space familiar but here familiarity is your enemy. While I’m playing I just want to go outside. Instead of a wide open environment, the player is trapped inside a compact, structured space: an intensely claustrophobic house, saturated with darkness. The other reason, which is key, is the world itself. It is transformed from trinket hunt into a frightening journey to who knows where. These little moments act like miniature islands of sanity to hold onto, to stave off the dread that thickens around you… if only for a moment. The environment, a single house, is more reactive to your progress and there is even optional interactivity in places. Even though the environment is still largely composed of simple shapes, it hides it better. And while the world of Actias corrupts with progress, this corruption does not fundamentally affect the experience and the player is still just running around a world looking for triggers – there’s even a counter for them.ĪNATOMY shows much more accomplishment. In CHYRZA, the world is essentially static as you make progress the player needs to put in some mental effort to avoid seeing it’s abstract, dead world as a short collectible hunt. There are two reasons for this.įirst: predictable structure. Yet ANATOMY implements exactly the same design pattern and does not break. My problem was how this design encourages players to reduce them to a trinket hunt, which guts Horrorshow’s obvious talent for terror. Eric and I discussed CHYRZA (2014) in a podcast and more recently I took CHYRZA and Actias (2015) as examples of what I consider the wrong design choice to make in an exploration game: collect item to advance narrative. I’ve touched on some of Kitty Horrorshow’s works before. I’ll try not to get too spoilery until near the end. I also think the experience would be severely dampened if you engaged it in Let’s Play format. It’s quite the nerve shredder and the terror comes from your own imagination, an endless source of worst-case horror scenarios. It’s currently on sale for $2.99 at itch.io. ![]() It is probably no more than an hour’s play at the most, but don’t go expecting it to be free. In case that wasn’t explicit enough because I failed to add neon lights and CAPITAL LETTERS, I recommend you give ANATOMY a whirl. I had no urgent need to find out what existed on the other side of that door, to let ANATOMY drag its ragged, rusty claws through my subconscious. The clomp-clomp of neighbours jogging up and down the stairs in what sounded like metal boots. I wasn’t alone and the house was not particularly quiet. It happened at 10 o’clock at night and I needed to put head to pillow soon. At one point in ANATOMY (Kitty Horrorshow, 2016), a door opened by itself. ![]()
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